‘No, that’s you and it always will be, Max.’ She took a breath. ‘But he is beginning to call him Dad.’

‘In the English?’

‘Yeah. I guess it feels . . . a step removed? It’s warmer than Father, but not you.’

His face flinched, and she reached out and touched his hand lightly. ‘He loves you, Max – you’ll always be his pappa. This is not about replacing you.’

‘Isn’t it? I replaced Emil.’ There was a brutality to his words; they almost had a self-flagellating quality to them.

She watched him. ‘How are you bearing up?’ She sensed that out of all of them caught up in this web – him, Emil, Linus, Hanna – he was the one most overlooked. He didn’t have a blood link here, nor even a legal or religious one. Emil was Hanna’s legal husband and Linus’s legal father. He had all the rights, all the sympathy, all the money, all the power . . .

‘Me? Oh, I’m just . . . waking up every morning wondering if this will be the day Hanna finally leaves me.’

Bell looked back at him in astonishment. Did he know? How could he possibly? Had he seen them out on Saturday night, or heard about it? They’d hardly been discreet.

‘What?’ he asked, reading her face. ‘You can’t be surprised, surely?’

‘M-Max, Hanna loves you,’ she said, stumbling over the words.

‘Yes. But more than him? Ever since that bastard phone call that he’d woken up, she’s been . . . different. Distant.’

‘She’s in an impossible situation.’

‘We all are, Bell. Believe me, I’ve got sympathy for the poor guy. What he’s been through . . . No one should have to endure that . . . He was my friend too. Christ, he was my friend first.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Before he met Hanna, before I did, we were childhood friends. Out here.’ He shrugged, motioning to the cabin, the island.

‘No one’s ever mentioned that before.’

He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s not important. But it’s also pretty obvious, isn’t it? His place is across the pond. His family built on that island five generations ago, and my grandparents bought this plot. We’ve both been coming to the lagoon our entire lives. I’ve never really not known him . . . Well, until recently.’

‘Were you close?’ She shifted position, hardly able to believe she hadn’t heard about this before now. Hanna hadn’t said anything, nor Emil . . .

He gave a reflective smile. ‘When we were about eight or nine, he and I used to row our boats to the middle of the lagoon and tie them together at the oar hooks and sit fishing all day.’

‘That’s so sweet.’

‘I’m not sure you’d have thought it was sweet if you saw the contraband we smuggled out.’ He chuckled. ‘Chocolates and sweets when we were younger, but then as we got older – Penthouse magazine, cigarettes, weed, booze. We would smuggle out bottles of schnapps and drink ourselves stupid. It was perfect. No one ever came out to bother us; the only rule was, we had to return home when either of our families waved a white flag.’