Kit would have loved it. But he couldn’t. Because he had died in a freak accident nobody could have predicted or prevented. And Ethan had survived. The burden of that guilt still lay heavy on his shoulders. Especially in this town where Kit had grown up. So far he had managed to keep a low profile and focus on the work at hand.
Ethan shrugged the tension away from his shoulders.
He had seven days to finish the house before his parents flew into London, then he would get back to honouring Kit in the only way he knew how. By sailing to the max and teaching young people how to live their lives to the full, just as Kit had done.
With a bit of luck his parents might actually like what he had done. Especially when they found out that he had made a couple of alterations to the original plans. Instead of an extended parking area, Ethan had built a solid garage, workshop, boathouse and jetty. These were his personal gifts to his parents. And particularly his father.
Maybe, just maybe, they could find the time to sail out on their own boat together from their private jetty, like they used to, when he came back in July to make good his promise to open the Swanhaven regatta.
Now that was something worth looking forward to.
A squall of icy sleet hit Ethan straight in the face and he roared with laughter and dropped his head back in joy. That was more like it. Bring it on. Bring. It. On.
Marigold Chance thrust her hands deep inside the pockets of her thick padded down coat and braced herself against the freezing wind, which was whipping up the sand onto the path that led away from Swanhaven and out past the marina and jetty to the wild part of the Dorset shoreline.
Leaving the village behind, she walked as fast as she could to get warm, her target already in sight. A slow winding path started on the shore then rose slowly up and onto the grassy banks onto the low chalk hills which became cliffs at the other end of the bay.
Steps had been cut into the cliff face from the beach, but Mari paused and closed her eyes for a moment before she stepped forward, desperate to clear her head and try to relieve the throbbing headache which had been nagging at the back of her neck for the past twenty-four hours.
This part of the beach was made up of pebbles which had been smoothed by the relentless action of the waves back and forth to form fine powder sand in places and large cobblestones in others. It had been snowing when she arrived in Swanhaven and the air was still cold enough to keep the snow in white clumps on top of the frozen ice trapped between the stones at the top end of the beach where she was walking. The heavy winter seas carried with them pieces of driftwood and seaweed that floated in the cold waters of a shipping lane like the English Channel.
For once Mari was glad to feel the cold fresh wind buffeting her cheeks as she snuggled low inside the warm coat, a windproof hat pulled well down over her ears.
The relentless pressure of her job as a computer systems trouble-shooter was starting to get to her, but exhaustion came with the job and it was all worth it. In a few years she would be able to start her own business and work from home as an internet consultant. With modern technology, she could work from home and run an online internet advisory business from anywhere in the world, and that included Swanhaven. This small coastal town where she had spent the first eighteen years of her life was where she wanted to make a life and create a stable, long-standing home, safe and warm, for herself and Rosa. A home nobody could take away from her. From either of them.
Mari inhaled slowly to calm her breathing and focused on the sound of the seagulls calling above her head, dogs barking on the shore and the relentless beat of the waves.
She could still hear the flap of the pennants on the boats in the marina and the musical sound of the wind in the rigging of the sailing boats.
This was the soundtrack of her early life, which had stayed with her no matter where she might be living and working. Here she could escape the relentless cacophony of cars, aircraft engines, noisy air conditioning and frantic telephone calls in the middle of the night from IT departments whose servers had crashed. In her shoulder bag there were three smartphones and two mobile phones. But right now, for one whole precious hour, she had turned everything off.
And it was bliss. Her breathing tuned into the rhythm of the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore and for a fraction of a second she felt as though she was a girl again and she had never left Swanhaven.
Sailing and the sea had formed a fundamental part of her childhood. She loved the sea with a passion. She knew how cruel it could be, but there was no finer place in the world. And Kit would understand that.
Turning her back to the wind, Mari slipped the glove from her left hand and reached into the laptop bag she carried everywhere. Her fingers touched a precious photograph and she carefully drew it out of the bag, holding tightly so that it would not be snatched away in the gusty wind. It was only right that she should look at this photograph here of all places, even though it had been around the world with her more than once. Not like Kit’s best friend Ethan Chandler, on the deck of some horrendously expensive racing yacht, battling the ocean for his very life, but inside a bag which went into the cabins of aircraft and hotel rooms and even restaurants and offices and computer server rooms.
The smiling face of her mother looked back at her from the photograph. She was a tall, slim, pretty woman with freckled skin illuminated by the sunlight reflected back from the water in the sunny harbour of Swanhaven. One of her arms was draped around Rosa’s shoulders. Rosa must have been about fourteen then and so full of life and fun and energy. Her baby sister was always ready to smile into the camera without a hint of embarrassment or hesitation. But this time Rosa and her mother had something to laugh about—because they were watching Kit playing the fool. As always. Seventeen years old and full of mischief, Kit was their hero, full of life and energy and funny, handsome and charming—everyone loved him, and he was indulged and spoiled. Kit would not sit still for a moment, always jumping about, always wanting to be in the action, especially when it came to the water and sailing.
Mari remembered the day she’d taken the photograph so well. It was the Easter holiday and the sailing club had been open for a training day. Of course Kit was the instructor, yet again, but he was not content to simply smile for his younger sister, but had to leap forward onto one knee and wave jazz hands at her, which, of course, made Rosa and her mother laugh even louder. This was her happy family she loved, so natural and so unrehearsed. Just a typical shot of a mum having fun with her three kids on a trip to the marina.
Looking at the image now, she could almost feel the sun on her face and the wind in her hair on that April morning when she’d captured the precious moment in time when they’d all been so happy together. It was hard to believe that she had taken the photograph only a few months before the yacht race in the annual Swanhaven Sailing Regatta when they lost Kit in a freak accident and the thin fabric of safe, loving little family was ripped apart.
He had been the golden boy. The much-loved only son.
Oh, Kit. She missed him so much, like a physical ache that never truly went away, but somehow over the years she had learned to push it to the back of her mind so that she could survive every day, though the pain of the loss was still there. Coming back to Swanhaven, and seeing the boats in the marina and young people finding such joy in the water, brought back all of those happy memories so vividly.
They had been such good times with her family all around her.
Mari ran her fingertip down her mother’s face on the photograph, just as the wind picked up and almost whipped it away, and she popped it back into her bag, made sure that it was safe and pulled on her gloves as quickly as she could.
Perhaps she was not as ready to see her old home as she thought she was? It had been her mother’s dream that one day she should be able to buy back the home she had loved so very much, but she’d died before Mari could help to make that dream come true. And it broke Mari’s heart