Page 61 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Getting back into the hypogeum is much easier than it probably should be.

Kathryn has all the entry codes and knows the security team like old friends.

It’s a different shift from earlier, which is probably a good thing.

They greet each other in Maltese, but still, I get the exchange of family news and standing jokes.

She swiftly introduces me as her English cousin, waving her hand over me as if she is rather hoping they won’t notice me at all.

In a way, I already feel like I’m not here – that this is just an empty husk standing here, smiling and laughing as she makes jokes and small talk, and that the essential part of me is already far away.

‘I’m just picking up some books I need for a lecture tomorrow,’ Kathryn tells them with an authoritative air that doesn’t invite scrutiny. ‘I’ll be ten minutes maximum!’

As Kathryn enters the security codes, I take my phone out of the tote bag that she gave me. I wasn’t planning on taking luggage, but I hope I can take the toys through. Not my phone, of course – that is staying here. But there is just one last thing I need to look up.

I search for serious road-traffic accidents in Milan in 1992. There’s not much – just a line in Italian in an archived newspaper article. Doing my best to commit it to memory, I close the app and turn off my phone, setting it down on the floor.

We are out of the reception building and into the first underground layer of the temple before I really understand what Kathryn is risking for me and my insane notions.

If she gets caught smuggling her cousin into Malta’s great treasure after hours, then her career could be in ruins.

It makes no sense that she is doing this for me, and yet here we are.

‘Maia, Maia,’ she repeats my name, clicking her fingers until I focus on her face. ‘You need to concentrate! It’s not every day I break into an ancient monument.’

‘Kathryn,’ I say, ‘we need to go back. This is crazy. I can’t let you get into trouble for me.’

‘I’m not doing this for you; you are doing it for me.

’ She smiles, tears shining in her dark eyes.

‘I have loved these temples all my life, and I have longed to understand them – not just to make guesses or assumptions but to know. Don’t you worry about me – I take after our grandmother; I will be fine.

All I want you to do is prove me right.’

‘I will,’ I promise.

‘Right, pay attention.’ Kathryn is laser-focused.

‘I can’t go any further with you – you’ll have to find your way on your own.

I’m going back to the front desk now to tell them you wandered off when I wasn’t looking, then we are going to search for you.

Either we’ll find you in about fifteen minutes or you will have vanished into thin air and we can create an urban myth about you, the woman who vanished into the past.’ She grips my hands tightly in hers. ‘I will miss you.’

‘Kathryn,’ I whisper, ‘thank you. For everything. You took me to your heart about five seconds after we met. I will never forget that.’

‘And you’ve given me an understanding of these temples and islands that I could have lived a lifetime without having,’ Kathryn says. ‘And this is going to sound weird, but I hope you make it, Maia. I hope I never see you again.’

We hug, briefly but tightly, and Kathryn hurries back to the front desk.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ she calls back.

The temple welcomes me into the folds of her belly, and together we begin to sing.