1LexiLexi unwound the taxi window. The warm wind was infused with pine and the arid scents of sun-baked earth. Tiers of whitewashed houses clustered close to the rising blue dome of a church.
The sky, Lexi thought.
My God, how wide and cloudless could a sky be? It felt like a magician's trick, swapping the rain-slicked pavements of London for the shimmering heat of Greece. She couldn't quite believe that she was here.
"We're on a hen weekend," Bella was telling the taxi driver, oversized sunglasses pulled down, lipstick freshly reapplied. "Lexi's the bride," she said, swiveling around in the passenger seat to point.
"Congratulations," the driver said, warm, dark eyes flicking to hers in the rearview mirror.
"Thank you." Lexi smiled.
The bride. She was the bride. She shook her head lightly, still a little stunned.
"I'm her maid of honor," Bella announced proudly. "You know: The best friend. The important one who organizes the hen weekend?"
"Self-appointed," Lexi added. "I wasn't going to have a maid of honor."
"Which I ignored since you weren't even going to have a hen weekend."
"True." Hen parties made Lexi think of twenty-something-year-olds dancing in cheap veils, shots slurped through phallic straws, blistered heels, and too-short skirts. In fact, had Lexi been twenty, she would have
loved a hen party. She would have tossed back the tequila, danced on the podium in a wisp of a dress, and when her feet blistered, she would've kicked off her stilettos and danced barefoot. But she was thirty-one now-and done with waking in the morning with that queasy sense of regret and shame that had nothing to do with a hangover. She was finally-much to everyone's surprise, including her own-getting married to a man she loved.
I love you.She'd actually said those words, aloud. Meant them. It happened over breakfast, the two of them sitting at his kitchen counter with sleep-ruffled hair, him laughing about his failed attempt at cooking lasagna the evening before. She'd begun saying the meal wasn't a total disaster-the wine was nice!-and then she'd added,
I love you. Just like that. Three brand-new words. Settling between their pot of coffee and the stack of sourdough toast.
He had looked at her. Ed Tollock. Thirty-five. Thick, dark hair threaded with early silver. A low, deep voice. What was it about him? His calm confidence? The way he'd look at her for a long, intense moment, then shake his head, grin, as if he couldn't believe his luck?
He'd moved aside their mugs, reached for her hands. His fingers were tanned, with fine golden hairs on the backs of them, and he'd said, "I love you, too. And one day, very soon, I'm going to ask you to marry me." He'd smiled at her, so easily, so openly, that Lexi didn't snatch her hands away, grab her coat, and run. She met his gaze and said, "Is that right?"
Three weeks later there was a ring box. No extravagant candlelit dinner or down-on-one-knee ceremony. Just a simple walk along the banks of the Thames, hands held as they watched the white wake from a shelduck taking flight. His question, then her answer:
Yes.
She glanced at her engagement ring now, the emerald-cut diamond glittering wildly. She was intent on keeping the wedding small: a gathering of family and friends taking over an old mill licensed for ceremonies. Simple, intimate. She didn't want the big dress, the hairstylist, the photographer. She just wanted him.
"I hear you:
low-key," Bella had said when Lexi explained her wedding plans. "But don't think for one minute that exempts you from a hen party. You are getting married once, which means we are going on a hen weekend, and that, Lexi Jane Lowe, is that."
So here they were, the tiny Greek island of Aegos. They'd left behind the tourist hustle and a strip of noisy bars as they drove west from the airport. Now the road had emptied and narrowed, carrying them over a scrub-lined hillside where the music came from the tinkling of goat bells and a donkey braying in the lengthening shade of an olive tree.
She'd told Bella that she wanted to spend the weekend lazing in the sun, reading, swimming, and eating. Bella had nodded earnestly for about two seconds, before the corners of her lips curled upward and she wiggled her eyebrows, meaning she had other plans entirely.
Bella was saying something to the driver now, gesturing expansively, while he quaked with laughter. Lexi smiled. God, she loved this woman. Bella was her yes person. The one whom you could call day or night and pitch any outlandish idea, and Bella's voice would sparkle as she'd say, Yes!
Fen-Bella's girlfriend-was the calm to Bella's storm of energy. She was gazing from the taxi window, wind fingering her razor-short, bleached hair. The small tattoo of a swallow on the back of her neck looked so crisply drawn that it, too, might take flight. Her brow was furrowed and a ball of tension worked across her jaw. It was an expression so at odds with her usual relaxed, easy smile that Lexi touched her arm, asking, "Fen? You okay?"
Fen startled. The tension slid away as she smiled. "Fine. Sorry. Miles away."
Lexi had sensed an atmosphere between Fen and Bella at the airport, something weighted in the pauses before they responded to one another. She'd ask Bella about it when they were alone.
"Thank you again for letting us stay in your aunt's villa," Lexi said.
