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He was no longer the scruffy surfer he once had been. His shoulder-length blond hair was shiny clean and caught back in a trendy ponytail, his eyes clear of drugs, his shoulders square under the sharp threads, although he still sported the deeply tanned face that was the legacy of his love of the beach, along with his trademark semishaven chin.
‘Where is he?’ were the first words out of his mouth.
Her stunned greeting died on her lips. ‘He and Zorro are taking a walk on the beach,’ she said equally curtly. ‘Karl, what are you doing here?’
‘What do you think I’m doing? You wanted to talk. Here I am,’ he answered sullenly. ‘I suppose you’ve got your memory back. When did he turn up?’
‘Some things I remember…not all. Ryan arrived a week ago. He’s been helping me—’
‘I bet he has,’ he said snidely. ‘A week? Are you sleeping with him again?’ She blushed and he punched his fist into his palm. ‘God, Nina, you were happy again—you didn’t need him any more. You were doing great by yourself. You said you’d rediscovered your artistic soul! I kept him away for you, it was all for you! And now you’re just going to let him walk back into your life like nothing happened? You’ve been apart for the nine months, but now…God—now you’re cohabiting again,’ he threw at her. ‘You know what that means? It means now you’ll have to wait another two years if you want to get a divorce—’
‘A divorce!’ It hit her like a thunderclap and she staggered, reaching blindly out for a chair into which she collapsed on unsteady legs. ‘A divorce? I thought—he said we’d been living together, but…We got married?’
Karl looked equally thunderstruck by her shock. ‘Three months after you met—’
‘Ryan and I are husband and wife?’ The wall in her mind was beginning to tilt, threatening to crash down on her, pulverise her beneath its full, crushing weight, and nightmarishly Nina found herself helpless to run.
Karl erupted in a fluent streak of curses. ‘You mean you hadn’t remembered? And he hasn’t told you? Any of it?’ Her white-faced silence said it all and he swore again, but with a strong undercurrent of bewilderment thickening his angry voice. ‘What in the hell does he think he’s playing at?’ he snarled. But before she could ask him any more questions, he had spun on his heel and flung himself back out the door.
Nina was frozen to her seat. Two years. The two years that had been blocked out of her mind for so long had been the years during which she had met, loved and married Ryan Flint. She stared down at her hands…her bare hands. Something was missing. Something she had been used to seeing. Once there had been a wedding ring on that finger. Once…
Like an old woman, she got up and moved with arthritic stiffness down to the laundry where she opened the deep, ceiling-high linen closet. After dragging over a small stepladder, she went on tiptoe to the highest shelf and reached in to pull out a dusty leather satchel. It had been stuffed into her backpack when she arrived on the island. She had never opened it. She had thrust it into the back of the closet and never looked at it from that day to this, never even thought of it, blocked it out of her mind as surely as her memories. Now she took it into her bedroom and laid it on her coverlet, reaching for the dusty brass clasp with shaking fingers.
Photographs. Wedding photographs—a shaft of heat stopping memories of a simple ceremony in a beautiful little wooden church. A set of keys. Personal papers—her passport and birth certificate and…and a notarised certificate of marriage between Ryan Liam Flint and Nina Joan Dowling. And, wrapped in a handkerchief decorated with tiny teddy bears, one wedding ring, plain gold, eighteen carat, symbol of faith between a man and a woman, symbol of love and hope and shared dreams for the future….
And, finally, there was money. Bundles and bundles of money, rubber-banded together in compact stacks of large and small denominations. Untraceable used bills. Ryan’s money, his missing cash float—although to Nina’s sick shame it looked nowhere near the amount he had mentioned.
