The Girl Below(95)

Until that moment, I did not know what sprinting was—how fast it was possible for my legs to run. I moved like a tornado, but very nearly not fast enough. When I reached the service door, it was already going a little out of focus, and I stepped through it and turned around to see that the garden had blurred beyond recognition. It remained so for another moment before clarity slowly returned, and with it the view of the courtyard.

Shaking with nerves, I walked over to sit on the low white wall, where the view of the ocean began to calm me. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting there when I heard footsteps behind me and looked up to see Pippa walking out of Peggy’s room. She tiptoed toward me, and the first thing I noticed was how drawn her face looked.

“Is Peggy okay?” I said.

“She’s the same,” said Pippa. “I’ve been in with her all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

“I can’t sleep either. Too hot.”

She frowned. “Did you go for a swim?”

“Actually, I was about to,” I said, before glancing down at my T-shirt and shorts, and seeing they were wet through. “I mean, yes. Yes, I went for a swim. What I meant was that I was just about to take a shower.”

I could see that I had confused her, but she just yawned and said, “Good idea to have one now, before the morning rush.”

In the tiny bathroom, I peeled off my wet shorts and T-shirt and wondered if perhaps I had gone for a swim and imagined the rest. But when I held my clothes up to my nose, they gave off the fresh scent of rain, not the sharp tang of salt.

It occurred to me that I ought to find out what the time was—something I hadn’t bothered with for weeks. I wasn’t sure at what exact point I’d stopped paying attention to alarm clocks and watches, but I hadn’t even switched on my cell phone since arriving in Greece. I found my phone in the bottom of my backpack, and it had enough charge left to switch on and display London time. From memory, Greece was two hours behind GMT, so I calculated it was about half past three in the morning. Working backward, I figured out I must have woken at around three fifteen that night, and gone out into the garden a few minutes after the hatch had been closed. Which meant that the night before . . .

I caught what I’d been trying to do—calculate the time I’d need to wake up to be in the garden before the hatch closed—then realized how bonkers it was to assume that the time twenty years ago would be concurrent with now. I could no more predict when and where the garden would appear than I could control what Caleb would do next.

Then, exactly as I had the night before, I felt wiped out, my brain aching from the effort of trying to understand something wholly irrational. I was already in bed, had climbed up the ladder to find my phone, and minutes later passed out cold.

The sleep was a short one, and I managed to get up and dress and make it to the kitchen for breakfast before the men took off for the day. Elena was the only one absent, and while the rest of us tried to drink coffee and eat toast in a civilized manner, Caleb horsed around in the kitchen and wasn’t satisfied until he had knocked a basket of onions off the bench. I was trying to avoid eye contact with him, but had been aware of his every move, and laughed involuntarily when the onions spilled.

“That’s it,” shrieked Pippa, reaching her wit’s end at the early hour of eight in the morning. “After you’ve picked up the onions, you can bugger off to the beach—anywhere except hanging around here being a bloody great pain in the neck.”

“You should come with me, Suki,” said Caleb, juggling the onions instead of picking them up like he’d been told. “The beach is terrific, really top notch.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I promised to stay here and help with Peggy.”

“Oh no you don’t,” said Pippa. “You’ve been here two days and haven’t left the villa yet. We can’t send you back without a tan.”

“You need my help, and I really don’t mind,” I said, trying to be emphatic.

Pippa cleared away my plate from in front of me. “We’ll manage fine without you, and on top of that, I absolutely insist.”

I caught Harold’s eye, and it was as though he had seen the treachery in my thoughts; why I was trying so hard to avoid being alone with Caleb. To provoke him, I said, “Why don’t you come with us?” even though I suspected he was the kind of bookish person who hated beaches, swimming, sunshine, and the outdoors.

“No thanks,” he said. “You’ll have more fun without me.”

“Oh,” said Caleb, smiling. “Do you think so?”