Welcome to Nantes' Cove

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Isla Verde,” cooed the flight attendant. “It is four thirty-three p.m. island time, and ninety-six degrees in the shade, or thereabout! We understand your eagerness to dive into our clear, blue waters,” she continued, “but please do remain seated, with your seat belt fastened, until the plane has come to a complete stop. And please refrain from singing until you have entered the terminal. There’ll be time enough. You will likely wake up singing every day of your stay here. If you live on Isla Verde, you know. Thank you for choosing Island Airways. We look forward to serving you again in the future.”

Swiffer McLuan heaved a sigh, adjusted his Ray-Bans, and gazed out at the building coming into view. “Terminal?” he mused absently. “That’s about the size of a boat shed.”

The man in the seat next to him flipped his seatbelt open, pulled his passport out of the seat-pocket in front of him, tucked it into his shirt-pocket, patted it with significance, and stretching his right leg out into the aisle, leaning left across the seats towards Swiffer.

“How long’d you say you were stayin’?” he asked. Swiffer kept looking out the window and didn’t answer right away.

“Ten days,” he finally said, still without turning around.

“Yeah! For a first time, that’s just about the right amount,” said his co-passenger. “Any more and you might end up climbing the walls. I know I did. Man, we booked ourselves in for fourteen days and fourteen nights. Back then they practically paid you to come here. Everything was dirt cheap. The only beer to be had was some bitter island brew and not a woman in sight. Just a bunch of guys fishin’. It’s different now. You’ll be fine. Just remember to…”

Just then there came the loud ping that indicated that the cabin door had been opened and people could stand up and begin to get off. Swiffer’s adviser cut off mid-sentence, bounded up and was halfway up the aisle of the small aircraft before Swiffer could blink. All around him, people were popping up out of their seats, eager to get started on their island adventures. Swiffer watched them without much interest, scrambling to get their bags from the overhead bins and jostling to get maybe two steps closer to the door than the other people closest to them. Finally, he scooted over to the aisle seat and prepared to stand but leaned back into the seat again as he noticed a woman struggling with two small children a few rows back. The little girl smiled at him as she went by and, much as he wanted to, and normally would have, he just could not muster a smile for the child. He closed his eyes until he was sure the little family had all gone past.

Swiffer began to feel the heat as he neared the door of the aircraft, but he was still caught off-guard when he stepped out onto the passenger staircase that would take him down to the airport runway. There was no fully enclosed jet-bridge leading into a cool, air-conditioned building. In this airport, passengers stepped out of the plane right into the tropical sunshine—or rain, as often occurred—walked, and once in a while, slipped down the steps onto the runway, then had a good one-hundred-yard journey into the terminal. That was not airconditioned either, but it had a roof; it provided protection from sunshine and rain.

A slight and very warm breeze made it seem as if the heat was being stirred up around him with each step that Swiffer McLuan took down to the tarmac. There were clouds, big white clouds, but there was no rain today. The sky was a beautiful blue. He saw mirages to the left, right and directly ahead, between him and the terminal building he was being directed to. The sunlight was bright even with his very dark sunglasses and he actually had to squint against the shimmer on the sea, which he quickly calculated was less than three hundred yards away. The walk to the terminal, by comparison, felt like a mile, at least. He was dripping with sweat by the time he walked through the doors. Beads of salt water had gathered on his forehead and chest, and he could feel his thin linen shirt beginning to stick to his back.

It was considerably darker inside the building and perhaps even slightly cooler, but he still seemed to see a shimmer in the air. Immediately, even before Swiffer could begin to adjust to the difference, he was assailed by the sounds, the music, the dancing, the colourful costumes, the people singing and bustling about and, apparently, making very merry.

“What the hell?!” he exclaimed, “Is this an airport?” He stopped in his tracks, uncertain, for a moment, and very quickly had to skip to the right to avoid being swept up in a twirling, skipping little mob of six or seven people costumed in all the colours of the rainbow. “Looks more like carnival in Rio to me!!” he thought. He would know. He had been to carnival in Rio. More than once. “Ok! Well, maybe not quite Rio,” he conceded silently, after a bit, “but definitely not airport!”

He looked around, trying to find the signs directing him to Immigration, and heaved an almost audible sigh of relief when he saw a very normally dressed person appear in front of him with a sign reading, Mr. McLuan.

“I’m Swiffer McLuan.”

“Welcome to Isla Verde, Mr. McLuan” she said. “I’m Natalie Baines from The Cove. Come with me, please.”

She seemed almost to skip through Immigration, Baggage Claim, and Customs, so very quickly did she whisk him through, while other passengers sweated and struggled and negotiated with officious officials, eager redcaps, and slow-moving taxi drivers. Looking around at one point, he saw his seatmate among a just-arrived group, all of them already wearing necklaces of flowers and glossy green hats woven of coconut leaves, singing and dancing as if it were a thing they did every day.

