Wild Blue Yonder (The Ceruleans: Book 3) by Megan Tayte

us,’ she said. ‘When she’s around, I
can relax. Like when she delivered my baby. I trusted everything she said. It’s
easy being with her. A calm way to live.’
    I nodded, though Estelle’s complete surrender made me
uncomfortable.
    ‘And Adam?’ I asked. ‘He’s happy too?’
    ‘I think so. He certainly seems that way when I see him.’
    ‘But how often is that possible, with him over there and you
here?’
    She smiled. ‘He comes home to me every night, Scarlett. His
work on the mainland is his job. I am his home.’
    I looked at her, this young girl: already pregnant with her
second child, with a stack of books to read, a novel in her mind to write, and
a man she loved and who loved her back. She was happy on some level, I could
see that. And yet it was hard not to see all the darkness she projected too –
black, black, black.
    ‘What if you hadn’t loved him?’ I asked her. ‘Adam? What
would have happened then?’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It was only ever him
for me. Do you know what I mean?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’
    *
    Later, once Estelle had left with her books and a secured
promise from me to find her the next day for a cuppa, I sat on the sofa for a
long time.
    Jude knocked on the interconnecting door three times. I
ignored him.
    By the time the digital clock on the television read 00:01,
I’d made scant progress in sorting my jumbled thoughts. In fact, I’d achieved
little else than working my way through an entire box of tissues and biting my
lower lip viciously enough to make it bleed.
    I leaned my head back on the cushions and closed my eyes. A
vision of my father, Hugo, walked into my tired head. Why he was there I’d no
idea – he’d recently sent me a Dear John letter and then paid me off to leave
his life, so he was hardly welcome in my mind. I’d never really got on with
him. Stiff as he was, and distant. Oh-so posh. Obsessed with horse-racing and
cricket and the Financial Times . Oh yes, and paperwork. He was
paper-obsessed. Every minute element of his life was on paper someplace. Lists.
Word maps. Graphs. Diagrams. Once, in my early teens, I’d found a pie chart
entitled ‘Non-Work Time Allocation’. One sliver of the pie was labelled
‘Family’. It was so tiny he’d had to type the label vertically. The guy was a monumental
ass.
    Still, I thought now, perhaps he had something with the
paperwork.
    At the desk I took out some stationery. In the centre of the
paper I scrawled the words ‘BLOODY BIG MESS’. I encircled them, then I drew
more circles around the central one and filled them with names: Jude, Luke,
Sienna, Evangeline. I connected each circle to the centre, and then I took each
word in turn and broke it down, scattering further words around.
    Jude. Liar. Betrayer. Betrothed to me. Will help save
Sienna?
    Luke. Sad. Alone. Clueless. Loves me still.
    Sienna. Needs me. Captive. Where?
    Evangeline. Creepy dictator. In the know.
    The longer I stared at my messy little mind-map, the more I
saw there was no epiphany to be found here, because still, still after
all the revelations of the last two days, the picture was incomplete.
    Knowledge is power. And as far as I could tell, there was
just one person here with all the knowledge and, thus, all the power.
    For now.
    I underlined the final word on the sheet three times in
strong, black ink. Then, with dry eyes and a jaw set in determination, I went
to bed.
     

12: THE SMILING
     
    Sunrise the next morning found me in the cavernous
conservatory. To the casual onlooker, the scene was placid and dignified: me
settled in a rattan armchair, nibbling toast and sipping pomegranate tea; the
woman across from me perched demurely on the edge of her seat, legs crossed at
the ankles, elegant hands gesticulating in fluid, beautiful movements as she
spoke. And yet, beneath the surface of this apparently happy meeting of
‘Mother’ and ‘mother-to-be’, I was having quite a Hamlet moment, staggered