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

She could only hope Alex would bring them back with him. Once he’d realized what she’d done – forced, by his actions – he would have headed back too, surely? He wouldn’t leave them behind to spite her? He might be many things – ruthless, ambitious, unprincipled, uncompromising – but spiteful wasn’t one of them.

She tried not to think about how he had found out she had gone – she tried not to imagine the look on his face when he’d checked in on her hut and found it empty. Maybe he had waited a while, letting her rest properly and sleep in, or perhaps too ashamed of how he’d behaved – drunk on exhaustion and aguardiente and nostalgia – to rush to face her again. But then, eventually, he would have had to; he’d have seen her things gone. It would have gone around the village that William – his old mentor, guide and friend – had gone too.

He’d have put two and two together and . . .

That was the moment she kept envisaging as her feet moved, left-right-left-right . . . She saw the change in his eyes, the growing slackness of his lips, the paling of his skin as he understood she had abandoned him, walked away again. She saw in microscopic detail his feelings of hurt, of rejection. And anger too. Hate me, then.

She wondered what time he’d left, and how far he was behind them. Would he take the microlight? He couldn’t catch them on foot, of that she was pretty sure. William didn’t walk as fast as Alex but they must have had a head start of at least three hours and she had a feeling – but couldn’t be certain – their route back was different.

It had still been pitch black when they left. The head torch – which Alex had chivalrously given her the first night in case of midnight loo trips – had been the only way for her to see as they picked a route through the trees. William needed no assistance at all; even the sliver moon appeared to be, for him, merely decorative, an ornament in the sky. Rather, he moved as if by instinct, understanding the sway of the land, its stories and secrets, an inner compass guiding him through the landscape of his ancestors. She trusted him implicitly.

They had slept the night before in a cave, behind a waterfall. Perfectly dry. She had been too terrified to approach at first, explaining to him what had happened to her with the canoe and going over the falls and he had seemed strangely unsurprised by it, almost as though he might have expected it. Because of her naivety? Her Westernness? He had simply held out his hand and led her onwards, behind the furious water, where not a drop touched her.

He hadn’t brought anything with him, only a hunting knife sheathed on his belt, his walking stick and a bag of stones that appeared to be important. A shawl, knotted diagonally over his shoulder by day, had been wrapped around him as a blanket while he slept. That was all.

He had checked the wound by her elbow for her, explaining that what she had thought was just an infected scratch had in fact been invaded by an insect, which had laid its eggs in her skin. Left untreated, he had said, those eggs would have turned into a worm. Instead, the leaf sap he had rubbed in and covered with the leaf when she’d arrived had killed the worm within two hours – that was the ‘activity’ she had felt, and the wound was now healing quickly. It both grossed her out and fascinated her. Even steroid cream couldn’t work that fast.

She looked ahead to the sparkling strip of sea stretching along the horizon. The lights of faraway ships twinkled at the earth’s edge and she knew somewhere, beyond where she could see, lay Jamaica. Jed’s family had originated from there, coming over the Caribbean Sea to hunt turtles here back in the thirties and forties. He found it both ironic and pleasing that he now worked for a man whose foundation was set up specifically to protect those creatures, and many others.

Jed. She wondered still how he was and again sent her fervent wishes into the sky that he had reached hospital before any brain swelling became problematic. She wondered if his family knew. If her family knew. Was her father aware there had been serious problems out here with the ranchers? Alex’s tone on the matter – like Jed’s – had been evasive, eye contact averted; he clearly hadn’t been telling her the whole story. But her father, writing the cheques and putting his name to the project . . . he had to know, surely? Unless Alex was keeping it from him too.

She would need to talk to her father when he got here. She frowned, trying to think when that would be. The handover was happening Friday, and today was . . . today was . . .? Everything had become such a blur, what with no phones, no clocks, no watches . . .

Was today Thursday? Or Friday? No. It had to be Thursday . . . Or perhaps Wednesday?

She began thinking back, counting the days since they’d left England on Saturday evening . . . It was Thursday. The handover was tomorrow, which meant her parents would be arriving today. They were all supposed to be flying up to the Lodge tonight. Right now! Her, Rory, Miles and Zac, Holly, Dev and Jimmy. All of them. There was no way she couldn’t be there. Her father had taken his fortune and committed to giving away ninety-five per cent of it with the brushstroke of a pen. It was a historic act of singular philanthropy. Even Chuck Feeney, the co-founder of DFS and her father’s old friend, had taken decades to give away his $8 billion fortune; her father was doing it in less than one. That was what he had liked so much about Alex’s proposal: the purity of the project, its