“Here we are,” he heard Natalie Baines say, as they came out into the sunlight again and she walked around to the back of a green Jeep Gladiator with the doors taken off, parked right in front. He dropped his bags into the vehicle and swung himself into the front passenger seat as she indicated, before she stopped to speak with a man standing at the curb. He noticed a set of fishing lures in the storage well between the seats alongside two lipstick tubes and some paper money. There was a beach towel on the back seat and a panama hat on the dashboard, right against the steering wheel. He heard a laugh and looked up just in time to see Natalie flip the bird at someone out of his line of vision, but whom he heard also laughing.

“Later!” he heard her call back to someone. “Tell your wife I said eight, on the dot.”

“Let’s go,” she said to Swiffer, as she settled in behind the wheel and put on her hat. “It’ll take us just a little over half an hour to get to The Cove. The sun won’t have set yet, so you’re still in time for a quick swim before dinner, if you’d like. You must, of course, get wet first night. It’s kind of a tradition at The Cove. Get Wet, First Night. It’s an initiation of sorts. A kind of good luck thing.” He felt her glance across at him, but he kept looking straight ahead.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I might just stay in and watch the sunset from a balcony or something. I’ll see how it goes.”

Natalie clicked her seatbelt in and navigated the Jeep through the airport gates and traffic of maybe ten vehicles, to get to the stretch of road that would take them to the other side of the island where The Cove was situated. Wide enough to fit perhaps three cars, the roadway was divided into two lanes, one going and one coming. Not many vehicles were coming or going once they were away from the airport, Swiffer noticed. As they drove, the air felt not quite so sharp-edged anymore; it seemed to soften, almost to curl itself around him. The road itself was a series of curves and bends that his driver navigated with an ease and fluidity borne of familiarity, he figured. In a distracted sort of way, he found himself trying to remember how long she had said the drive would be.

The Cove was the short form of the full name of Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports. The resort had been recommended to Swiffer by a long-time client who was, like Swiffer, also a sport fishing enthusiast.

“I go there every year, and I would have bought a villa there a long time ago,” that client had told him, “but my wife hates seafood even more than she hates my fishing buddies. Wouldn’t have been worth the aggro!”

Swiffer’s firm had handled the divorce settlement for this client and that wife, a life-change that the client had chosen to cement by, in fact, purchasing a villa at Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports on Isla Verde.

Swiffer had very politely declined his client’s offer of the use of his villa for his stay at Nantes’ Cove. He had left it to Marjorie, his executive personal assistant, to make all the arrangements, and she had very proudly reported that she had booked him as the very first guest in the most-recently built villa at The Cove.

“I hope you have had a chance to go over the schedule that your assistant and I have arranged for you,” he heard Natalie say. “I think we got all the major activities organized. She was very careful to ensure that we provided every opportunity for you to have lots of fun, and also get some ‘pure, sweet rest’ first. Her words. Her requirements.

“So, once you’ve rested thoroughly over the first couple of days, your schedule is full, but of course, you are free to rearrange and reschedule anything that you might want to,” she went on, after a brief pause which it did not even cross his mind to think of filling. “The only challenge might be the fishing expeditions. Those are group activities which require some advance planning, so if you change your mind, please let us know as far in advance as you can. The boats leave very early in the mornings and return in the mid to late afternoon, so if getting out of bed at three o’clock in the morning does not work for you, we can help you look at something else entirely.”

“No, no!” he said. “Three a.m. is fine.”

“Good,” she replied, “So, your first trip is three days away in the early morning. A car will pick you up at your villa at two-thirty. It’s a fifteen-minute drive to the fishing docks. I see you brought gear, but if you need anything else, you should be able to get it at the docks. Our shop is pretty well stocked.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, and tapped on her iPhone in the dock mounted on her dashboard. Music rose up into the air around him; not loud, but not soft either. He found he could hear the music clearly, and everything else around him at the same time—the wind, the engine, the tyres swishing on the tarmac, birds, waves, and a small airplane passing overhead. They were driving north, on the left side of the road and the sea was to the left of them, right on the edge of the roadway. He saw pelicans diving, frigates soaring and children playing in the waves. Some small boats were anchored here and there, an easy swimming distance off shore. Towards the horizon he saw a few sailboats and further away, a large cruise ship that seemed to be sitting still.

“Isla Verde does not allow cruise ships larger than a hundred and fifty feet,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “Ships that come here are the smaller ones that carry maximum two hundred passengers or so. In any case, Isla Verde is still very much a place for people who actively pursue water sports—fishing, of course, that was the first and continues to be the most important one—but with diving, skiing, parasailing and so on now added. There is excellent sailing in our waters; the north-east trade winds provide perfect winds pretty much all year round throughout the Caribbean islands. On our north coast, also, there is also some fairly decent windsurfing. We get visitors of all ages here on Isla Verde, but not generally the simply sightseeing kind or the type who’s just looking for night life.”

