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PROLOGUE
Eighteen months previously, Zurich
MAYAANDBEATRICEhad set out early, not alone, as the minibus ferrying tourists from the small ski resort to the airport in Zurich had been full of fellow travellers. They had all been stranded by the severe storm front that had resulted in the ski slopes being closed for the previous four days.
The storm was over now butearlyas a strategy had not worked—the minibus had been diverted before they’d even reached the terminal. The update texts the sisters had received so far from the airline had not been particularly encouraging or helpful and the details of theairportsecurity issuementioned in news reports remained worryingly vague.
There were rumours floating around on the Internet and also in the hotel bar situated within a short taxi drive of the airport where Maya and Beatrice had decided to wait out the delay.
They were not the only stranded travellers to take this option; the place was full of easy-to-spot tense, grumpy and frustrated airline passengers, who were waiting to be given news.
‘A response some time this side of Christmas would be good.’ Beatrice’s remark was not leavened with any of her normal humour. Her smooth brow was creased in a frown as she acquired a spare bar stool and sat down, arranging her long legs with casual elegance before turning her gaze back to the screen of her phone, as if willing their airline’s promised update to appear.
‘I might just go and check—’
‘Fine,’ Bea snapped, tight-lipped, without looking up.
Maya sighed. No sign of a full thaw just yet. They’d had the biggest row ever back at the ski resort, and, although they’d made up, the atmosphere was all a bit frigid. Some of the things her sister had said to her... Maya just couldn’t get them out of her head; they kept playing on a loop.
‘Really, Maya, relationship advice fromyou—what a joke! You’ve never evenhada relationship. As soon as any half-decent guy gets within ten feet of you, you push him away,’ Beatrice had said accusingly.
Maya had been stung. ‘I dated Rob for months!’
‘And you sabotaged that one just like all the others—and there have hardly been any others, have there? Soyou’venever had your heart broken, for the simple fact that you won’t take a risk—’
‘Youtook a risk and look where it left you!’ Maya had regretted the hasty words the moment they’d left her lips, and her swift efforts to de-escalate the situation had not exactly been a success. ‘Sorry, Bea, but I hate to see you so unhappy. I know you chose to leave Dante, but he is clearly still messing with your—’
‘Do not badmouth Dante to me...’ her sister, who had spent the last few days doing just that herself, had growled back. ‘Yes, I left him, Maya, but people do sometimes leave! And people die, we both know that too. It’s called real life—and at least I have one.’ Tears suddenly filled Beatrice’s blue eyes. ‘Sorry...I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.’
After that final riposte, they had hugged and made up but Maya knew her sister had meant everything she’d said, and it was probably all true.
She considered saying something bright and cheery to lift the mood but decided that optimism would go down like a lead balloon. There was nothing she could say to make Beatrice feel any better, so it was probably better not to say anything at all.
She hitched in a little sigh and wished she’d remembered that saying nothing was an option last night. As she drifted away to stretch her legs, she threw the occasional glance over her shoulder at her sister, feeling the heavy weight of her total helplessness on her slender shoulders in the face of Beatrice’s overwhelming unhappiness.
It was hard to watch someone you loved hurting.
She loved Beatrice, and no matter how often they squabbled or disagreed she knew that they had an unbreakable bond and that Beatrice would always be there for her.
The connection could not have been stronger if they had been biological sisters instead of Maya having been adopted by Beatrice’s parents. Actually, Maya believed that it was stronger because she had arealsister out there and she had no connection with her. Her sister—actually, half-sister to be accurate—remained only a name and a face in a photo...Violetta. Her half-sister was clearly someone who, like their shared birth mother, apparently did not want to know Maya, did not want to beembarrassedby Maya’s existence.
Searching out her birth mother was one of the few things she’d done that Maya had never shared with Beatrice or her adoptive mother, herrealmother. When she had reached out to Olivia Ramsey, she had not been sure what to expect. And when the response had been an invitation to meet up for lunch, Maya had almost confided her very mixed feelings about the prospect of finally putting a face to the name of the stranger who had given her life and then immediately given her away. But she hadn’t told Beatrice or their mother, and now eighteen months had passed, and so, she told herself, had the moment for sharing the secret.
Maya eased the vague sense of guilt she still felt for keeping that particular secret by convincing herself that this way there was no risk of Mum or Beatrice thinking that they were not enough of a family for her. Because they were her everything.
If she was being totally honest with herself, her reluctance to confide in them ran side by side with her reluctance to relive in the telling Olivia Ramsey’s rejection all over again. Once had been more than enough to have it spelt out that the well-dressed, clearly well-off woman who had given birth to you only wanted to meet up with you years later to tell you, categorically, that there was no place in her life for the daughter she had given away. Showing Maya a photo of the daughter shehadchosen to keep—Violetta—had been the last nail in the coffin of Maya’s hopes of building any kind of relationship with her.
Maya couldn’t remember exactly how she’d responded to Olivia’s deliberately calm statements of fact...something along the lines of,No problem, but I’d be grateful for any family medical history that might be relevant to me, which her birth mother, who had not seemed overburdened with empathy, had accepted at face value.
So she hadn’t inherited her own empathy from her biological mother—but what about her father? Well, when she had finally worked herself up to asking the question of his identity the answer hadn’t left her any the wiser. Apparently her mother hadn’t known his name—but he’d been good-looking,verygood-looking. Normally, Olivia had drawled, she didn’t date men under six feet.
The other woman had volunteered her reason for giving Maya up without any prompting in the same emotionally tone-deaf style: she’d admitted she would almostdefinitelyhave kept Maya if her married wealthy lover at the time had accepted her story that the baby was his. Only how was she to know he’d had a vasectomy? And surely Mayahadto agree that saying you are single mother is a total turn-off for a real man?
‘Ouch.’
The person wielding the trolley bag like a lethal weapon didn’t even acknowledge the collision—of course they didn’t, she thought darkly as she took refuge behind a potted palm. It turned out to be a perfect vantage point to watch the progress of an enterprising young artist who was based in the hotel foyer banging out a production line of cartoon portraits of new arrivals.
She rubbed her bruised shin and sighed. This last-minute skiing break had been doomed pretty much from the get-go; it had started badly and gone steadily downhill from there.
