Bella

"OH MY GOODNESS," FRANCESCA SAYS, gliding toward me. "Is it really you? Do you know—I thought I saw you at breakfast yesterday! But then I thought ‘It can't be!' The hair, that threw me off. It suits you! How have you been, my lovely? What are you up to these days? It's been so long."

For a moment I'm totally at a loss. Of all the things I'd expected, it wasn't this. It's utterly shameless. But then she always was. People don't change that much. All of this, the soft curling locks, the rural goddess photoshoots with farm animals, the flowing linen: it hides something steely and unyielding. Beneath it all she's always been hard as fucking nails.

I take a step toward her. Her eyes skitter away from mine, unable to hold the contact. The only tell.

"I need to speak to you, Francesca."

She tosses her head. "Oh," she says, smoothly, "funny thing, I'd also been hoping for a catch-up with you!" Her broad smile is Cheshire-cat sinister. I swallow my dread and move toward her, all the same. Too close, right into her personal space. And it works. She takes a step back and I see a spasm of something cross her face. Fear.

I feel a surge of triumph. Apparently she's registering the fact that I'm no longer the timid little girl she remembers, that she can't just push me around. To really ram that home I take a step closer and grab her by the wrist, gripping the fragile bones tight beneath my fingers. I'm vaguely aware of faces turning to look at us. "You'll come with me, now," I say. "Or I'm going to make a big scene. Bigger than this. Way bigger than this."

Again, that shimmer of alarm in her expression. "Let's go somewhere else," she says, placatingly, her gaze darting to the watching guests. "Somewhere quieter, to talk."

I follow her into the main building, past the entrance to the bar where I first met Eddie. "In here," she says, opening a door. "I think you'll remember this room. It's barely changed. It's so cozy, don't you think?"

It's the library: antique tomes and pieces of curios filling the bookshelves that line three walls, the grand old fireplace. I don't think she's chosen it by accident. Last time I was in this room, I was with Jake. We'd just been paid three thousand pounds for our silence.

She closes the door and then, I see, she turns a key. I feel a stutter of alarm. Brush a hand against my tote bag to touch the reassuring shape of the half bottle of gin I took from my room. Carefully, though, because just before I left the dining pod I smashed the neck against the table so the top is lethally sharp. You can take the girl out of South London...

Once the lock clunks into place, she rounds on me. "What are you doing here?" she hisses. Francesca Meadows has disappeared in a puff of sage-infused smoke and the Frankie I knew stands before me. In a way it's a relief. The whole creation of Francesca Meadows has felt like a kind of gaslighting. Because Frankie—Frankie was bitchy and cool and fun, Frankie smoked Marlboro Lights on the tennis courts and drank Malibu-spiked banana Nesquik. Frankie with her cool-posh-girl voice—husky, lethargic. Frankie with her tall tales of sex at raves in London warehouses. Frankie who made me long for a bigger, more glamorous existence, who made me feel at times that I could almost taste it.

Frankie who ruined my life.

"What have you come here for?" she asks. I blink. I realize I've been so lost in the shock of the transformation that she's put me briefly on the back foot. But not for long. I clutch the bottle's stem, for courage.

"I've come to remind you of what you did. It seems to me you could do with some refreshing."

She gives a little sigh. And when she speaks again her voice has changed and she is Francesca Meadows, high-end woo-woo goddess, and Frankie has slipped into the shadows again: "Oh, Sparrow. You can't spend your whole life living in the past. It's just not good for you. You have to live in the now."

"Well, I disagree. I think you've moved on a little too easily. It didn't touch you at all, did it? Not then. Not now. Not one iota of remorse. You shouldn't be able to stand being here. It should make you ill. How could you talk to journalists about your idyllic summers here... about getting up to fucking ‘high-jinks'? Like it was all some lark? Some childhood mishap?"

"Oh, Sparrow. We've been over this, no? It was a terrible tragedy. No one's fault."

"No. You killed her. Maybe you meant to kill all of us. And honestly, in a way it doesn't matter whether you meant to or not. Because what you did afterwards, how you all covered it up: that was evil. She didn't matter enough, did she? She was local, poor. She wasn't a real person, not to someone like you.

"The thing is," I continue. "For all these years you've made me feel like a killer. You and your hideous Grandfa, making me and Jake complicit, palming us off with cash. But we weren't the guilty ones. You are, Frankie."

"Don't call me that," she hisses. Another whiplash change from the airy, aloof creature of before. Then she closes her eyes and inhales deeply. "Sparrow. You should get some help. Go to a retreat for a few months. Meditate. Honestly. It changed my life. Gave me purpose."

"I've got that," I say. "It's why I came."

"Are you here to kill me?"

She asks it lightly, almost conversationally—like we're at a drinks party having a polite catch-up. Again, I'm wrong-footed. But I carry on. "I'm here for justice. And it doesn't even matter that you moved the body."