“I see,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” she continued. “there really is not much on the island for regular sightseeing tourists. No ancient ruins, no historical sites or statues, nothing of that sort. This is a place for people who want to do stuff; people who want to get up and go all day long, fall into bed worn out at night and then get up the next morning and do it all over again. The night-time scene here is food and conversation. Walks along the waterfront. Fishing expedition stories. Aching muscles and sunburn, not nightclubs and casinos. It’s restaurants and live music. We have some very good restaurants and bands here, actually, and sometimes you get them together in the one place. There is a lot of drinking, though,” she chuckled. “I don’t know! People seem to drink in gallons, just because they happen to be at the seaside!

“There is a fully stocked bar in your villa—in each villa at The Cove, as a matter of course. Your refrigerator is stocked with beer and chasers, and your wine cooler carries a specially selected assortment of red and white wines from the major wine producing regions of the world.”

She said that with a kind of slight flourish followed by a chuckle. He thought she sounded like a brochure and that her slightly self-conscious chuckle at the end seemed to indicate that she, too, realized it and was rendered a little bit embarrassed by it. He heard himself chuckle out loud in response and wondered whether she was indeed thinking the same thing he was.

She looked across at him just in time to see him glance away from her. She shifted gears; the Jeep revved and leapt forward. He looked to his right, furrowed his brow, and pulled his phone from his pocket. Neither of them spoke again until they arrived at the resort.

Nantes’ Cove came into view as Natalie rounded the last in a series of rising switchbacks and came over the brow of a hill. In front of them, the hills rolled and sloped down to the water’s edge and the blackest sand he had ever seen. The beach curved and curled below them, smaller in the innermost curve, then widened a little, curved out, circled in, and widened and closed in again twice more, before finally throwing itself wide open to the wide and beautiful sea beyond. A run of cliffs stood like sentinels and gate posts on either side. From above, Nantes’ Cove looked like a trio of large rounded, variegated beads, sparkling and glistening in every tone possible of blue and green and everything in between. Past them, towards the horizon, the sea was a deep, rich blue, sparkling with silver and spreading out into what seemed to him to be infinity.

Natalie slowed the vehicle down and leaned forward a little onto the steering wheel as she drove along the hilltop, giving her client the time he needed to take a good long look. He sat up and forward for a second, then leaned back into his seat and breathed in the sight. He could see her in profile against the sea, the hills and cliffs, the sailboats and speedboats, fishing boats, canoes, and jet skis. He didn’t notice her doing it, but he thought she must have turned the volume up because the music got a little louder and then a little louder again as they cruised down into the cove. And it was perfect.

She turned the music down again as they drove between the huge stone pillars and towering royal palm trees at the entrance. On each side of the entrance was a small green sign made of metal with a cut-out design that read Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports. About two or three hundred feet in, the driveway turned left, and once or twice, Natalie glanced sideways at her passenger as she navigated the meandering series of twists and turns that took them through the profusion of herbage—fruit trees, palm trees, flowering shrubs, and even a vegetable garden—past villas and the dock and more villas, finally coming to a stop in front of a large building that seemed to be built of green marble, with a wrap-around veranda decorated with potted green plants.

“This is The Clubhouse,” Natalie informed him. “It houses the lobby, check-in for hotel guests and the hotel itself, which has twenty-four rooms. It’s open twenty-four seven. The concierge desk is here. You have a butler assigned to your villa, but the concierge will help you with anything else you might need. Inside, there are two restaurants, a coffee shop, a bar, a library, a large conference room and six small meeting rooms, the salon, spa and gym, the boutique, and some other shops. At the other side of the building, you come out seaside. Dockside, there are the chandler’s, Nandi’s at The Cove—one of our two top restaurants, a wine bar, an ice-cream shop, and some others, and of course, a sports bar. There is also the yacht club which has a bar, too, of course, and serves food!”

“Thank you,” he said. “Everything’s here.”

“Everything you could possibly need for a full and totally memorable Isla Verde experience,” she concurred. “That’s what we do at Nantes’ Cove.” She eased the vehicle forward again.

“Your villa is seaside. On the beach,” she told him.

After a few more minutes of slow cruising, they drove through a gate and up a short driveway, coming to a stop at the steps of a pale green building, with a wrap-around veranda and music seeming to come toward him up out of the earth. On a sign next to the door were the words, “Mint Julep.” He suddenly realized that every building he had seen so far was a shade of green, and that he had been hearing music non-stop even though Natalie had already turned the music off in the vehicle. His ears guided his eyes to a small tower on the side of the driveway that he realized was a speaker. He hoped they turned it off sometimes!

