‘She was lying,’ Bonnie sighs. Her hands have stopped tapping but I still see them shaking as she grasps them tightly in her lap. ‘That’s why we fell out.’

‘She can’t have been. Not when her mum told me there was a sister.’

‘She was lying, because she said it was me.’

If it’s possible for my heart to temporarily stop beating, it has done so. The air around me stills, catching our breaths, and even then I know it’s a fraction of time I will never get out of my head.

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘Iona told me I was her sister and that I’d been taken when I was a baby,’ Bonnie tells me.

‘What the hell does she mean by that? That Mum and Dad kidnapped you?’ My heart has raced back to life again and now it beats furiously as I push away from the bed, pacing the short space between it and the wall.

‘She said the reason I was taken …’ Bonnie swallows, and I can hear her words catching ‘… was so they could give me a better life. Only they left her behind.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ I shake my head. ‘Bon, you must know it is, it sounds like a fairy tale.’ I crouch in front of her, reaching for her hands, prising them apart. They feel so cold against mine. ‘You don’t believe any of this, do you?’

‘I was never even going to ask Mum, but I couldn’t help myself. I broke one day. She told me it wasn’t true.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘She’s hardly going to say, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what happened,” is she?’ Her eyes flare defiantly but her body has slumped.

I shake my head. ‘But you know it doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Mum made me think Iona was jealous and made it all up. I was beginning to think she might have, you know, the way she was always cooing over the house and that damned island as if we lived in a palace.’

I realise I am frowning at Bonnie as she speaks, looking like I don’t agree, for she snaps, ‘She was. You just didn’t see it.’

‘I’m not saying she wasn’t,’ I reply, though if anything it always appeared the other way round. ‘What about Dad?’ I ask.

‘He was …’ Bonnie gazes past me, thinking back. ‘Dad was distant. He didn’t really talk about it. While Mum was going crazy that Iona had even said such a thing, he seemed more concerned about Iona.’

I push myself up angrily and pace towards the wall again.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she snaps. ‘Will you stop doing that?’

‘Bon, I think Dad might have been having an affair with her.’

‘What?’ she laughs. ‘That has to be the most absurd thing I’ve heard.’