The Island Daughter: Love on the Island, #3

By Helena Halme

One family. Old secrets. New Life.

 

After her dear stepfather has a fatal heart attack, Alicia returns home to the Åland Islands to support her mother, Hilda. She leaves behind a new life forged in Stockholm with her lover, Patrick. 

 

But when her lover's ex, Mia, the daughter of the local property magnate, makes moves to rekindle her relationship with Patrick, Alicia is torn between duty and her own happiness.

 

Alicia's hopes of a brighter future are further dashed when deeply buried family secrets surface. How can she forge a new life when everything she believed to be true about her past is a lie? 

 

Meanwhile, Alicia's best friend, Brit, has her own problems. After a life spent footloose and fancy-free, traveling the world working on cruise ships, she's both horrified and delighted when she sees the thin pink lines on a test tube. But how can she have a baby with a man she's only known for a matter of months?

 

The Island Daughter is perfect for fans of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, Everything We Keep by Kerry Lonsdale, and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. The third novel in Helena Halme's Love on the Island series, it can also be enjoyed as a standalone read. 

 

Join Alicia's small island community for another installment in the "captivating" new series set on the most picturesque of Scandinavian islands. Once you enter her world, you'll never want to leave.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helena Halme
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781393680987

Helena Halme

Helena Halme grew up in Tampere, central Finland, and moved to the UK at the age of 22 via Stockholm and Helsinki. She spent the first ten years in Britain being a Navy Wife and working as journalist and translator for the BBC. Helena now lives in North London, loves Nordic Noir and writes Scandinavian and military fiction. Her latest novel, The Navy Wife, is a sequel to her best-selling novel, The Englishman. Helena has published two other novels, Coffee and Vodka, and The Red King of Helsinki.

Book preview

ONE

‘D id you forget your keys again?’ Alicia shouts as she runs to the front door of the three-bedroomed apartment overlooking the Riddarfjärden water in Stockholm.

When she opens up, she gives an involuntary gasp. On the other side stands Mia, her lover’s ex-wife.

‘What are you doing here?’ Mia asks.

Mia is dressed in her signatory off-white. Underneath her pale, close-fitting overcoat are white slacks and a silky blouse. On her feet, she’s wearing a pair of high-heeled tan boots. Her voice is as spiky as her footwear.

Alicia feels drab and unkempt in her old gray jogging pants and a worn-out T-shirt with a hole in one of the armpits. It’s as if her home is being invaded by this rich woman, who has not only hurt her boyfriend but has made it as difficult as possible for him to see his two daughters. What right does she have to come to her and Patrick’s new place? Or question Alicia’s presence here?

‘I could ask you the same thing?’ Alicia says and lifts her chin. Her dirty hair is in a ponytail, and more than anything now, she wishes she’d showered before Patrick came back from dropping off his daughters. It suddenly occurs to her why this woman is here.

‘Is everything OK?’ Alicia says, concerned that something has happened to Patrick. She glances at her watch and sees that it’s just gone 6pm—more than half an hour before Mia and Patrick are due to do the handover.

‘Don’t just stand there. Let me in!’ Mia says, impatiently readjusting her oversized designer handbag as she pushes past her.

‘It’s a nice place you have here,’ Mia says, looking around.

Alicia stands in the hall, blocking her way into the lounge and the bedrooms. The last thing she wants is to give Patrick’s ex a tour of their home. Mia shrugs her shoulders and walks into the newly remodeled, bespoke kitchen. She runs her hand over the shiny gray work surface and admires the cabinets.

‘Do you like living here?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ Alicia says, wondering what on earth the woman wants with her.

Alicia decides to make coffee. Perhaps if she can get Mia to sit down with a hot drink, she can find out.

A few moments later, as they sit facing each other across the kitchen table, cups of coffee in their hands, Mia finally says that Patrick asked her to fetch the girls from the apartment.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Alicia says.

She’s sure Patrick would have told her of the change of plan, as well as warn her about Mia’s visit. Alicia hasn’t set eyes on Patrick’s ex-wife since the previous summer. Mia had accosted Alicia outside the Ålandsbladet newspaper offices, where she and Patrick were working at the time, and accused her of sleeping with her husband. The fact that Mia was already involved with another man, and her wealthy family, the Erikssons, were negotiating a divorce settlement, didn’t seem to matter to Mia. After that unpleasant incident, Alicia had tried to steer clear of her. This wasn’t as difficult on the small Åland islands as it might have seemed. Mia was often jetting off to remote locations, with or without her two daughters.

‘Whatever,’ Mia says.

‘What are you really doing here, Mia?’ Alicia asks.

But instead of replying to her, Mia touches the leaf of a cactus plant that Alicia had placed with two others on the wide windowsill.

‘Do you pay Patrick rent? I mean in money, not just in kind?’

Her eyes are as cold as ice. As is her voice.

‘What’s it to you?’ Alicia manages to say. She tries to control herself, but her voice is high-pitched.

‘Well, I am the landlord after all.’ Mia says, raising her gaze to meet Alicia’s.

