Scott felt his body go limp as though suspended in water.

And then, he drew back his arm and hurled his glass at the wall so hard that it shattered into a thousand glittering pieces.

CHAPTER FORTY

EMILY

LUNCH WAS a steaming, glistening Brazilian seafood stew.

Down by the pool, Nina bustled about fetching bowls and cutlery from the kitchen, arranging flowers in a vase, and pouring homemade lemonade into a jug. She positioned it all carefully on the table and stepped back to admire the effect. Her face was fixed in a Barbie-doll smile.

“Aurelia squeezed all the lemons herself, didn’t you, Strawberry?” Nina said, indicating the lemonade. She poured a glass and held it out to Emily with a trembling hand. The liquid inside slopped gently up the sides.

Oblivious to the tension, Aurelia sat at the table, carefully arranging a selection of figurines around her plate: horses, fairies, witches, and dragons. There were circles under her eyes, but otherwise there was no sign of the previous day’s drama; the wound was hidden under her usual floppy straw hat. Emily hoped it had been dressed properly.

“She’s not feeling too crash-hot today,” Nina said, following Emily’s gaze. “Bad night, poor thing.” Nina picked up a knife and began to slice a baguette into small rounds. Aurelia looked up as if to say, Who, me?

Emily placed her lemonade on the table without taking a sip. Everything’s fine, she told herself. I was wrong. I made a mistake. She tried to smile but her mouth kept twisting downward.

“Come on, my darling.” Nina stood behind Aurelia, gently nudging her until she was sitting properly at the table. “You need to eat.”

Emily sat down opposite. Directly above, the sun beat down on their backs, warming the silverware until it was almost too hot to touch.

I was wrong. Everything is fine.

She stared into her bowl. Prawns poked through the surface of the stew like crooked fingers.

Nina tore a piece of bread into small pieces and placed it at Aurelia’s lips. Absorbed in her game, Aurelia opened her mouth and chewed solemnly, tapping Nina on the arm to remind her she needed to feed the toys, too. Nina obliged, passing the bread from fairy to horse to witch.

Emily fixated on Aurelia’s hands, each fingernail a tiny pink rose petal. The index finger held a smudge of purple ink, and her left wrist was decorated with several cheerful red stamps that said, GREAT WORK! On her forearms, just visible under the thick smear of sunscreen, were the telltale freckles. And once she started looking she couldn’t stop. The roots of Aurelia’s hair were covered by the hat, but Emily thought she could detect a slightly unnatural sheen to the ends, a subtle red-purple tinge. She took her memory of the Google image and laid it over Aurelia’s solemn little face. It fit perfectly.

No. I’m wrong. I have to be wrong.

But suddenly everything was falling into place so fast that she had to grip the edge of the table to stay upright. Aurelia was not Aurelia. She was Amandine Tessier, a little French girl who had been snatched from the streets of Nice at almost three years old. She had been kept hidden at Querencia for a further three years, spoiled and babied and fiercely loved by a woman who was not her mother. She’d been disguised beyond all recognition, the “medical condition” providing a multitude of excuses to keep her out of sight, out of school, and covered up from head to toe. Both her heart and her mother tongue had been cruelly ripped out and replaced by something unspeakably foreign. The trauma had rendered her mute; she’d been literally scared speechless.

And Nina … ironically, Nina was terrified of losing the person she loved the most, tormented daily by the thought that someone might come and take her away.

Emily was suddenly struck by a feeling of displacement so strong that she nearly broke down. She didn’t belong here in this place, with these people. She wanted to run home, but she realized she didn’t know where that was. For the first time in her life, she desperately wanted her real mother. She wanted the body that had birthed her, her own flesh and blood. Without her, Emily felt small and alone in the world, an astronaut untethered from a spacecraft.

Please make this stop. Please make me forget. Please let’s just go back to the way things were.

Under the table, something kicked her foot. She looked up to see Aurelia watching her with wide eyes, holding a horse in her outstretched hand. Play with me. Returning Aurelia’s gaze, Emily found that she could see the lens now, a very faint circle right at the edge of the right iris, imperceptible unless you were looking for it. And Aurelia’s features … Emily understood that she’d been completely fooled. There was no resemblance whatsoever to either Nina or Scott. Her nose was too big, her eyes too round.

A deep sense of betrayal sliced through her, sharp and bitter. They never trusted me, she thought. They never once dropped the pretense.

“Are you okay, Em?” One look at Nina’s beautiful face, so full of love and concern, and Emily almost crumbled. “You don’t look well.”

“Yes, I—I might go and lie down.”

“You do that.” Nina fixed her with a level stare. “I hope it’s not something you ate.”

Something tightened in Emily’s chest. She looked at Nina. Then she looked down at the stew.

“Can I get you anything?” Nina said, her stare unblinking.

“No, I don’t think so.” Emily pushed away her untouched bowl and stood up, her chair scraping noisily on the tiles. “I’ll just go get some rest.”

As she turned to go, she looked up and her eyes met Nina’s. They, too, were wet and anguished, full of pain and sadness … and something else.

Resolve.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

SCOTT

RYANAIR OUGHT to be sued for cruelty to humans, Scott thought, writhing and fidgeting in his airline seat. Maybe he would sue them.

He gripped his phone, repeatedly tapping the call button, pressing it against his ear again and again, but there was no answer. Goddammit, Yves, where are you?

He felt like a battery chicken squeezed into a steel cage with hundreds of stinking, grimy creatures. The seat itself was unbearably narrow and the armrests so thin it was like trying to lay your elbows on scissor blades. The toilets looked to be the same size as the luggage compartments, and there was a smell, too—Scott sniffed the air and made a face—of feet, and microwaved pies. He glanced around at his fellow passengers, at the bickering families and the couples contentedly flipping through the duty-free magazine. None of them seemed to be even half as appalled as he was. In fact, some people actually seemed to be more interested in him than in the brutal conditions in which they all found themselves.

Admittedly, he did look a little out of place in his Tom Ford suit, gleaming Rolex, and Ray-Bans, but there hadn’t been any time to change. He’d told Verity it was an emergency, but apparently the jet was in the hangar undergoing scheduled maintenance and there were no charters available at such short notice. Worse, there were no full-service flights until the morning, which meant the only way he was going to get to France immediately was via budget airline.

Thankfully, Verity had found him a last-minute ticket. He’d arrived at the check-in desk sweaty, bewildered, and lost without the usual VIP assistance. He’d stood in line at the gate for hours with countless people all carrying plastic bags and those pathetic travel pillows, his body temperature rising with every passing second, and he still hadn’t managed to cool down. He thought about taking his jacket off, but it felt like protection somehow, like armor. The sunglasses, too, felt prophylactic: a deterrent to anyone who might feel the need to make small talk.

Come on, come on, come on, come on. What was the hold up? They’d been sitting on the tarmac for an eternity.

At last, the plane crept backward out of the terminal, and a few people let out half-hearted cheers. Scott mentally calculated his arrival time at Querencia. They’d be in the air for one hour and thirty-five minutes. Another fifteen minutes for disembarkation and passport control at the other end. He had no bags, so there’d be no need to hang around at the carousel, but it was looking increasingly likely that he’d have to make his own way from the airport.