The Summer of Secrets Read Free

so fast, I didn’t want to call in sick.’
    The manager nodded, keen to get this trashy little piece and her kid out of his way. ‘Very good, but this is going on record.’
    Catalina grabbed her boy’s hand and backed out of the room, thanking him profusely. In a few brief seconds she had closed the door behind her and left the manager with the vague sensation that he had been manipulated, but not knowing quite how.
    Catalina walked away from the situation in a cloud of triumph but the comedown left her wondering how she could always get what she wanted, yet life seemed be getting more and more difficult. She was haunted by the choices that she had made. She missed her parents and the friends that she had made were not the same as the friends she had left behind. Above all she had not found love...
    Outside her window the full moon shone.
    A few miles away Danny Featherbow won a hand of poker that would change both their lives forever.

Megan
    Danny Featherbow’s grandmother, Alice, taught Danny, as a boy, the simple game that he would play every chance he had, until the day he died: the turn of three cards with a stake on the value of the third. So simple, so seductive. Like love.
    Within half an hour Alice had taken all his pocket money.
    â€˜You shouldn’t trust the cards as much as you do, Danny’ she said, and she turned a silver coin down through her four fingers and back up again in a skilful way that he immediately wanted to master. ‘The cards will always let you down eventually,’ she said. ‘Trust yourself, always yourself, only yourself.’ His grandmother bent close to him and he could smell her rose scented face cream and see the furrows in her face that it could not help. ‘The trick is to leave the game while you’re ahead,’ she said.
    She stood up and returned to the business of keeping their tiny house spick and span in case someone should visit. But they never did.
    The following week Danny won his money back again. In fact, he never lost money to his grandmother again. He stopped taking silly risks and only put his coins on the table if he was more likely than not to get them back. He paid no attention to the voices tempting him to play a hand anyway because you never know. He didn’t bet on maybe. Life was cruel.
    He had barely started to learn higher maths at school and yet on an instinctive level eleven year old Danny was able to calculate complicated probability, percentages and the odds of winning the simple card game she called Acey Duecey. And so it became easy to win.
    He could feel his grandmother’s curious gaze upon him as he sat counting the coins he had amassed. He liked to stack the coins in a single tower, reaching a fraction higher with every winning hand, and he liked to imagine that one day he might have a tower of money that was taller than him, taller than his grandmother, taller then them both. A pile of silver that he could climb away from here to the moon and stars.
    â€˜Teach me that thing you do with the coin,’ he said, trying and fumbling.
    She reached down to ruffle her fingers through his messy brown hair in an uncharacteristic display of affection and he lifted his bowed head.
    â€˜I think perhaps you were born lucky,’ she said.
    He was sixteen before he fell in love. All the girls at school were mad about Danny Featherbow but he barely noticed, which of course only made them giggle behind their hands all the more. His hair stood up in shocks of misbehaviour and was the last trace of boyishness that remained on a serious, handsome face.
    Harriet was standing in line at the butcher’s on a freezing cold evening shortly before Christmas. She had milky skin and fine blonde hair, almost white, which fell halfway down her back. It was tied with a dark green ribbon and immediately Danny imagined untying that ribbon and seeing that hair cascade over those shoulders like spun silk. At that precise