A man and a woman appeared on the steps of the villa, wearing badges and green striped service uniforms. Hers said, Butler; his, Check-in.

“Welcome to The Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports, Mr. McLuan,” they said.

“I’m Maggie, your butler,” she said, “Rupert will take your bags.” Another man wearing the same colours—Rupert, evidently—appeared next to the vehicle and began off-loading Swiffer’s bags and fishing gear.

“Come with me, please,” said Check-in. “I’ll get you settled in.”

He followed the trio up the stairs to the veranda. As he was going through the doorway into the house, he heard a vehicle start up and looked back just in time to see Natalie turn and drive off down the short driveway and out the gate. He hadn’t said either thank you or good-bye. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to have given her a tip, either. She didn’t wear a badge, and she hadn’t said who she was, other than, “I’m Natalie Baines from The Cove.”

As the sun set on Isla Verde, the guests at Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports wandered into bars and restaurants, settled into armchairs and hammocks, escaped the royal palm and stone columns for a night on the town, or fell into bed into the deep, dreamless sleep of the utterly worn-out and dead-tired. Some others prepared for night diving excursions or headed out to sea for Jolly Roger rum-and-music boat rides under the stars. Here and there, people strolled along the beach or the waterfront. These were mostly the latest arrivals, the newbies, those who had not yet worn themselves out or found their island rhythm.

The guest in the pale green villa named Mint Julep, was one of these latter. He had first poured himself a drink and sat out on the beachside veranda, sipping and thinking that perhaps he should indeed have booked a fishing trip for tomorrow instead of taking the “first three days of doing absolutely nothing” that his sister, Sololye, had tricked him into agreeing to.

Swiffer dismissed his butler pretty quickly after arrival. Solitude and alone time were the reasons he was here, after all. He fully appreciated the convenience of having people at his beck and call, but having made the decision to take this time and come on this journey, now that he was actually here, he was going to do just exactly that—take time out, alone time to unplug and do nothing. He was going to be “liming,” which is how Sololye had told him that people on the islands say “hang out.”

At times, it had felt like an annoyance and an imposition to him, the way everybody and their cousins seemed to be colluding to get him to ‘take some time out, take some time off, and just heal.’

“It’s been a rough time for you,” they all said. Repeatedly. Initially, he had resisted, very strongly, the mountains of well-meaning advice—slow down; take a break; go on holiday; find a woman; get married. He understood that they were concerned about him but he had been finding solace in his work. It was work that had kept him going, not thinking, not crumbling, putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. Taking a break had not seemed like a good idea to him at all, and for the last two and a half years or so—almost three—he had managed to keep them all at bay. Getting him married was now his aunt’s and his sister’s single-point agenda item. So far, he had out-maneuvered them on that, mainly by reminding the two that neither of them had yet married.

Over the last three years, he had worked out a system and had fine-tuned his daily, weekly, and monthly routine. It worked. Had become second nature. Required no thinking whatsoever. Wake up, work out, work, sleep. Wake up, work out, work, sleep. Somewhere in between, sometimes, eat. Saturday afternoons, lunch with Sololye and her family of animals on her farm upstate. Second Sunday every month, drive Auntie Lena to the city to select flowers to be placed in the family crypt across the ocean in London. He never understood why she could not simply have ordered them online, or set up a standing order and have it done automatically, but he didn’t argue, and every month, he drove her to the same little flower shop in the Village and watched as she selected the flowers and arrangements for the graves of her sister, brother-in-law, and niece. That was it. That was his life. Until his visit seven weeks ago with Dr. Randall.

To be clear, Dr. Randall, had not predicted his imminent death and demise or any such thing. Dr. Randall was a geneticist and a researcher into the effects of stress on organ functioning. He interpreted gene testing reports and told people what their predispositions were based on what he saw in their hereditary makeup and the effects that trauma and prolonged stress might have on their health. Dr. Randall was his sister Sololye’s idea. His usual doctor would have worked for him but his sister had insisted and then had increased the pressure for him to take a vacation.

Sitting on a veranda in the tropics tonight, watching the stars and listening to the waves, Swiffer’s thoughts ran back to his parents, Brody McLuan, Q. C. and Amintara McLuan née Gebreyes, and to his sister, Saida, identical twin to Sololye. Lawyers by profession, from parts of the world as different from each other as they could possibly be, Brody and Amintara had met in law school in London, England, married, had three children, and built a reputable and powerful law firm that specialised in international business and later had added human rights law. After his own training in law, he, Swiffer, had worked in his parents’ firm in London. He was assigned a case that involved an American firm working in the UK and in Dubai, and for two and a half years he had spent a great deal of time either in the United States or interacting with American law firms and the court. He found the world of American jurisprudence, so very different to the British, to be endlessly fascinating, and also found himself attracted to a different specialty in law.