She frowns. "What on earth are you talking about?" For a moment she seems genuinely thrown. I press on.

"There'll be evidence there, all the same. You weren't as thorough as you could have been." I think of Cora's silver Celtic knot ring, hidden in my bag.

"There is no body," she says, her voice a touch higher than usual. For the first time she sounds uncertain. "Grandfa dealt with it all—he told me. The... the tragedy: he made it go away."

I look at her. She seems truly unsettled. Could it be that she really doesn't know?

It's possible. She left the next morning, after all.

"I came back," I say. "The day before I left Tome, all those years ago." It took all my courage. "I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to look you in the eye, just the two of us, and ask if you'd meant to do it. But you'd already gone."

I plugged in the code at the gate. I was met at the front door by Grandfa. "Francesca and the twins have gone away for a time with their grandmother," he told me. "I thought I already dealt with you. You've done enough, don't you think? There's nothing for you here. Leave us alone." And the words that he was far too well-heeled to speak out loud: or else.

He shut the door in my face. I turned and walked back down the steps. I would have walked away and never come back except that halfway down the drive my eye was drawn to something on the edge of the woods. A disturbance in the ground. A heap of earth. I knew that he might be watching from the house, so I kept walking. Pressed the button to open the gates. And then, right at the last second, rather than going through them, I slunk into the shadows beside the wall. I walked along the perimeter, staying in the shadows, and then when I reached the woods I used the trees as cover, walking right along the boundary.

The spot I had seen from the drive was bare and raw looking. Several feet long. I stood there for a long time and stared at it, trying to work out what to do with this knowledge. Perhaps if I had been older, braver—perhaps if Jake had been with me... But I was alone and scared, in the grounds of a grand house occupied by a grand old family with money and power and threats.

I knew I could do nothing except mark it out in my memory: the precise location, the trees beside it. When I got back to the caravan I drew my map in the back of my journal. This seemed important. That someone would remember. I sent a text to Jake, too. I know where she is.

"Is it possible your darling grandad wasn't quite as thorough as you thought?" I ask Francesca. "After all, he was pretty sloppy about hiding his affairs, wasn't he?"

"Be quiet," she says, pressing the flat of her palm against her brow so it's almost as though she's talking to herself as much as she is to me. "Just—just SHUT UP."

But I can't stop now. It feels too good to make her feel a tiny measure of the pain I've experienced for fifteen years.

"I want you to say it. I need you to acknowledge what you did to her—to us. I want to be able to look my daughter in the eye. I want to be able to look in the mirror and know that, in spite of my many flaws, I am a good person. That I'm someone who does the right thing. Because that"—I'm crying now—"that's what you and your grandfa took away from me that night." I start walking toward her, reaching for the bottle inside the tote. I see her eyes flit to the bag. If I'm lucky she'll think I'm holding a knife.

"I saw them," I whisper. "Last night, I saw the Birds."

She begins to laugh, a little manically. "The Birds? I told you that was all me, you stupid cow!" She sweeps her hand out toward the festivities. "I've always been good at creating a spectacle, haven't I?"

"But that's where you're wrong, Frankie—"

"Don't call me that."

"I saw them back then—"

I think I glimpse a tiny spasm of fear. Then she seems to gather herself. The mask comes back down. "What, while you were high on prescription meds I'd filched from my mother's stash? Yeah, course you did."

"And I saw them last night. In the woods—"

She actually rolls her eyes. "Oh for God's sake, Sparrow. I've moved on from childish games and fairy tales. You're wasting my time."

But as I step toward her she's backing away, into the corner, until she's pressed right up against the bookshelves. It's then that I see it, on one of the shelves above her head: my fossil—the one I found on the beach that first day, unwittingly setting off this whole chain of events. That little haunted relic of an ancient past that has had so much bearing on my present.

Her eyes are wild and trapped. "You've always been a leech," she hisses. "A taker. And I'm not going to let you take any of this away from me."

The pain comes first, before I can work out what has happened. The pain, the outrage of the impact. And then I feel my legs give way and I fall to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. It takes a moment or two of lying here in a blind red static of pain, reduced to my most animal, diminished self, to work out what just happened. She's struck me with something heavy and blunt. I'm lying on the ground in front of her, head throbbing. Blurrily I can just make out her sandaled feet a few inches from my head, the immaculate nude pedicure. And in spite of everything I can't help making the absurd observation: of course she wears a bloody diamond-studded toe ring.

Suddenly I feel overwhelmingly, irresistibly tired. It wouldn't hurt, would it? Just to rest here for a while. Just to gather my strength.

"Sleep tight, Sparrow," she whispers, close enough that I can smell her sweetish breath. "I won't let you ruin this place for me. Just like I wouldn't then. I've created something beautiful here. Something for the now, for the future. So much bigger than anything that happened in the past."

I feel her ease the tote bag from my shoulder. And as though from a very long way away, I hear the door open, then click closed. The turn of the key.

I shut my eyes.