Chapter 21 Camilla

21 CAMILLA

NOW

What a fucking day.

Camilla sits alone in the bar area, having said good night to both Kate and Darcy. It’s just past nine. She can’t face going back to her room. The anniversary of the Spinnaker killings is just hours away now. She’s on her fourth cocktail—a pi?a colada with a flamboyant garnish and a sugar-rimmed glass—and quite prepared to keep drinking so long as it keeps the knot in her stomach from getting any worse. In fact, she might just keep drinking until she passes out. Darcy and Kate will understand, surely, if she doesn’t appear tomorrow morning. But better to pass out in her villa than here in public view.

She’s just getting up to leave when a figure appears next to her.

“Good evening. May I join you?”

She looks up to see Antoni, who is accompanied by a lanky, square-jawed eighteen-year-old with liquid-brown eyes.

“Antoni,” he says, putting his hand to his chest. “In case you’d forgotten. And this is my nephew, Salvador.”

She smiles. “No, I hadn’t forgotten. Sharp as a tack, that’s me.” She shoots a tipsy grin at Salvador. “Evening.”

She sits back down in her chair, the idea of being alone suddenly unappealing. Antoni turns to the young man and says something in Spanish. Salvador nods, responding, though she has no idea what he’s saying, with the exception of “sí, sí,” which she understands as “yes, yes.”

“Salvador doesn’t speak English,” Antoni explains. “He’s going to have a drink with a girl he met earlier.”

Salvador smiles awkwardly at Camilla and lifts a hand in farewell. “Mucho gusto.”

“Mucho gusto,” Camilla says, raising her glass and spilling a little of its contents as Salvador departs toward a younger woman sitting expectantly at the bar.

Antoni takes the seat opposite Camilla, and she can tell he’s stone-cold sober. He’s smartly dressed: a crisp linen shirt, open enough at the neck to reveal chest hair. Strong arms, too, the hint of a pronounced biceps at the sleeve hem.

“Antoni,” she says, quickly remembering the fray at dinnertime. “God, that was crazy earlier. Rob, I mean.”

He nods. “ Sí , he was very angry. His young wife was upset, too. I was trying to give her some advice for the Pilates move you showed us. But…” He tuts, shakes his head. “Her husband is a torracollons .”

She gives a loud laugh. “A what?”

“A ball ache.”

“Maybe you can teach me some Spanish swear words,” she says, raising her glass.

“Catalonian,” he says.

“Is that another word for ball ache ?”

“Yes and no,” he says. “It’s my nationality. I’m from Catalonia.”

She realizes her error and laughs again, her head flung back, drawing looks from the guests nearby.

“How is Kate?” he asks.

“She’s fine,” she lies. “Absolutely fine.”

“That’s good to hear. I was worried.”

She fakes a smile, slighted by the assumption that he’s only here to ask about bloody Kate. “I’ll pass on your good wishes, shall I?”

“What are you drinking?” he asks.

“My sorrows.”

His expression changes, his eyes moving across her. “Ah, that’s not so good. Have they a more cheerful cocktail?”

She glances behind him. They’re sitting in the bar, rattan chairs and tables spread out beneath a straw roof, the light murmur of jazz music from speakers overhead. Candles glimmering in glass jars, the night sky filled with stars.

She nods at the waiter, who approaches their table with a tray.

“A pi?a colada for my friend Antoni,” she says.

“Certainly. And for you?”

“I’ll have one, too.”

The waiter vanishes toward the bar. She drains the rest of her glass.

“I heard about Kate,” Antoni says. “Another accident.”

“She’s lucky is what she is,” Camilla says, her tone more spiteful than she intended. “Went swimming with the kayaks and paddleboards. Took an oar to the head. But she’s fine.”

He nods, his fingers laced. “That’s good. Not good she took an oar to the head, of course. But I’m glad she’s all right.” A smile, his eyes lightly scanning her. “I find holidays can be a double-edged sword.”

She cocks her head. “How so?”

“Well, the opportunity to rest is wonderful, is it not? But also, we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure we enjoy every second. And sometimes a vacation allows the mind to unwind a little bit too much. We have all this time to think about the good, and the not-so-good.”

She runs her eyes over him, impressed. He’s deep, this guy. “I know. Some of us work, work, work just to keep ourselves from thinking too hard; otherwise we might go mad.”

“Exactly. Vacations are not to be taken lightly. They can be dangerous .” His voice deepens on the word dangerous , and he laughs, but she hears the truth in his tone.

“I haven’t taken a holiday in about twelve years,” she says. “I’ve gone abroad, sure, but it’s always a working holiday.”

His smile fades as he realizes she’s confiding in him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I get scared if I’ve got too much time to sit around and think.”

He cocks his head, trying to work out what she means. “Why scared?”

She shrugs, flicking a long strand of black hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know. Fear makes no sense, does it? I keep thinking about my daughter, Natasha. She’s perfectly fine, by the way, but I worry.”

“Fear is fear.”

“I suppose. I just… I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her, too.” Her throat tightens. “I don’t think I’d survive it.”

He hears the catch in her voice and leans forward, placing his hand gently on hers. The feel of his hand jolts her, sobering her a little. She stares down at it; the sensation of a warm touch, of someone’s hand on hers, is something she hasn’t felt in a long time.

“Tomorrow’s the anniversary of… losing my twin brother,” she says, hesitating on the word losing . “It’s always a hard time of year for me.”

“Losing a twin must feel like losing a part of yourself,” Antoni says softly.

The waiter appears before she can answer, setting down the cocktails on the table in front of them. Camilla doesn’t lift her eyes from Antoni. She is either blind drunk or spellbound by this man and his soft manner, the kind and eloquent way he approaches delicate subjects, like her brother’s death. Like grief.