He lost the first round of his case for the Americans, and it bothered him terribly. He had not seen it as an exceptionally complicated matter, but he had not reckoned with the convolutions of modern American legal thinking. He had much to learn, he realised. He also wanted to reduce the likelihood of failure in any other similar cases that might come to him in the future. So, with his parents’ approval, he registered for a post-graduate course in law at Columbia University in New York City. In the end, Swiffer, again with his parents’ support, added divorce and property law to the services offered by Gebreyes McLuan Int’l, and opened up a small office in the United States. It had grown considerably in the five years he’d been working on it.

Tonight, he found himself going over that segment of his life, the early years in New York and the—very unfamiliar and vaguely disconcerting—question he found himself pondering these days, was whether he wanted to carry on the New York City practice. That had never come up before. He loved his work and had plenty of it, and he enjoyed the city immensely. His was a good life. This new question was not part of the plan. His thoughts went back to the moment, the period when everything had changed so drastically, including even his will to wake up every morning and keep moving.

The sequence of events of that last of the series of fateful days three years ago, that had so suddenly and completely changed his life—and he himself, too—tried to replay itself in his head, over and over and over. Tonight, he let it play. He heard the telephone ring. He heard himself answer it and he heard the voice on the other end ask, “Is this Swiffer McLuan?” as if it were happening right now, in real time. He heard the voice, with a very British accent, identify itself as Deputy Commissioner Uline of the London Metropolitan Police.

He still cannot remember exactly what words were used in what the officer said to him after he introduced himself, but he remembers instantly feeling cold, very cold. He saw himself walk over to close the window. He had opened it because it was a humid New York City summer day and he had never been keen on air-conditioning. The chill had deepened as the officer spoke. A calm, deep voice using a calm, reassuring tone. The aeroplane carrying them from London to Brussels had gone down just off the coast of England, into the Channel. No determination yet as of the cause, but rescue efforts are fully in progress, sir, and we recommend that you return to the United Kingdom as quickly as you can. If you would also be so kind as to inform us, please, of your flight details, we will arrange transportation for you.

Less than five hours after that call, he was on a British Airways flight to Heathrow. The police were there to meet him. We’re awfully sorry, sir, the news has not improved. He remembered how the English countryside outside, moving swiftly past the window of his car, seemed to be blue and flat. Like a wall. He had felt like he was driving alongside a flat wall, a mural, everything painted in shades of dark blue.

Tonight, he remembered he had smashed his hand onto his desk, with grief and with anger after the call. He had been furious. They had talked about the risks of flying together. They had agreed, as a family, and as a company, that they would never fly more than two in the same aircraft. And he had been unsatisfied with even that. He knew that airplanes were safer and safer, and that the likelihood of any of them dying in a plane crash was statistically, not very high, but he had insisted, anyway. His sisters had even poked fun at him from time to time, and yet…here we were, now. His rage was all-consuming. In the days immediately after, he had cried, screamed, groaned, ached, in ways and in parts of his body that he would never have imagined. It had taken a long time before it subsided appreciably.

Eventually, he learned that when he felt the rage rising inside him, he could move. He got up. Walked across the room. Turned on something. Turned off something. It worked almost every time. If he could, in fact, move about, he did. And when that was not possible or appropriate, when he could not just get to his feet and move about, he called his mother’s name, out loud or in his head. Tonight, he could move, but he did not want to. He wanted her to come to him. He called her out loud, but softy. Softly always worked. She always came when he called.

“Mamma. Mammamintara!” Softly. And she came. On the flight back to London, he had sat in his seat and called her and kept calling her. And she had come every time. She still did.

He heard his mother’s voice, crystal clear and soft, calling him by his correct name, Seifu, which had been her father’s name. Swiffer had come about when he played cricket at school in England.

“Seifu,” he heard her say. “Seifu! Look. Look at your sisters.”

In his memory, he could see her sitting on the grass in the garden of their home just outside London, watching his father, a big, muscular man, playing that game with his identical twin daughters, Saida and Sololye, where he swung them around and around, one on each arm until one sister inevitably lost her grip and fell off, ceding victory to the other. He heard his father’s deep laughter, his mother’s soft chuckle and his sisters’ bright squeals as clear as real bells ringing, right now, right here.

Swiffer moved. He grabbed his drink off the patio table and swung his legs off the side of the veranda onto the fine black sand, still warm from the sun. After a few quick, almost running steps, he stopped, put his feet together, pulled himself up and in, breathed deeply into the night air a few times and took a big, deep swig from his glass. He let the cognac burn his palate for a while. Finally, he released the breath and ambled slowly in the direction of the water, digging his toes in and lightly kicking small clouds of sand ahead of him as he walked.