‘What?’ Alicia utters the question before she has time to think.

You should be playing this cool.

‘This whole block is owned by Eriksson Holdings, a company I am the Chief Executive of, so in theory—well, not even in theory, but in reality—I am Patrick’s landlord, and now yours. And he doesn’t pay any rent, so…’

Alicia stares at Mia. She wants to shout at her, or get up and yank the woman’s hair, but she controls herself. Several times since moving in four months ago, Alicia has asked Patrick how much she should contribute toward the rent. This is an expensive area and the apartment is beautifully done up with oak flooring throughout. On one occasion, Alicia even told Patrick how lucky he was to find the place, and that it must have cost him a small fortune.

Patrick had just taken her into his arms and said he rented it through a friend. Which, Alicia now knows, is a lie. There is no way Patrick would call Mia ‘a friend’.

‘I’m glad you like the decor. I chose everything myself,’ Mia says, letting her eyes travel from one end of the kitchen to the other.

‘I even ordered all the furniture,’ she adds.

Alicia stares at the woman. Did Patrick know this?

Mia leans closer to her. ‘Including the bed. I particularly loved the oak-framed bed. I thought it would suit Patrick perfectly.’

Alicia’s mind is briefly cast back to when she first met Patrick and (she can now admit to herself) fell instantly in love with him. She was returning to the islands where she was raised, for a holiday with her British husband, Liam. She bumped into Patrick, literally, when the ferry suddenly rocked in rough seas. His blonde hair, blue eyes and strong arms had ignited a fire in Alicia that she thought had been extinguished by grief for her 17-year-old son and her husband’s infidelity.

Alicia can’t take anymore of Mia’s snarky comments. Her head is spinning, but she gets up. Looking down at Mia, she says, ‘At this very moment, Patrick is probably driving toward the ferry port where you were supposed to meet.’

Mia glances at her large and expensive Cartier watch. ‘Oh dear, I must have misunderstood.’ She gets up, having not touched her coffee.

‘I’ll be on my way then. Just a piece of advice. Patrick is fickle. He’ll soon get tired of you, just as he did of me,’ she adds as she floats out of the apartment.

TWO

When Patrick opens the door to the apartment, all he wants to do is to wrap his arms around Alicia and take her to bed. He’s still frozen from the forty minutes spent waiting with Sara and Frederica outside the Marie Line ferry terminal. The early April day was unusually chilly. He thought he spotted some tiny flakes of snow swirling in the wind.

He’d wanted to go inside the terminal building. There were large windows overlooking the parking lot, and Mia’s car would be fully visible, but his youngest, 10-year-old Frederica, had insisted on waiting outside so they wouldn’t miss their mother. The girls wanted to board the ferry inside the car with their mother rather than make their way along the covered walkway alone, something Patrick fully understood. He wouldn’t have let them do it anyway, but they could have waited inside. He’d hugged his two girls close, pretending to keep them both warm, but he also wanted to feel their closeness. He’d miss them during the two weeks until their next visit to Stockholm.

Mia was late, as usual. By the time her brand-new white Jaguar Land Rover turned the corner, there were only five minutes left to board the ship. Patrick held his tongue. He didn’t want to start an argument with Mia. He handed the girls’ rucksacks to their mother and hugged Sara and Frederica tightly one more time.

He hurried to the Tunnelbana station at Ropsten, taking the stone steps from the harbor to the underground platform two at a time. The emptiness he felt each time he said goodbye to his daughters was tearing his chest in two, but as the train speeded toward Mariatorget, his thoughts turned to Alicia more and more and her warm body waiting for him at home.

As soon as Patrick steps inside the apartment, he throws his coat on a hook and goes to find Alicia. She’s standing against the sink, putting something away in the cupboard above. She’s wearing a pair of cotton shorts and a camisole under a long, soft dressing gown, which he’d given her as a moving-in present. The tips of her breasts are visible under the thin cotton, and when he cups her buttocks in his hand, he can feel her soft, rounded flesh. She’s not wearing knickers underneath. Her hair is wet from the shower and she smells wonderful.

‘You’ve cleared up!’ he says and hugs Alicia close.

‘Mia was here,’ Alicia says, moving away from him and sitting down at the kitchen table.

THREE

Patrick sits opposite Alicia, in the chair Mia sat in only an hour ago. He lifts his eyes, and once again Alicia is taken aback by how blue they are. But instead of the openness they normally convey, there’s something else. When he lowers his head to look at his hands and makes no comment, Alicia knows Mia was right.

‘What is it?’ Alicia asks, trying not to sound accusatory.

Now Patrick replies quickly, too quickly, ‘Nothing.’

His eyes meet Alicia’s once again.

‘She told me the family own this apartment. Is that true?’

Patrick shifts on the seat. Alicia waits. Involuntarily, she’s crossed her arms over her chest, but now she lets them drop on her lap.

‘Technically, yes,’ Patrick finally replies.

‘I can’t believe it!’

Alicia has raised her voice and she immediately regrets it.

