Chapter Twenty-Eight

She sat on the bottom stair, staring out at the idyllic scenes playing out in the garden. Linus had finally left his room to join his sisters, too intrigued by their giddy shrieks to stay upstairs, and the three of them were coming down the helter-skelter together – Tilde in front, Elise in the middle and Linus at the back, his longer legs stretching past theirs and keeping them safe as they whirled down the slide. Hanna was waiting at the bottom to catch them with outstretched arms, Max sitting at the table still and photographing them on his phone.

It was a perfect moment. They looked like the perfect family. And yet it was a mirage, no more real than Jack walking through her dreams. Upstairs was a man – a husband and father – who was preparing to take back what he had lost as he lay unconscious for all those years, and who would bet against him getting it? He was the man who had defied all odds just to be back in that room. It was the promise of reclaiming his family, and that alone, which had propelled him back to life and nothing – not Max, not her – would get in the way of that. Nothing should.

Her heart juddered at the still-hot memory of what had just passed between them and she gave another silent gasp, at what could have been, at what might have been, her shoulders hoisting up to her ears as she hid her face in her hands. Twice now, in that room, temptation had made them both buckle – but not fall. He had resisted her and now she had resisted him, though it had taken everything in her to do it.

She watched Hanna blankly through the long windows, serene in a white blouse and oatmeal linen shorts, looking for a sign that she too was about to switch worlds – these were the dying moments of her and Max’s life together – but there was nothing. Here she was the Madonna and not the whore, an adoring mother playing with her children, no hint of the unfaithful wife who had slept naked upstairs in those twisted sheets.

Bell sniffed and wiped the tears away with the back of her hands. She knew she had to go back out there; she knew what she had to do. Somewhere through this heady summer, the Mogerts’ lives had become fully hers and she had lost sight of herself. Become lost in a family that wasn’t hers, no matter how much she might wish it –

‘Don’t let him get to you. He can be a difficult bugger. Always was. That’s just about the one thing we can’t pin on the accident.’

She looked up to find Nina leaning against the newel post, her drink held languidly in the palm of one hand.

Hurriedly, Bell dried her face as best she could. ‘Oh no, I’m fine really.’

‘Ha!’ Nina barked. ‘You’re beginning to sound like him.’