Sean took the teenager’s other arm and hoisted him to his feet.

‘You too, Ethan,’ Jennifer said. ‘Can you walk?’

‘I’m fine,’ Ethan said, getting to his feet.

I held out my hand to Lucy. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s all go inside.’

She stood up slowly, took my hand, and we followed the others back into the villa.

Nine months earlier

Nine months earlier

She still remembers the first time she saw him.

She remembers it like it was captured on her Instagram feed, like she could go back there and see it any time she wanted to. She just has to close her eyes and think of him and that image pops into her head, fresh and clear and pin-sharp like it’s in HD.

They’re at school, in the dining hall queue. And there he is.

He’s tall – at least six feet – that’s the first thing she notices. Wide shoulders and a square jaw, proper stubble, not just silly bumfluff like some of the other boys in her year. His sleeves are rolled up, forearms broad with muscle. And he has this way of standing, of looking around, as if he knows everyone is looking at him and he’s perfectly OK with that, he’s used to it. Chestnut-brown hair in this gorgeous fade cut, long at the front, and he brushes it away from his eyes.

His eyes. A bright, shining blue, serious and funny and dangerous and deep.

They draw you in.

He’s like an amazing blend of Shawn Mendes and Chris Hemsworth, but he makes both of them look a bit crap, in her humble opinion. He’s ridiculously hot. He’s so hot it’s kind of unfair on all the other boys in the year, who look like little kids standing next to him.

She wonders if he thinks the same way about her.

Monday

MONDAY

Chapter 25

25

The water was icy, a brutal, paralysing cold that felt like frozen fire, a million tiny needles piercing my skin at once. Rushing down from the mountains, it was pure and beautifully clear but I couldn’t imagine paddling in it, let alone getting my shoulders under. I lifted my feet out of the stream and sat back on the rock, full of delicious relief as the July sun warmed my feet back into life.

I felt like the captain of a sinking ship, standing on the deck, waiting for the water to take me.

We had driven north into the hills to the Gorges D’Héric, a deep gully of sparkling red granite. Hiking a mile up the path, we found ourselves the perfect sunny spot – a steep-sided valley carpeted with oak trees, jagged peaks of rock above us on both sides jutting against the blue sky. Just upstream, a mini-waterfall emptied into a deep pool of clear mountain water, rocks rising vertically above it on both sides.