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

occupied only the right side of his mouth, tipping it up boyishly. He smiled a lot these days. After several years in the dating wilderness, when he’d been chased and seduced for all the wrong reasons, life had changed for the better when he’d met Zac, a corporate lawyer. Miles loved to recount how their eyes had met over the conference table . . . Tara just loved to see her little brother happy. Zac was seven years older and comfortingly protective of him, and they kept their social circle small and intimate these days. ‘Well fuck me, that’s a first.’

‘Pottymouth!’ Jimmy cried, racing back down the aisle with the hand that had been only moments before up to the wrist in chocolate eclairs outstretched in front of Miles, awaiting a fine.

‘Say what now?’ her brother asked, bewildered.

‘No swearing in front of my nine-year-old godson, please. Kindly cough up a pound.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Every time,’ Tara nodded, as the attendant came round with a tray of flutes of champagne. She flinched as she took hers. Celebrating was the last thing she felt like doing. Drinking to the point of oblivion on the other hand . . . ‘Hols has had to take out an overdraft.’

‘He’s saving up for an electric scooter,’ Dev said proudly. ‘He’s almost there, too.’

‘Well, he certainly will be by the end of this week,’ Zac laughed, loosening his tie and reaching for his glass of champagne.

‘Cheers!’ Holly said, taking one for herself and holding her glass aloft until the others clinked it too. She drank deeply, with the zeal of someone released from a fifteen-hour shift; someone who had started her day pulling a Coke bottle from a man’s rectum and was ending it seated on a stitched-diamond cream leather plane seat, heading for a tropical paradise with her best friend and family.

Tara’s own day hadn’t followed that upward trajectory and, try as she might, she couldn’t click out of this sense of isolation; she felt set apart from everyone, locked behind a glass wall and unable to reach even the people she loved most in this world. A little girl had died because of her negligence and oversight. Why couldn’t she cry or talk about it? Why couldn’t she feel anything?

She looked out of the window and saw Rory stepping out of the terminal building, half-running, half-walking across the tarmac, a copy of The Times clutched in one hand and his bag rolling behind him. His suit jacket was flying open in the wind, his tie flapping over his shoulder. He didn’t look dressed for the tropics (unlike Dev, who was already in a tropical print shirt and Jesus sandals) and she felt a rush of relief at the mere dependable sight of him. He would make her feel better. As soon as she told him, he would know what she should do.

She waited expectantly for him to come up the steps, for his face to appear in the doorway. She smiled as everyone cheered at his arrival and watched as he threw his arms in the air jubilantly in response, playing the part. Zac put a glass in his hand before he’d even taken off his jacket. There was a party feeling on board, and the engines weren’t even on yet.

‘Hey, you,’ he said, sliding into the seat beside her and kissing her lightly on the mouth. ‘Sorry I’m late. Good day?’

‘I called in sick, actually. Wasn’t feeling so great.’

He looked surprised, then frowned. ‘Another headache?’

She gave her shrug. ‘Can’t shake it off. Can’t sleep through it.’

He squeezed her knee sympathetically in reply. ‘I’ve got some heavy-duty ibuprofen if you want?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

Rory opened his bag and rifled for the little silver packet as Miles brought up his Ibiza playlist and Holly began dancing in her seat. Tara gave a wan smile. She was going to be stuck on this plane for the next twelve hours with her best friend and her brother calling the shots, neither of whom believed that less was more, or that good things come to those who wait. ‘I might be better off with a tranquillizer than headache pills,’ she said, as he handed her a couple.

The stairs were pulled up, the engines fired and she looked out of the window, watching as the tarmac began to roll by, seeing how the horizon leaned to a tilt and the houses became small, until eventually the clouds wound around the plane in tatty rags and they emerged soaring into the blue.

She felt like a ball shot from a catapult as she stared from the windows at the world below. Everything looked peaceful at this distance. She had a feeling of having escaped from something terrible down there and that she would be safe if she could just stay up here, suspended in time, as well as space—

‘Oh bugger!’ Rory startled beside her, so violently he almost sloshed his champagne over his lap.

‘What?’ she cried, alarmed.

He looked back at her with wide eyes. ‘I forgot the electric toothbrush charger adaptor plug.’

‘The—’ She stared at him, her heart beating at triple time.

Jimmy came and stood in front of him with a hand outstretched. ‘Pottymouth. One pound, please.’

A helicopter was waiting on the tarmac a short distance from the plane, its headlights shining into the darkness and ready to whisk them straight off to Talamanca. Tara stood at the top of the steps and stared out, but not even the San José Highlands were visible on this inky night, and the stars remained obscured from sight by the intense blaze of city lights. She took a lungful of the warm air instead, as if the foreignness of her new environs could be tasted, even if not seen. It seemed woody compared to the granular minerality of London, somehow heavier and more dense, and she felt her blood gently warm.

‘Chop-chop,’ Rory said, patting her on the bottom to nudge her forwards. ‘Wide load coming through.’

She glanced back and saw Dev struggling to carry a very long, sleeping Jimmy. He was as limp as a noodle.