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‘I just find it strange that, just a couple of days after we kiss, you decide that you’re not granting the permits after all,’ Guy said.
Well, she wasn’t rising to the bait. She had made that decision based on evidence. He was the one bringing their relationship into this, when there was really no need. ‘You should never have assumed that they would be approved. That was your mistake, not mine.’
‘You gave me every indication—’
‘I did nothing of the sort,’ Meena retorted, sand slipping through her fingers as she searched for any evidence of egg shell. When she had come out here in her boat this morning, she’d had visions of finding hatchlings still in the nest, perhaps unable to find their way out through compacted sand. Now a hollow feeling was growing inside her at the thought that she might have made a mistake. Even a nest full of unhatched eggs would be something. Something that she could use to prevent the development. But if her fears were correct, and the nest was empty, she would be left with nothing.
‘I have maintained throughout this process that the permits would only be granted if you were able to show that the environment around Le Bijou would not be significantly harmed. You failed to do so. This was the only possible conclusion.’ She tried to hide her fears from Guy, tried to hide the worst-case scenario that was playing out under the sand. Until Guy caught her expression.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. And then, ‘Shouldn’t we have found something by now?’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly, not offering more than that monosyllable as she kept on digging,
But when she finally looked up he fixed her with a stare and she couldn’t look away. Because as much as she might be a professional, they both knew that there was more to their relationship than that. She was managing to keep that under control, for now. But the longer that she was forced to look at his face, the harder it was to keep memories from her mind. Those early, hazy memories in the private clinic, as a kind nurse had taken her hand and explained about the baby that had slipped away while she had been sleeping.
‘What’s wrong?’ Guy asked, and she knew from the tenor of the voice that her despair was showing on her face.
She fought to keep the words from her lips, but it was going to be impossible to conceal for ever. The best she could do was get it over and done with. ‘There’s...there’s nothing here. Nothing at all.’
An emptiness opened up inside her as she spoke the words, as she started to accept them.
‘What? What does that mean?’ Guy asked.
‘It must have been a false crawl,’ Meena said, finally sitting back on her heels and rubbing the aching muscles in her arm. She stripped off her blue latex gloves and threw them on the sand. ‘Sometimes, turtles will crawl up the beach, dig a nest but not lay any eggs. That’s what must have happened here.’
‘And that means no baby turtles.’
‘No hatchlings,’ she confirmed. And no hope for a reprieve for Le Bijou. Guy would get her report overturned with her superiors; she knew it. There just wasn’t enough to stop the development. Not without the hatchlings.
She nodded, then moved to the blanket that she’d spread out under the shade of a coconut tree, picking up her water bottle and her clipboard. The longer that she stared into that empty nest, the larger the empty feeling inside her grew. She had to get away from it.
Guy came to sit beside her.
‘Meena,’ he said, the ice melting from his voice. ‘Are you okay? We never talked about what happened the last time we were here. I’m sorry that I accused you of letting that interfere with our work. But...’
She couldn’t do this now. Couldn’t have this conversation. Not with the emotions that seeing that empty nest had brought rushing to the surface. It was more than the loss of the hatchlings she was feeling. It was another loss, another time, when she had felt all the potential of a life to be lived snatched away before it had started. And she couldn’t let Guy see those feelings, because it would mean telling him about the miscarriage, and she had already decided that she couldn’t do that to him.
‘I should have called you,’ Guy said. ‘To talk about what happened. We shouldn’t have left it like that.’
‘Or I should have called,’ Meena conceded. ‘I should have dealt with our personal relationship before I sent you my decision about the permits.’
‘Dealt with it?’
She shrugged, choosing her words carefully, not sure in what direction she wanted this conversation to go. ‘I should have spoken to you about what happened between us.’
She had barely even let herself think about what she felt about that kiss. The kiss itself she hadn’t been able to hide from. It had played in her mind, over and over, since the minute that it had happened. But as for where that left her and Guy? It was safer not to think about it. Not to wonder whether he was thinking of her at all. Whether he was replaying that kiss in agonisingly intense detail, as she had been.
‘And what would you have said?’ Guy asked, his voice dropping.
Meena held her breath. She didn’t know what she would have said. She still didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wanted to say that the kiss had shaken her and grounded her at the same time. That she was terrified and also desperate to do it again. She wanted to ask if that was how it had been before. If there was something between them that had survived her accident—a part of who she had been that summer who was still living in her skin.
But she couldn’t
say any of that. Because the hard, cold look on his face told her he didn’t want to hear a word of it. ‘I would have said, I hope we can be adult enough to keep what happened separate from our professional life, and that my decision had nothing to do with what happened that night.’
For the first time since he had walked onto the beach, she saw a crack of warmth in his expression, and she breathed a sigh of relief. ‘How am I doing with adulting so far?’ he asked with a wry smile.
She grinned in return. ‘Not great. Me?’
