‘You have to call him back and tell him not to come here. No one is allowed out here. It’s not our house, we can’t invite other people to—‘

‘Dax won’t mind, he’s cool.’

Rosie and Dax had yet to have a conversation. Once again Rosie was making up rules to suit her needs. ‘I’m telling you that it’s not cool. Phone him, Rosie, I mean it. Did you think about consulting me or Carina? We don’t want a guy invading our space. Call him and tell him not to come or you’ll be invited to leave too.’

‘Uh, fine,’ Rosie tsked, wandering away from her sister. ‘You’re such a drag.’

‘I’m sorry, Rosie, but you can’t just invite a party here and expect the rest of us to deal.’

‘I’ll call him, but you’ve got to promise we’ll crank up the atmosphere here. Do you promise we’ll have our own party?’

‘I have to call Dax, but after that we can—‘

Rosie whooped. ‘Let’s have some fun! We’ll have some wine and play some music, does this place have a sound system?’

There was a sound system in the living room with state of the art speakers in every room and outside too, which could be individually controlled. But Ivy wasn’t going to tell her sister that.

‘I can’t believe that you’ve only been here a couple of days and you’re bored already.’

This was the recurring theme of her relationship with her sister who would much rather party than do most other things like have a civilised conversation or hold down a job. Though Ivy had lost her share of jobs too, maybe it was more than just bad luck, and somehow it was engrained in their DNA that they would get themselves into frequent trouble.

‘We’re in California! LA is full of hot guys loaded with cash! We’re wasting opportunities locking ourselves up out here. We could be in nightclubs, meeting people. Maybe we’d be discovered!’ Rosie gasped and began to sashay around the room. ‘Who would turn down a chance to be rich and famous?’

Ivy didn’t want to be the one to tell her sister that at the age of thirty-one she was a little too old to be discovered. Or more accurately that Rosie should be a little too old to fall for that line.

While Rosie amused herself by singing a dance tune and dancing around the dining table, Ivy finished cleaning up the kitchen. ‘Go and phone him,’ Ivy instructed.

Rosie didn’t miss a word of her song, she twirled her way out of the kitchen to the living room and Ivy was pleased to get peace, though she could still hear Rosie’s singing from the other room.

She was about to go upstairs and phone Dax when Carina came into the kitchen, dressed but still flushed from the heat of the bathroom.

‘She’s in a good mood,’ Carina said, wearing a grin. ‘Is she always so happy?’

‘Rosie is the queen of finding her happiness.’

‘I’m always impressed by people who manage to remain optimistic through their lives. We all have difficult times, but those don’t seem to have affected Rosie.’

It was an admirable quality, Rosie wouldn’t let anyone else alter her mood. Carina retrieved the wine from the fridge and held it up in an offering to Ivy, who shook her head. ‘Please carry on and enjoy it, I’m not much of a drinker.’

‘You’re teetotal?’ Carina asked, pouring wine into a wine glass that she obtained from the top shelf. ‘Forgive me for asking, but did you have a problem?’

‘With alcohol? No,’ Ivy said. Carina can’t have noticed the glass of wine she’d had at dinner. ‘I just… I have to call Dax before I go to bed, and I’d rather be clearheaded to do it.’

‘He doesn’t like you drinking? Does he direct a lot of your behaviour?’

‘You’re asking if he’s controlling?’ she asked, pouring herself a tall glass of orange juice then going outside to sit on the deck with Carina following just behind her.

Ivy put her glass on the glass-top table between two wicker chairs and her feet up on the matching footstool. Carina seated herself in the other chair and held her glass close to her chest in both hands.

‘I am curious about your relationship, you’re very close and both very secretive.’

‘Dax is a straightforward guy. His barriers are just higher with you because… he doesn’t want to get invested.’

‘Because I abandoned him once, he thinks that I’ll do it again. I can understand that. It’s difficult to accept your son rejecting you. He holes up in your bedroom and avoids me.’

Ivy wasn’t sure what Carina wanted from her or from Dax. She complained about Dax’s behaviour but made no excuses for her own.

‘You know, you haven’t made your intentions clear, and until you are honest with us, you’re unlikely to get any respect from us.’

‘Us? If I don’t have your respect, then I won’t have Dax’s?’

‘I think that I can be an ally, but I have to believe that you’ll be good for him. Soon, I’ll be leaving here, and I don’t trust you, so I won’t be arguing your case to Dax.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘When I’ve asked about your relationship with Bruno you tell me that you don’t want to talk about it. So why should I tell you about my relationship with Dax?’

Carina finished her wine then took a deep breath, the sound of the ocean filled the echoing silence between the women. ‘It’s been a long time since I thought about him and longer since I spoke of him.’

‘Bruno?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that mean you haven’t thought about Dax?’ Ivy asked. Dax could have used a mother when he was growing up. If he hadn’t been abandoned by his parents so young then maybe he wouldn’t have been such an easy target for Mauri Stark.

‘I thought about him, but I thought he was with Ray.’ The man who Dax had thought was his father until Mauri revealed the truth of his parentage. ‘Bruno was… we were together for almost five years and for a long time we were happy, he took care of me and made sacrifices for me.’

‘The dream guy,’ Ivy said, hoping her disdain wasn’t too obvious.

‘Oh no, he had his vices and after the bloom came off the rose… we fought a lot, and he didn’t like it when I argued back… then the affairs started.’

‘He slept around?’

‘Bruno did what he wanted when he wanted. At first he made excuses but after a few months of enduring his flirtations he began to act like it was normal, and he expected me to put up with his behaviour without complaining. The sad part is that for a long time I did.’

‘Is that why you left him?’

‘I found out that I was pregnant, and it was when I came home to tell him that… I found him in bed with another woman.’ Which sounded like it was normal behaviour but from how Carina gazed out across the black ocean, which was lit by only the moon, something was different about this woman.

‘Who was it?’ Ivy asked.

‘Mauri’s wife, Winnie,’ she said, forcing herself to smile and turn to Ivy, but the glaze in her eyes betrayed how real the pain still was for her. Ivy’s jaw fell, and she wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that revelation. Dax had never spoken about Mauri’s wife, the mother of Brad and Trystan, from what Ivy did know the woman had been dead for a long time. ‘Mauri didn’t know, and of course I couldn’t tell him.’

‘Why not?’

‘Bruno warned me not to. He threatened me, and I had to agree to keep the secret, Bruno was so angry at me for catching them like I did. The funny thing was, he fought for her more than he fought for me or anyone else. He didn’t want his relationship with Mauri to change, but he also worried for her safety, for her wellbeing.’

‘Is that when you left?’

‘I struggled because I thought the baby would change things, it didn’t. I didn’t tell him about it right away, but when I did… he told me to get rid of it, to get rid of Dax… I couldn’t do that.’

‘Why did he want—‘

‘He wanted to keep seeing Mauri’s wife, but that was never going to work, she would never have left Mauri because he could offer her a life that Bruno couldn’t. If Mauri had discovered them… he’d have cast them both out, and neither of them wanted that.’