The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

better and happier life than anything he could have given her. She was the woman she was because of his betrayal. She ought to have thanked him for it. She had everything.

She closed her eyes, remembering the longing that had shone – unbidden, unwanted – in his eyes as Rory called for her over the radio waves. She remembered his smile like a sunbeam when he’d found her in that tiny office, a room in the jungle, the contrariness of it all seeming to him a sign that they were destined – when all along they were fated. Ambition, curses, either or both, the universe always conspired to keep them apart.

She remembered how she had stood on the grass in the moonlight, knowing she had to make a decision – and she had nearly, so nearly, gone to his hut. She had almost succumbed to the hunger for him that she’d told herself was purely a chemical reaction, the strange alchemy that sparkled between them. They could have had one night together, she had told herself. Just one. Old time’s sake. Revenge sex.

But she had known one night wouldn’t be enough. That she could never have enough of him, and therefore it was better to have nothing. She had gone to William’s hut and paid him to get her out of there, because she had known that once she took one brick from the wall the entire fortress would crumble and she would be exposed again to the man she loved to hate – and hated to love.

She didn’t know how long she lay there. She couldn’t feel her arms or her legs. Her body felt as if it was sinking into the earth, as though she was being reclaimed by Iriria. Strangely, the thought didn’t alarm her. She thought she could happily never move from here again. Let the cloud forest claim her. She could no longer picture herself in her old life now anyway – sitting in the canteen with Holly, tepid orange food eaten off trays; the smell of antiseptic, the glare of the surgical theatre lights and the snap of rubber gloves, the sight of a tiny body on the table before her . . .

Little Lucy. It was a week since she had died. How much living had that poor child been denied? How much had Tara herself lived, even in that short time?

Distantly she remembered the call she had never made back to the hospital’s clinical director – the investigation that would be going on in her absence and the eyebrows that would be raised on hearing she was ‘on holiday’. She knew she ought to care, but she felt nothing. No one would ever understand what she had been through out here, chasing hope for another child on the other side of the world and failing at that too.

She closed her eyes, feeling heavier with every breath. She didn’t think she could move if she tried. Her body felt set in the mud and she was dimly aware the rain had stopped, that shafts of sunlight were winking past the clouds sporadically and beaming them onto the forest like blasts of grace. The birds were flying again, criss-crossing overhead in the gap created by the hundreds of fallen trees. She felt insects burrow and wriggle beneath her splayed palms. Life had resumed, as though the momentary horror of the mudslide was already forgotten, if not forgiven.

She felt far away, almost below the earth, as the insect came into view. It hovered high above her in the sky, silhouetted black against the haze. It stared down at her as she stared back at it, then began to descend, growing ever larger and throwing out a wind that made the trees bend and her hair blow against her face. She squinted as her brain stirred from its torpor . . . Still, she couldn’t move. Her body no longer obeyed instructions. She could no sooner get herself up from the ground than could a stick.

The helicopter lowered quickly, landing somewhere down the slope, out of her frame of vision again. Perhaps she hadn’t been seen after all? It didn’t really matter. She was happy to lie here. The mud had begun to feel like an embrace, the earth holding her, and she took comfort from the way it moulded around her body. It had been so long since she had felt truly held . . .

She closed her eyes, remembering just that spark of it down by the river . . . Alex’s embrace as he had found her. A small smile ticked up the corners of her mouth as she felt herself moved, then lifted; the earth’s suckered release of her was followed by a cold chill along her back. She opened her eyes to see two faces bearing down on her. They were wearing helmets and moving quickly. Efficiently.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ve got you now,’ one of them said, seeing her distant gaze fasten upon him.

‘How . . .?’ But the word was as shaky and thin as a puff of smoke and in the next instant, she felt herself rise up several feet in the air. She realized she was being stretchered. She was being rescued . . . It was all over.

She stared at the sight immediately above her and as she was carried beneath the empty patch of brightening sky, she had a sudden longing for the shaded embrace of the trees again. She wanted to catch just one more ray of light heroically winkling its way through the leaves to a small patch of earth; she wanted to see a macaw preening its feathers on a branch, to watch a sloth hang in blissful sleep.

Instead, the return to her world had already begun. She watched the bobbing of her rescuers’ perfectly round helmets as they navigated the slope, saw ahead the precision engineering of the helicopter’s blades, spinning at speeds faster than her eye could see, ready to whisk her from here—

William.

He was there, suddenly. From her prone position, she saw for the first time a tattoo on his neck,