For some reason, his mind flashed back to his arrival at the airport this afternoon and the face of the woman who had come to meet him. He saw again, the picture of Nantes’ Cove from the top of the hill, with her face in relief against the sparkling waters. He had assumed that she was a general employee of the resort, but it also came to him now as he looked back, that the staff at the villa had seemed very formal in their interactions with her. Deferential, even. She must be the manager, he supposed, and clearly not from around here.

Natalie left her office in The Clubhouse, the main building of the resort, just as the sun slipped into the sea out beyond the cove. As she crossed the veranda on the beachside of the building, she heard the usual gasps and exclamations from guests who swore they saw the green flash, and the pshaws and dismissals from those who insisted there was no such thing. She smiled to herself, pleased that her guests were having a good time. Her father had been right—The Green Flash Veranda and Bar at The Cove was a favourite of locals and visitors alike. Seats were always in short supply at sunset, come rain or shine, high season or not. This evening was no different. Several locals called out their greetings to her and she waved and called back but didn’t stop or even slow down.

Instead of getting into her Jeep this evening, Natalie took her sandals off, dropped them onto the front seat and headed toward the waterline. She had quite some time still before her dinner date with her friends, the other four women of The Cove-N. She was happy to be seeing them tonight, because she was in a bit of a mood, feeling excited and stoked but also more than a little bit unsettled. It had been an important day for her and The Cove, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was exactly that she was feeling—it was a mixture of emotions that she could not quite single out and identify. She felt different, though she could not quite say different to what, and the air around her also seemed somehow not as it usually did. She was glad there was a gathering of the Cove-N tonight; she was eager to get to her friends and talk about stuff, but she also felt the need to release some energy first.

She headed south along the beach, walking at first. Her phone buzzed and she ignored it, popped it into the sleeve pocket of the sports shirt she was wearing. Big Mack had taught her about ‘checking out’ and she had never forgotten the lessons. After his death, she had made a religion of it. Every evening, from the moment her feet stepped off the veranda of the main building, she was unavailable to anyone for at least the first thirty minutes—unless there were blood and broken bones, Big Mack used to say. The entire staff knew this and structured their requirements of her accordingly. Newbies learnt very quickly, sometimes from their colleagues or immediate supervisor, and sometimes at the end of a string of very colourful words from The Big Boss—the nickname which the staff used to refer to Natalie when they talked about her, but not when they found themselves having to actually speak to her directly.

She had already changed into her running shorts, and tonight was barefoot on the sand night, which was her favourite, but she didn’t exactly feel like running right at this moment. She wanted to just walk. She wasn’t feeling worried or unhappy; it was a peculiar feeling, not entirely unfamiliar, actually, but not customary or usual either, at all. She tried to remember when she had last felt like this and couldn’t, at first. As she made her way down the beach, she gradually began to feel lighter and lighter. Every step lifted her mood, cleared her head.

The sand was warm. It was slightly coarser close to where the waves broke and she loved the feel of it there. She breathed in the smells of the sea and the feel of the water rolling around her ankles and splashing lightly against her calves. She looked out to the edge of the cove where it met the sea, and let her gaze climb up the cliff on the north side and up into the branches of a huge tree a little way back from the edge. She was too far away to be able to distinguish them all from where she was, but she knew every branch on that tree and she could picture the crowd of glossy, deep green leaves that had made it easy for her to hide away amongst them when she was a child. Even now, as an adult, she still sometimes climbed up the huge tree, using the pockets and footholds that her grandfather had carved into the trunk when he was a child. Even now, as an adult, she still sometimes felt the need to climb up and hide from the world amongst the leaves of the silk cotton tree.

“Your mother first climbed up this tree when she was only three,” Granjacques had told her.

Her attention was drawn away by the sound of a motorboat speeding into the cove through the cliff gates, trailing a wake of snow-white water behind it. Across the other side of the bay, another boat was pulling a skier along, and up in the skies above them, two people were floating through the air under small parachutes tethered to another motor boat moving in the opposite direction. She could see through the door of the yacht club. There were small sailboats in the sea, people on stools at the bar and others lounging with their feet on the rails of the veranda. The resort was doing well. The resort was doing better and better with the changes she had made in the five years since Big Mack had died, and she was proud of her work. She knew her father would have been proud of her, too. In fact, she felt with every cell in her being, that he was feeling very proud of her right at this moment, wherever in the universe he happened to be.

