Page 79 of A Very Happy Easter

“I’ll text you. I mean, it’s a shame because the food’s amazing, but us girls have to stick together, don’t we?”

“We do. We absolutely do.”

Heath moved fast. I caught him on the beach, and when I told him where Neil was, he literally ran up the sand to the villa. A nerve-racking hour followed where I paced the living room and Heath watched me from the sofa, his phone in his hand.

“Anything?” I asked for the twentieth time.

“Give them a minute.”

“How can you act so calm about this?”

“Practice. You want me to make you some lunch?”

I shook my head. “My stomach’s full of butterflies.”

No, not butterflies. Crows. A murder of big black crows.

Finally, finally, Heath announced, “He’s still there.”

Thank goodness. “Will they watch him until the police come?”

“They won’t let him get away.” His tone said there was a “but” coming.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“The big boss is in the loop, and she told us to put a net around him and wait.”

“Emmy? That boss?”

“Yes.”

“Why would she want to wait? Neil should be locked up, like, yesterday.”

“I don’t know the answer to that question, and I’m not entirely sure I want to.”

“She won’t…she won’t let him go, will she?”

“No chance of that. But she might give him a little reminder of why it’s not a good idea to assault women.” Heath studied me. “I can ask her to back off if that makes you uncomfortable.”

When I was seventeen, after the police shrugged and said there was nothing more they could do about prosecuting Neil, I’d bought a burner phone and googled “how to hire a hit man.” But it turned out you had a fifty-fifty chance of hiring an undercover law enforcement agent instead, and I didn’t want to end up in jail myself. Plus when I’d tried tiptoeing into the dark web, I’d seen things that gave me nightmares for months.

“Honestly? I’d be relieved.”

“Then we’ll sit back and let her get on with it. What do you want for dinner?”

As Heath veered sharply back to normality, emotions got the better of me. Something welled up in my chest, not panic this time, but relief. The tears still escaped, though. He wrapped me up in a hug.

“This’ll soon be over, Edie. They’ll get him for the arson.”

“It’s not enough. What happens when he’s released again?”

Heath kissed my hair, as had become his habit. “You won’t need to worry, I promise.”

Twenty-Two

“Ohmigosh! I wish I got that on video.” I sucked in air, hands on my knees, then waved my arms as the seagull that had just demolished Heath’s carefully constructed sandcastle came for me. “Aieeeee!”

Casa Santo came with a cupboard full of sports and games equipment, and this past week, we’d tried everything from swingball and croquet to yoga. Heath was surprisingly flexible. Today, we’d both drunk too much wine with lunch and somehow decided to relive our childhoods by building sandcastles on the beach. Heath’s family used to go to Devon in the summer—that was where his parents had eventually retired to—and my family spent time in Barbados, Nice, Aruba, and the Maldives.