Page 68 of A Convenient Fiction

Some of the female bathers were visible, wading just beyond the canvas awning of their bathing machines. It was difficult to tell one from the other. Their hair was covered in matching oilskin caps, their torsos nearly indistinguishable in drooping wet wool.

“Alex!” Henrietta ran toward him across the sand. “What in the world are you doing?”

He looked back at her sharply. “I told you to wait with Teddy.”

“That manservant of his…Yardley, or whatever his name is, is with him now. Papa and Mrs. Bainbridge are up on the promenade as well.”

“What color was Laura’s bathing dress?” he asked.

“It’s my bathing costume, actually. She borrowed it from me—” She stopped short at the look on his face. “It’s dark blue, with a white trim.”

Alex looked through the telescope. Laura wasn’t with the other bathers. He couldn’t see her anywhere.

A visceral fear rose within him, squeezing at his heart and lungs. He was vividly reminded of that day on the cliffs at Abbot’s Holcombe so long ago. The sea hadn’t been smooth then. It had been wild. A roiling stew.

He’d been climbing down the cliff face with Justin, Tom, and Neville, just as they’d done dozens of times. Clinging to the familiar outcroppings. No one had noticed the rocks skittering beneath Neville until it was too late.

Neville had tried to move away from the crumbling stones, and in the process, had lost his foothold. He’d slipped sharply to the right, his hands scrabbling on the rocks. And then he’d fallen. He’d struck his head and gone down into the sea, where he disappeared. As if he’d never been there in the first place.

Justin hadn’t hesitated. He’d dived in after him, straight from the cliff face, heedless of the danger.

Alex and Tom had descended the rest of the way to the beach. And they’d waited, and waited, Alex pacing the water’s edge like a caged lion. But when Justin, at last, came out of the sea, Neville wasn’t with him.

“I couldn’t find him,” he’d said as he struggled for breath. “He’s gone.”

“No.” Alex had shaken his head. “No.”

And then, amid Justin and Tom’s shouts of protest, he’d gone into the sea himself.

Fear hadn’t mattered. Reason hadn’t mattered. He’d been too desperate. Too unwilling to accept that Neville had been taken from them.

Margate wasn’t Devon. And Laura Hayes wasn’t Neville Cross. But as Alex stood on the beach, he felt that same stifling sense of desperation.

“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Henrietta said. “Laura can swim, you know.”

“Not in the sea, she can’t.” He scanned the water. There was a glint across a low swell of waves in the distance. A shadow of dark blue on the surface. It was probably nothing. But—

Dear God, it looked remarkably like a person.

“I don’t see how you would know that. It isn’t as if—” Henrietta broke off with a cry. “What are you doing? Come back here!”

Alex scarcely heard her as he ran out into the surf. The part of his brain still functioning registered the fact that there were no small boats about—no sailors who could be applied to for assistance. There were only bathers with indeterminate swimming skills, paddling in the shallows.

There was no one else to help her. No one else who could possibly get to her in time.

It was the last rational thought he had before he kicked off his shoes, tore off his coat, and dived into the sea.

The cold water swallowed him whole, seeping straight through his trousers and shirt to chill him to the bone. It surged all around him, a living, breathing thing with a power and a will of its own.

He’d always been a strong swimmer. A burst of adrenaline made him even more so. He struck out for where he’d seen her. Where he’d thought he had seen her. Far past the women’s bathing machines, and out to where the sea began to churn and pull, a dangerous, primitive force that could easily kill a man.

Or a woman.

But Laura wasn’t there. The silhouette Alex had seen on the water was gone.

Which meant that he’d been mistaken. Or…

That her lungs had filled with water. That she’d sunk beneath the waves and drowned.