Just this afternoon, she had received the last of the government licences, permits and permissions that were necessary for the Cove to be allowed to put on the first Isla Verde Sailing Week ever, to be held in two years’ time. Everything regulatory and legal that was required by the related government departments and by law, was now paid up and paid for—every fee, every deposit, everything. The government offices and island officials had finally signed, stamped, and returned to the company the last of the documentation the company had been required to submit in the process. It had arrived by courier just after lunch, accompanied by a form letter carrying the signature of the Minister of Tourism. The Government of Five Islands and the Ministry of Tourism are pleased etc. etc. Less than a week ago, she had received a similar package from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, which was the entity responsible for the marine environment. The Police and Coast Guard permissions had already come in months before. The Chamber of Commerce had signed on years ago. Everything was ready now.

Natalie had almost cried when she opened this last envelope, the final one, the last in a long, convoluted, bureaucratic labyrinth. Finally, they were out of the maze. She could see the way ahead now. It had been a long uphill battle; had taken a very long time and quite a bit of money to get to here. A lot of people had put in many long hours, and Cove Holdings had already made a significant financial investment. All of that energy was finally beginning to take form; things were taking shape. The dream was finally getting to become real.

Nothing like this had ever been held in Five Islands before. There was no precedent for a production of this type or scale. This was going to be the very first, and finally, it was coming to fruition. It was a major achievement for everyone; it would be a major event for Isla Verde, at every level. And for Five Islands as a whole. Instantaneously, there returned a slight shadow. They had managed to get this far without having had to play politics much. They were all aware, however, that things could change. She kept that thought always in the back of her mind, as she knew that her grandfather also did. The entire group working on this were conscious of the probabilities and always on guard. They had discussed it thoroughly in meetings, as a very real consideration and a potential hazard.

“So far, so good,” she told herself.

Natalie ran her gaze once again over the boats anchored in the seas of the cove, lifted her eyes to the sailboats on the horizon and smiled. She had done well. She was proud of herself and of her staff. It had been a long four years of discussions and negotiations, backtrackings and rewordings, planning and building, undoing and redoing, but they had done it. Everything was lined up and ready. She was ready.

Over the last months, she and her staff had also concluded all the provisional and preliminary agreements and signed the requisite memoranda of understanding and agreements in principle with commercial sponsors. Final contracts and signings were contingent upon the completion of the government documentation and permissions process and the receipt of final sign-off from the relevant government departments and ministries. Now, that next phase could begin.

In about three or four weeks or so, as soon as she could get the appointments set, she would fly out to the United States mainland to meet with the larger sponsors, and with yacht clubs, sailors, and suppliers. She would hold interviews for boatyard management personnel and finalise purchasing agreements for the first round of building materials for the ship yard. She would meet with the designers and architects again, to move forward to the next stage of the work of retrofitting the resort to accommodate the event. From there she would fly to London to meet with lawyers and conclude insurance agreements with Lloyds’. The local law firm had been instructed to seek a partner firm in London. They had already reached out to colleagues in the region who had experience in representing yacht clubs which had already hosted large, international scale events of this nature. She made a note to check in with Jacques, the President of Cove Holdings who was overseeing that part of this whole massive undertaking. Where were they with regard to the referrals and recommendations for lawyers in London?

“Yeah!” she said out loud to the skies. She kicked up a small cloud of sand. “I did it, Daddy. We did it! We did it. Isla Verde Sailing Week at Nantes’ Cove Resort and Water Sports. We did it. Your dream is coming true!! I did not let it die.”

The thought of her father and the excitement of the event brought her to the brink of tears that blurred her vision, but it also lifted the cloud and re-energised her at one and the same time. She smiled wryly to herself and bobbed her head a few times in self-acknowledgment. It had been quite a feat. Instinctively, she increased her pace and very smoothly slipped into her moderate-to-fast running rhythm—the one that always seemed to show up whenever she was excited about or trying to get away from some significant life event. On an ordinary day, she worked out to a playlist of music or podcasts; this evening, she ran on silent. This evening, she was listening. She was listening to the cosmos, to herself, to her father’s long-time dream. She was listening and she was hearing it coming true.

Her father, McKenzie Laurel Baines had arrived on Isla Verde forty-three years ago at the age of seventeen, a runaway from the streets of Miami and South Florida, after he had first been a runaway from the bogs and bayous of Louisiana and the masks and facades of New Orleans. A strapping young man, he easily found work in Isla Verde in the warehouses at the port, running errands and provisioning ships for commercial and recreational sailors, scrubbing decks and hulls, diving up lost anchors and such. Part of the saga of Isla Verde was the histories of people arriving and losing themselves, and arriving to lose themselves. It was not very long before he had acquired the nickname, Big Mack, and it had stuck. Hardly anyone remembered what Mack stood for or was short for.

