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

She jogged down the stairs and stepped out of the way on the tarmac to let him and Holly pass. Holly was looking fairly wild, as anyone might after a fifteen-hour shift and a magnum of champagne on a transatlantic flight. They’d all drunk far too much.

‘Wow, it’s actually not raining!’ Miles exclaimed, sticking his head out of the plane after them. ‘I thought they only had two settings here: rain, and more rain.’

‘Ror, it’s best to check messages here while you still can,’ she said, sounding as hungover as she felt. ‘The signal at Talamanca’s shocking.’

He frowned. ‘Really?’

‘By which I mean . . . non-existent.’ She watched the look of panic bloom across his face. ‘On the plus side, we’ll get to properly switch off and relax.’ She gave an approximation of an optimistic smile as he began to look anxious.

‘Hmm.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket and began scrolling quickly through his emails. At some point in the journey, she saw now, he had changed out of his suit and was now in chino shorts and a polo shirt. She didn’t remember exactly when. She had succeeded in drinking herself to distraction and had slept fitfully for a few hours. But at least she had slept.

Tara flicked through her emails too – the usual mix of marketing rubbish she never opened but couldn’t be bothered to unsubscribe to, and medical news. She saw she had a missed call, which was something of a novelty. Did people still use phones to actually . . . make calls?

She dialled her voicemail and listened in, watching blankly as Holly clambered inelegantly into the helicopter and reached back down to take her sleeping child from her husband’s arms. Tara turned away.

‘Tara?’ The voice was clipped, efficient. Instantly recognizable. ‘It’s Helen McPherson calling. Ring me back, would you? I understand you’re on annual leave for a week but I want to go over a few things with you with regard to the Miller case. Just a quick chat. Okay thanks.’

The Miller case. That little girl was a ‘case’ now?

Tara disconnected, feeling light-headed and like she wanted to throw up. Helen McPherson was the hospital’s clinical director, and a ruthless bureaucrat. She didn’t suffer fools or egos, and she was a slave to AI, especially when it promised to save money or lives, or both. The mortality rates under her stewardship had dropped seven per cent in eighteen months and Tara had heard whispers she was being lined up for a place on the Trust’s Board. This was no mere quick chat she wanted – the hospital’s youngest (and most newsworthy) consultant had left a blade inside the body of a four-year-old girl and that made her look bad. No, that message was the verbal equivalent of throwing a grenade across the floor – leaving Tara waiting for the bang.

Chapter Twelve

Everyone always seemed to react in the same way when they stepped into a tropical forest for the first time. First their gaze went up, looking for a star-freckled sky that could now only be glimpsed in small pieces; then their arms went out as they slowly revolved on the spot. It seemed almost a spiritual response, as though for once, the body was being driven by the soul.

Even if it hadn’t been the middle of the night, there wasn’t much to see here; only the lights of the helicopter gave them any visibility at all. There was no terminal building (or even a hut), no giant H painted on the ground. The helipad wasn’t visible from the road and was nothing more than a rogue bare patch where some old trees had once fallen. And yet Tara watched as Holly, Dev and Jimmy went through those motions of awe, an expression of wonderment on their faces beneath the giant ceibas.

Holly looked back at her with big, shining eyes. ‘I like what you’ve done with the place.’

Tara laughed. Holly could always bring a smile to her face.

Rory didn’t seem to have noticed yet; he was being useful and helping the pilot bring the bags out. Miles and Zac were on their phones, pointlessly checking for wifi in case things had changed since their last visit seven months ago. It was one in the morning, and they were all exhausted after over twelve hours of travelling.

‘For the record, I’m never going back,’ Holly said, staring up at the jagged patch of sky; it looked like a caterpillar-nibbled black leaf.

Tara smiled tiredly. ‘Tell me that when you’re a fortnight into the wet season. There isn’t enough serum in the world could make you stay here then.’

Holly looked suitably perturbed by the thought of the frizz.

Tara looked around, trying to see this place with fresh eyes too, but it was like unknowing the twist in a thriller film. It couldn’t be done. Innocence, once lost, was lost forever. She had been coming to this pocket of Costa Rican jungle since she was nine years old and Miles was seven. For eleven years, it had been her place of refuge, the holiday she looked forward to all year, a time-out from the world where boarding school was far away and the management boards couldn’t reach her father . . . They could all be themselves here in a way they couldn’t anywhere else. She felt it was the only place where she truly lived freely.

That had all stopped abruptly, of course, when the national park project had been announced. It was too tied up for her now with Alex Carter’s betrayal and the way he’d used her to get to her father. She couldn’t think of one without the other, and for almost a decade it had been easier not to think of either by simply not visiting. But she had missed coming here and it had forced her to deny a part of herself. It had been another loss on top of loss, she realized, as she stood there feeling the forest breathe around her. She could smell the sweet scent of orchids and the rich,