Chapter 2 Kate

2 KATE

NOW

Kate reckons she’s the most reluctant person ever to go to the Maldives.

Sand, sun, sea, and sweat —the four most repulsive s ’s she can think of. Also, salad and syringe . She doesn’t like either of those, and sex… actually, it’s been so long that she doesn’t have an opinion on it anymore.

She pops another Jaffa Cake into her mouth and eyes the black square of the flight information display suspended in the middle of the concourse. It’s like an object of deep time, she thinks, a lump of gneiss streaked with white minerals. Her eyes track to the flashing red digits at the left of the screen. She springs to her feet—the red numbers mean her gate is closing. How could it have happened so quickly?

She hefts her backpack onto her shoulders and lumbers toward the signs that tell her gates 11–23 are to the left. By the time she reaches the left-hand corridor she’s swimming in sweat, dismayed to find that it’s about a mile long. Where is the fucking gate?

Kate drives her legs forward, inner thighs chafing uncomfortably, a sharp pain blooming in her lungs. She keeps her eyes down, avoiding the stares from other passengers. Finally, a sign appears— GATE 22 . Still running, she rummages in the side pocket of her backpack for her passport and boarding pass, thrusting them at the desk agent.

“On you go,” the woman says, and Kate feels her knees almost give.

By the time she finds her seat on the plane, she’s wheezing and red-faced, and too knackered to care who sees.

She takes her seat, wincing at the small space she must squeeze herself into—and between two strangers. She thinks of her favorite armchair, roomy and comfortable, in the front window of her home in Carmarthenshire. It’s a rustic cottage that she’s sweetened over the years with hanging baskets and a lot of hard labor in the front and back gardens. Last year, she painted the door and window frames sage green. Mrs. Williams down the lane painted her garden gate a similar color not long after. Kate, a trendsetter! She’s not one for fashion, or trendsetting for that matter, but she takes pride in her cottage. It’s where she works, plays, and rests. She has absolutely zero desire to go anywhere else.

She looks down at the ground as it falls away from the plane, the streets and houses of Cardiff diminishing into little dots along the Welsh landscape. She could have hopped on the train to Heathrow and flown with Darcy and Camilla, but she’s relieved not to have to sit for ten hours next to Camilla. Camilla exists on chia seeds and air, has strong opinions about macros. Kate has nothing against anyone who wants to spend two hours a day strengthening their core, but Camilla likes to lecture everyone else about the importance of it. And given that Kate hasn’t seen or felt her core since 1992, she’s glad of the chance to avoid that.

The seat belt sign flicks off. With a sigh, she reaches for her backpack beneath her seat and pulls out her laptop.

Kate is a ghostwriter. Her latest project involves working with Niall Hardman, a soccer player from the noughties who has decided to bless mankind with his literary talents in the form of a series of crime novels. The first is about a psychopathic serial killer, which has required extensive research on her part into the mind of a psychopath. As per her previous clients, the idea is that Niall provides the basic outline of a story, and she the finished book. But Niall’s ideas are secondhand drivel, and his ideological leaning is, to put it mildly, on the old-fashioned side , so Kate has had a hard time trying to nail down a decent plot. Worse, Niall is convinced that he’s a storytelling maestro, and that Kate’s role in the process is merely to transcribe his terrible plots word for word, like a typist. She’s avoided using the term misogynistic when discussing his plotlines, which has taken great diplomacy. When she attempted to point out that some readers might find his female body count problematic, he suggested that she “wasn’t much of a writer.”

“Aren’t you supposed to shape the story around my plotline?” he said over a Zoom call.

“To a degree,” Arthur chipped in. Arthur is Kate’s agent, and a friend. “Why don’t you leave the twists and turns up to Kate? That’s why you hired her, isn’t it?”

Niall fell silent, chewing the skin around his fingernails, revealing a heavily tattooed hand. Later emails from his agent indicated that he’d felt “pushed out of the process,” but she couldn’t give two figs about how Niall felt. She has written for plenty of celebrities, and their theatrics didn’t faze her. Niall caved in the end, as she knew he would.

Secretly, though, she’s been putting off writing Niall’s book, and she’s working on her own novel now, under a pseudonym. She hasn’t even told Arthur. No psychopaths in this one. It’s about a young girl who goes on a solo journey to a remote wilderness and makes peace with the monsters of her past. It will be the first novel she publishes as her own work, after over fifteen years of writing. It feels nerve-racking, and lately she’s considered giving up the idea entirely. She earns a decent living from ghostwriting, so why create more work for herself?

But it’s not about the money. It’s about… something she can’t put her finger on.

Kate opens up the document with the new novel, then closes it. She’s almost finished, but she can’t face it. Instead, she brings up the pdf brochure Darcy sent her about the resort in the Maldives. It looks amazing, no doubt about it. It’s situated on a talc-white island amid a pristine turquoise ocean. There are images of colorful reefs and dolphins, people relaxing on sun loungers or massage beds, getting black stuff rubbed onto their backs. Pictures of people snorkeling and doing lots of sporty things. Pictures of cocktails, and artful food.

Kate tries to summon some enthusiasm, to feel grateful for what is undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Darcy has paid for it all out of her divorce settlement; Kate clocked the price when the QR code brought up her booking—fifty grand. Fifty grand for three people to go on a nine-day holiday. Yes, it was a last-minute thing, booked less than two weeks ago, but Kate’s Carmarthenshire cottage cost fifty grand, and she’d had to take out a twenty-five-year mortgage.

Nine days she’ll be at the resort, celebrating Darcy’s divorce from Jacob with all the cocktails and spa treatments and sunshine she can manage. She likes the idea of a cocktail, but indoors, perhaps beside an open fire, curled up on an armchair instead of a sun lounger. With her laptop, or a book. And maybe a steaming pot of tea instead of a cocktail.

Why anyone would want to sit on a beach all day is beyond her.

But this trip is about much, much more than sitting on a beach.

She must remember that.