The Last Resort by Heidi Perks

Author:Heidi Perks [Perks, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529159561
Publisher: Cornerstone
Published: 2023-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Three months earlier

MAGGIE

There are shards all over the carpet from where Will dropped a glass and it shattered on the coffee table moments before they left. I should be hoovering it up, I have another couple arriving in half an hour, but I don’t do any of it. Instead I watch the Hardings’ Audi roll out of the drive as they leave the Cliff House. I want to make sure they go.

Clutched in my hand is the photo of Lily and me that I picked up as soon as they left my room. I don’t need to look at it to know. The necklace she is wearing – the one that Erin so perfectly described. The tiny delicate gold leaf with little pockmarks on it that curled at the edges. It is Lily’s.

‘Just go,’ I mutter at them as they slowly disappear, and once they are gone, I still don’t move. The picture burns the skin on the palm of my hands where I hold it so tightly.

Who the hell are these people?

Dad had told Lily how special the necklace was, how unique. A colleague from Bali had brought it over for Mum as a gift, only our parents had both agreed how much Lily would love it and gave it to her instead on her thirteenth birthday.

After months of searching, when I had given up on the idea of ever getting Lily’s necklace back, I looked for a replacement, but I never found anything remotely similar.

Now so many questions skewer my brain. Did Erin see the photo? Did she describe Lily’s necklace to me on purpose?

Or is it worse than that? Did she actually see it in Will’s car?

Erin keeps telling me she is frightened, but I am now too. Is that, for some twisted reason, her plan? Did they choose me to be their therapist on purpose? I don’t really know how they found me, I think, as I remember the answer she gave on her original form to the question ‘Where did you hear about me?’

Her answer was a vague ‘word of mouth’.

I inhale a tight breath as I look at the picture of the chain around Lily’s neck, then hold my finger to touch the glass of the frame against my sister’s skin. It was strange how Erin told me she thought she was in danger. She didn’t talk of her husband having an affair; that wasn’t where her head was when she spoke about the necklace. So what was she trying to tell me?

Will thinks she needs to see a doctor. He assumes his wife is going mad.

Is she?

On paper I would agree. But I’m no longer so certain.

‘Whoa, they’re going to break, Maggie,’ Richard says that evening when he finds me washing up, slamming dishes into the sink. ‘What’s up?’

I look at my husband and reach out to touch his beard, stroking my thumb down his cheek. Richard and I don’t have secrets. On a day-to-day basis we tell each other everything. I don’t disclose anything about my clients, of course, but anything that involves me I tell him.

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