And she realizes, in a way that makes her wonder why and how she has lived the last two decades not realizing it, that her entire adult life has been defined by grief. That she has made every single decision as a direct result of the night her brother was murdered.

“Tell me,” Antoni says, “what was your brother’s name?”

“Cameron,” she says, feeling the heaviness in her blood when she says it aloud. She rarely says his name, though sometimes she says it just to keep him alive. It’s something she wonders about recommending to bereavement counselors: Tell people to say the names of the dead out loud. The silence surrounding a name is the keenest way to kill them all over again , she thinks.

“What about your wife?” she says. “What was her name?”

Antoni pulls out a packet of roll-up cigarettes from a pocket. “You don’t mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

He lights one, his face relaxing as he takes a slow, luxuriant drag. “Estella. Estella de Quirós.”

“Was she a dancer, too?”

He nods, smiling. “Much, much better than me. As a teenager she was told she could never have children, and this propelled her in a way to do something that the women in her family did not have the chance to do. Also, she was gifted, and a hard worker.”

She raises her glass. “To brilliant, hardworking, gifted people who are no longer with us.”

Antoni raises his. “Salud.”

He drinks, then sets his glass down, enjoying his cigarette. “What about your brother? Were you close?”

She shudders, hearing Cameron’s voice in her mind. That last, terrifying phone call. So many hours of therapy over the years, trying to process it.

“Cameron and I were born six minutes apart,” she says. “Both of us black-haired Filipino kids, the only Filipinos in our tiny little town. We clung to each other. But then, we drifted as teenagers. By the time we hit our twenties, he and I were on completely different levels. We weren’t on good terms when he died.”

She tells him, the words flowing out of her in an unstoppable babble, of how Cameron had fallen in with the wrong crowd in his teens, and instead of growing out of it he had become more and more embroiled. He had been a talented guitar player, was set to make a career as a musician. His descent was the climax of a horror movie in slow motion: the drugs, the jail time, the beatings inside prison, the thefts from their parents to support his addiction.

He started playing guitar again, then had a baby with a girlfriend, which offered their parents a glimmer of hope—perhaps this new child would make him turn over a new leaf. And perhaps they’d be able to see their grandchild.

Neither was to happen: Cam screwed it up, as he did everything else. The girlfriend refused access, worried that Cam would use in front of the kid. Their parents never so much as met their grandchild, a little girl. She must be in her mid-twenties now.

But that last phone call… I think someone’s here…. What do I do?

Antoni’s hand brushes against hers, bringing her back—where? She looks around, the alcohol making the air fuzzy, the ground shifting a little. Ah yes, she’s in the bar, in the resort, in the Maldives. She’s forty-nine. Twenty-two years have passed since Cam’s death. And yet, time does nothing, heals nothing. The past is stunningly present, all the time.

HE SUGGESTS THEY TAKE A walk along the beach, which is lit up by neon lights that change color, flickering across the dark waves.

“He called me that night,” she tells Antoni as they stroll slowly along the shore. “Not his girlfriend, not our parents, not any of his friends. He knew he was going to die, and he was terrified. We hadn’t spoken in four years, not a single word. And despite everything that had happened, despite the lies and all the times he’d stolen from me, I was the one he trusted above everyone else.” She swallows hard, her insides turning cold. “And there was nothing, absolutely nothing that I could do but listen to him die.”

Antoni fixes his dark gaze on her for a long time while she toes the tide, feeling the horror of that night all over again, hearing Cameron’s voice, the fear in it.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Antoni says.

She nods. “I’d envisaged it so many times. Getting a call from a hospital somewhere. The police turning up on my parents’ doorstep to say he’d been found dead with a needle in his arm. But he’d cleaned up, seemed to be sticking to the program. Our expectations were very low. He was working for a building firm in Dover, had to stay for a few weeks.” She sighs, her eyes tracking a shape in the water close by. “He was murdered. Nothing to do with drugs or gangs. Just some random attack.”

Antoni looks pained, but then, this is why she never tells anyone about the nature of Cameron’s death. If it ever comes up, she tends to say he died in a car accident. Murder raises too many questions, requires too much explanation. And some people have accused her of making it up.

“What about the killer?” Antoni says, reining his shock back in. He’s too cool a customer to be flabbergasted, even in the face of news like this, which she likes. “Was he prosecuted?”

Antoni passes her his cigarette, and she takes a long drag, lifting the hem of her dress as the tide rushes in. Too late—her dress is soaked.

“He died in prison,” she says, moving to dry sand.

Antoni follows, contemplative. “But he still took your brother. It doesn’t matter that justice was done.”

She gives a bitter laugh. “ Justice . Such a small word for such a torrent of bullshit.” Antoni laughs brightly, making her own laugh change key. She stares into his face. He’s the same height as her, perhaps an inch taller, and she enjoys the way he looks at her. Or maybe it’s the drink talking. Either way: he has such kindness, such depth of character in his face, and it occurs to her how underrated those things really are.

Who knew? All this time she sought out complicated, entitled, and often perverse men with bizarre fetishes, assuming they were the ones who were intelligent and sexy. An unfortunate combination. But here she is with a seemingly uncomplicated and straightforward man with kind brown eyes, and she is reeled right in.

He steps forward, a hand reaching to move her head gently toward his, and kisses her, a slow, achingly passionate kiss that melts all the irritation and bitterness away.

“Sorry if I was a bitch to you,” she says softly when they separate.

He shrugs it off, lacing his fingers slowly between hers. “I saw straight through it.”

And he kisses her again.