Not for the first time, she questioned whether they’d made the right choices and whether Evergreen was still the right place for them. Their haven sometimes felt like it was suffocating them instead, and every so often Maria worried that they’d trapped themselves here.

By the end of the summer she would know that they’d made a mistake in coming in the first place and that, sooner or later, the truth would find them wherever they were.

PRESENT

Chapter Eight

The journalist smiles as I gape back at her. ‘You don’t recognise me but I wouldn’t expect you to. I only knew you for one summer before you all disappeared.’

I cock my head to one side. There is something vaguely familiar about her thin face with the splattering of freckles on her nose and her sleek dark hair that’s pulled back into a ponytail.

‘Freya Little,’ she says. ‘My family arrived at the start of the summer and you were gone by the end of it.’

‘I remember,’ I say. ‘You had two brothers. Didn’t all your names begin with F?’

She grins. ‘Freddie and Frankie. Ridiculous, really. Were you going in for something to eat?’

I nod, glancing at the café.

‘Let’s go for a walk first,’ she says and starts ambling in the direction I just came from.

‘I can’t believe you recognised me after so long,’ I say, walking alongside her.

‘As soon as you told me your name I could see how little you’ve changed,’ she says. ‘Your hair’s still the same.’

I reach up to touch the ends that fall just below my shoulders. ‘It’s shorter,’ I say. ‘It was always so long when I was young.’

‘Did you know how much I used to look up to you?’ Freya asks.

‘Why would you have done that?’

‘You always seemed so sure of yourself, so certain about everything on this island. Not in a horrible way, more like you knew you were meant to be here. I, on the other hand, knew we definitely weren’t.’ Freya raises her eyebrows as she cuts off the path and heads towards the coastline to the side of the jetty.

‘How do you mean?’ I ask, following her to sit on a bench that overlooks Brownsea Island.

‘Mum wasn’t happy the day she arrived here and we all suffered because of it. I know my mum can be a bit loud for most people, but they didn’t give any of us the time of day. We were ostracised. Everyone else huddled together and made a decision we weren’t wanted. They were one big clique and we weren’t going to break into it.’

I raise my eyes as I carry on looking at the water. That wasn’t particularly the way I remembered it.