"It's a good excuse to return to Aegos."
"Bella said your aunt designed the place."
Fen nodded. "Originally for a client. Halfway through the project his finances imploded. He couldn't fund the rest. She was so in love with the place by then that she bought the plot from him."
"Has she lived here?"
"For a couple of years, but she found the winters hard. The villa is very isolated. There are no neighbors or even passing roads. She prefers to come in summer, bring a crowd. I think the remoteness unnerved her."
Fen's gaze returned to the window as the road unwound ahead of them.
There would be six of them staying at the villa. The second taxi carrying the other hens had detoured into town to stock up on provisions. Lexi had offered to go with them, but Bella said she'd do no such thing. "It's your hen party."
Lexi had a feeling she'd be hearing those words more than once this weekend.
"Almost there," the taxi driver said, changing into a lower gear as the tarmac gave way to a stony track.
Lexi gripped the door as they bounced over rutted ground, tires kicking up clouds of dust. They swung wide around rock-strewn potholes as the track drew them closer to the edge of the island.
When they crested a hilltop, for a moment Lexi could see nothing but the glittering blue kiss of sea. Then suddenly the villa appeared, stone-white with a Greek-flag-blue roof. It stood like a crown on the clifftop, reigning over a tiny, jeweled cove below.
Lexi could only stare.
Bella clapped her hands together. "Oh! Wow!"
Dust billowed behind them as the taxi descended steeply, brakes complaining. Lexi leaned forward, peering through the windscreen as she caught the climbing tangle of bougainvillea framing the side of the villa in a riot of pink.
The taxi came to a halt, engine ticking.
In a low whisper, as if speaking to herself, Fen said, "This is it."
Lexi pulled down her sunglasses, then stepped from the taxi. Even this late in the day, the heat was something solid, weighted, pressing against her skin. She took in the whitewashed villa with its fastened blue shutters. She could smell the first notes of the sea: salted and clean.
Stones crunched beneath sandals as the three of them fetched their cases from the trunk of the taxi. Bella waved away Lexi's attempt to pay the driver, and Lexi made a mental note to slip some money into the kitty in a quiet moment.
As the taxi pulled away, Lexi, a hand on a hip, turned on the spot, breathing in their surroundings.
Cliffs; ocean; mountainside.
Not another building in sight.
She caught the plaintive cry of a mountain goat somewhere in the distance.
Lexi felt a strange flutter of apprehension in her chest. She told herself it must be the anticipation of the weekend to come, a sense of pressure knowing that her friends had come all this way for her. Yet, as her heart rate began to gather speed, it felt like more than that, as if she was unnerved by the very villa, or its remoteness, or the occasion itself.
Bella appeared at her side, hooking an arm through Lexi's. She grinned, a strangely wolfish smile. "This weekend is going to be perfect."
2RobynRobyn paused the trolley in the fridge section of the supermarket. She hooked a finger at the neckline of her T-shirt and waggled it. Cool air reached her skin. Bliss. She wanted to climb into the standing refrigerator and press herself against those large tubs of Greek yogurt.
Her eyes stung. Flights always did that to her. It must have been some combination of air-conditioning and exhaustion. Unless she was about to cry? That happened since she'd become a mother. It was like her tear ducts had been tampered with and could leak without the faintest notice: at a single thought, an advert, a warm look between a mother and son. Anything.
She waited a moment, and when no tears arrived, she decided the eye sting was exhaustion. She'd barely slept last night and couldn't even blame Jack, who'd only woken once. After she'd been through her nightly rendition of nursery rhymes and resettled his blanket twice, she'd returned to her bed, too alert for sleep. She'd begun mentally running through the checklist of instructions for her parents.
Make sure you cut Jack's grapes in half. No more than twenty minutes of television, even if he yells. He must keep his hat on if it's sunny.She'd never left Jack before. She'd tried demonstrating how long four nights was by stacking colored blocks into a tower, but he'd bashed them down with a chubby palm, chuckling delightedly at the game.
Still, she mustn't feel guilty about leaving: it was Lexi's hen party. She would've flown to the other side of the world for Lexi because she was the sort of friend who-no matter what-was there for you. Lexi's life had always been big and colorful and messy and beautiful, and Robyn felt privileged to be along for the ride.
Although she wasn't feeling quite so privileged about doing the supermarket run. Typical of Bella to task her with it. "You're always so wonderfully practical," she'd said. "I'd just come away with a trolley full of ouzo."
She slung a large block of feta and a tub of herby olives into the trolley while imagining the others already in swimsuits, cooling off in a sparkling pool.
The B-list, she was thinking. Isn't that what they were
all thinking?
She always took things too personally.
That's your problem, Bill, her ex-husband, had told her.
Funny how personal a series of affairs feels.