At night, Big Mack fished for lobster and crab to supply the restaurants on the island—the new ones that began cropping up here and there on beaches up and down the coast, and for one or two of the old, local establishments. One of those was the Fish Shack at Nantes’ Cove on the north-western coast. This was a fish shack in the quintessential island sense—built right on the water’s edge with wooden sides, a long bar built of salt-soaked planks from old, disused ships, wooden floors through which patrons could see the sand and the water beneath, and food from the sea, seasoned to perfection and served in abundance. Nandi was the name of the daughter of one Jacques Nantes whose grandfather, island history records, was a Frenchman also named Jacques Nantes, who had washed up in the cove one morning after a storm, amongst an assortment of barrels, boxes, and boards, and lived to tell the tale.

This had happened at a time when there were very few people living on the island, and the only people who ever came to the island at any time were fishermen who came and went with the seasons and the fish. But, that first Jacques Nantes had stayed on Isla Verde, living right there in the inlet in which he found himself. Island folklore says that he never left the island again, not even for a day. He built himself a shack, combining island wood with flotsam and jetsam from the shipwreck, and set up home and work right there in what eventually became Nantes’ Cove. He became a legend in his own right among the people in the neighbourhood of islands for his sea savvy, his fishing knowhow, and the wealth he eventually accumulated from his trading with fishermen and sailors over the years.

As travel became easier and less costly and the tourism industry expanded, Isla Verde began to attract pleasure craft and eventually, also merchant mariners travelling up and down the countries of the Americas. Villages and towns sprang up on the island, homes and shops started being built, a jetty and eventually a proper port, school, clinic, church, all the usual institutions and buildings that comprise a community or country. Isla Verde was one island in a political grouping of five known as The Five Islands. The capital island, the seat of local government, the island with utilities and amenities, was Redonda. When the government stepped in to support the development of Isla Verde, with North American tourists in mind, Jean Nantes, son of Jacques Nantes, the original settler of the cove, laid claim to three hundred and fifty acres of the land around him and named it Nantes’ Cove.

At the time, hardly anyone else was interested in owning land on this island jungle which had by then, a population still well below one hundred, a very few miles of paved roads and no commercial activity or potential, as far as most people could see. At that time, there was only a wooden pier for a port and a mail boat which called at random, and travel between Isla Verde and any other island was only by fishing boat, whenever that was available.

So, for a mere consideration, by any standards, the government granted title as such, with the right to bequeath it to his heirs or to sell all or any portion of said land, or to develop or dispose of it in any other ways that he deemed fit, so long as it broke no laws, to Mr. Jacques Nantes, resident in Nantes’ Cove, Isla Verde, The Five Islands.

Natalie’s run lasted a good two hours this evening. Everything went well—the air was warm and smelled of flowers and the sea; the contracts had been finalized; hot yoga had finally come to The Cove and after a week of it, her body was feeling tight and taut and strong again. By the time she finished her run, she was feeling really good again. The sand felt good under her feet, the water sounded good next to her. The sky looked just truly beautiful up above. Things were well in her world.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the universe. “Thank you. Thank you.”

She was running in The Zone and could have gone on running forever but she finally noticed it had got dark, and then her cell phone rang. She saw ‘The Cove-N’ pop up on her screen and realised that she had less than an hour to get home, shower, get dressed and arrive at her friend’s house for their regular girls’ Cove-N night activities. She was also responsible that night for providing the drink. But, not just any drink, of course. A message was coming through that she should have deciphered by now in order to figure that out. She checked her messages and there it was—the call from Clara. It was an easy one tonight. It always was when it was Clara’s turn to send clues. Clara didn’t really see the point of the clues and games, she said. She held to her belief that Cove-N nights were supposed to be easy, fun nights and that members weren’t supposed to have to earn their way into the meetups, especially being the very few that they were.

“Hey! Clara,” Natalie said into her phone. “What’s up?”

“Just checking in since I didn’t hear back from you about tonight. You didn’t send in the answer to the clue for tonight,” said Clara.

“Malbec,” said Natalie. “Girl, I’ve been so busy and to be honest, kind of distracted after all the things that have been happening these last few days, that I only just checked.”

“So, did everything go good, then?” asked Clara.

“Yesss! Yes. Oh yes!” exclaimed Natalie. “The contracts are all signed. Everything is set. I’m bringing champagne as well, so get out the flutes!”

“Ok!! Alright! Alright. Alright! See you in a bit.”

“I’m on my way.”

The run back up the beach to her vehicle was more like a sprint—full-on running at max speed. Push, drive, explode! Slam, march, run high! Coach Tiggins would have been proud. Natalie ran past people on the beach without noticing who any one was. One of them was Swiffer McLuan, though, up to his knees in the surf, and he thought he recognised her, but felt he couldn’t be absolutely certain, not in the dark. And besides, he chided himself, he hardly knew her. He’d never seen her before today.