Anyway. She was looking forward to this weekend. She really was. She deserved it. It'd been a tough couple of years. No,
tough was wrong. That was what she'd say in front of her parents' friends. Correction; the last two years had been absolute shit-kickers. She had been six months pregnant when she'd discovered Bill had been having an affair. In fact, not one affair: many. Oh, how many there were. And she, Robyn of the Lists, of the Great Plans, had had no idea. When he finally admitted it, red-faced and indignant, she'd looked down at the huge swelling where her waist used to be and thought:
How am I going to do this on my own?Bill stayed until Jack was born, but after three months, the sleepless nights and cold stares were too much for either of them. She and Jack had moved in with her parents-and they'd been there ever since.
Bill visited Jack every Saturday afternoon, bringing plush cuddly toys, and then returned home to his new girlfriend, who still had full breasts and a stomach that didn't showcase silvery rivers that ran to the source of a C-section scar. Robyn knew she was meant to embrace these bodily changes-
the map of her life-but honestly, she preferred her old body, the tight one that could propel her up mountains, that didn't constantly give her a backache, that came with a sharp mind unfogged by exhaustion.
She rolled the trolley forward, catching up with Eleanor in the confectionery aisle. Her pale forehead shone with sweat, and she looked uncomfortably hot in a blouse and pressed shorts. Eleanor was Ed's sister. She hadn't been at the engagement drinks, Lexi explaining that she'd recently lost her fiancé, so a gathering to celebrate someone else's wedding was probably the last thing she needed. In truth, with Robyn's divorce imminent, it hadn't been that high up her list of fun ways to spend an evening. Still. It was Lexi. She would always show up for Lexi.
"Even when it says Cadbury," Eleanor said, brow wrinkled, "you can't trust it, can you? Cadbury abroad doesn't taste like Cadbury at home. Have you noticed? I think it must be the milk."
"Let's spread the risk and get a stash."
"Excellent," Eleanor said as she turned to reveal the basket slung over her arm, already stocked with a variety of chocolate bars and honeyed nuts.
They continued around the supermarket together, Eleanor gathering generous supplies of fruit, vegetables, herbs, and fresh bread. Once they'd finished and paid, Robyn wheeled the trolley into the sweltering heat of the afternoon.
Ana was standing beneath the shade of the supermarket canopy, a flame-orange head scarf knotted over her thick braided hair, a mobile pressed to her ear. Now, here was a woman who didn't have problems with leaky tear ducts, Robyn decided. They'd met for the first time on the flight, Robyn learning that she was a single mother to a fifteen-year-old and had put herself through night school to finish her degree. Now she worked as a freelance sign-language interpreter-inspired by her sister's deafness-juggling a busy work schedule to make herself available outside of school hours for her son.
When Robyn had found herself apologizing for currently living with her parents, Ana had fixed her with a firm, level stare: "Don't you dare apologize. We do what we do to get by. The bravest thing any of us can do is ask for help."
Having not noticed them approach, Ana was speaking in a low voice into her phone. "It was a mistake to come here," she said, eyes down, brow creased.
Robyn slowed her pace and, at her shoulder, Eleanor did the same.
A mistake? Why?
Ana looked up. Seeing them both, her eyes widened fractionally. "Talk later," she said hurriedly into the phone.
"Everything all right?" Robyn asked, then wondered if it would’ve been better to pretend she hadn’t overheard.
"Fine." Ana slipped her phone away, smoothed down her dress, then came to the side of the trolley. Her expression lightened as she eyed the bottles of Ouzo, gin, Metaxa, Prosecco and beer. ‘The alcohol to food ratio is excellent.’
Eleanor smiled and, after a moment, Robyn did, too.
As they unloaded the goods into the taxi, Robyn couldn’t quite believe that this was the start of Lexi’s hen party. The news still felt so fresh, so surprising. Lexi had always claimed she’d never marry – and they’d believed her. She’d spent most of her twenties as a backing dancer for a host of pop stars. She’d partied on tour buses, in penthouse suites, and tripped through Soho knowing every club owner’s name. And then, two years ago, she’d fractured her tibia and, just like that, the dancing, the partying, the lifestyle, was over. But life had a habit of slamming one door, only to open another. Well, it did where Lexi was concerned. Lexi retrained as a yoga teacher, met Ed, fell in love, and agreed to get married. Now here they were, in Greece, ready to celebrate. How was that for an about-turn?
Maybe that was the problem with Robyn’s life. She’d never lived it hard enough. Never gone for broke. She’d always followed the straight path: law degree, home-owner, career, marriage, baby. Tick, tick, bloody tick.
Where had it left her? Thirty years old, living with her parents and an eighteen-month-old baby, with a career she’d been sidelined from, and an ex-husband under her belt.
The B-list,
she thought.
Always the bloody B-list.
Copyright © 2022 by Lucy Clarke. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