Patrick reaches over and touches her arm.

‘Look, it was part of the divorce settlement. They own this whole block, so it made sense for me to live here.’

Alicia sits back in the chair. She can’t comprehend what’s happening. When Patrick and Alicia got together, Mia told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of Alicia. It wasn’t a surprise. Alicia had known since school that she and her Finnish mother, not to mention her farmer stepfather, weren’t good enough for the Erikssons. And now Alicia is living in Mia’s apartment rent-free! With furniture that Mia chose.

‘I was never part of that settlement, was I?’ She’s trying to keep calm but she also wants to confront Patrick. She cannot understand why he would lie to her when he knows how she feels about the Eriksson family.

Mia’s father also owns the local newspaper, where Alicia and Patrick worked together last year. On the few occasions when she’d met Kurt in the editorial office, she’d disliked him. She could tell from his perma-tan, expensive designer clothes, and abrupt manner that he didn't think her good enough for his former son-in-law. The son-in-law whom he also despised.

And Mia’s mother, Beatrice, a prize-winning author, who didn’t say two words to her or her parents when they’d met at the Midsummer party last year, is just as aloof. All of them, except the two girls, are just the kind of entitled, self-satisfied rich people that Alicia loathes. And now she is beholden to this family.

‘No,’ Patrick says quietly.

‘Right, I’m moving out as soon as I can,’ Alicia says.

‘But I love you,’ Patrick says in a low voice.

These three words, so simple, are powerful.

She nods and replies, ‘Me too.’

‘We can work this out, can’t we?’ Patrick says.

His eyes are on Alicia and she can feel herself melt.

Patrick gets up and places his lips on her mouth.

‘We’ll both move out, if that makes you happy,’ he murmurs in her ear and lifts her up. He half carries, half guides her toward their bedroom at the back of the apartment, while Alicia begins to undo his flies. Before they make it to the bedroom, she’s lifted up her top, removed her shorts and guided him inside her.

‘I thought I was going burst on the Tunnelbana,’ Patrick says afterward, grinning.

‘If that’s what two days without sex does to you, what will you be like in the summer when you’ll have the girls over for two weeks?’ Alicia says, smiling.

Her tone is light, but she is serious. This had been the first time Sara and Frederica had stayed with Patrick and Alicia. The plan had been that Alicia would go back to the islands to visit her mother and stepfather on the weekends the girls visited, but at the last minute Patrick had begged Alicia to stay.

And Alicia had loved being with the two girls. She cast her mind back to when Stefan was that age. She never thought she’d have another chance to play a part in bringing up children, however small that part might be.

But now after Mia’s unwanted visit, she isn’t sure of anything.

FOUR

Since moving to Stockholm and sharing her life and an apartment with Patrick, Alicia has often thought about Mia. This was a surprise to her, because while she’d been deciding whether to leave the Åland Islands behind, she’d hardly thought about Mia. Patrick had convinced her that his ex was history, and that Alicia would never have to interact with her, even though she was Sara and Frederica’s mother.

After meeting Patrick’s daughters, Alicia thought she ought to give Mia the benefit of the doubt. The girls were well-behaved and lovely, so surely a mother of such daughters couldn’t be all bad? Alicia knew that divorce brings the very worst out of people.

This now seems to have been an utterly naive attitude. But what did Mia want? Surely she’s too busy with her new relationship and her position in the Eriksson family business? Patrick said that she was now heading the property side of the enterprises, which, as far as Alicia could tell, included everything from a large real estate portfolio to digital startups. Plus, she was the primary carer for the girls—they only came to visit Patrick every other weekend. Times when Alicia usually went back to Sjoland, on the islands, to visit her mother, Hilda, and step-dad Uffe. On these occasions, she often thought about Mia and the girls crossing the Ålandshav in the opposite direction.

Patrick is always a little detached after these visits from the girls, although it never affects their lovemaking. If possible, he’s more passionate on those Sunday afternoons after he’s waved his daughters goodbye. Although Patrick had—financially speaking—a good divorce settlement, he’d had to give up time with Sara and Frederica.

Alicia’s conscience is clear. The divorce had nothing to do with her. When she first set eyes on the blonde Swede on the ferry, Mia was already seeing another man.

Patrick was heartbroken, he told her later, even if the marriage had been a mistake from the very start.

Kurt Eriksson, Mia’s father, had never accepted a lowly reporter as his son-in-law, and Mia’s infatuation with him soon waned after the children were born. Alicia, who was still grieving for her son, couldn’t understand how, according to Patrick, Mia was at times uninterested in her children. As soon as she was able, she went back to work as a realtor, leaving Patrick in charge of childcare. It was only the previous spring, when Mia confessed to her affair with Max von Rosengard, a well-heeled Swedish businessman, that she’d decided to move back to Åland and bring the girls fully into the Eriksson family fold. Before this, they had lived in Östermalm, the most swanky part of Stockholm.

Mia and Alicia had never really been friends when they were growing up, even though Mariehamn was a small place and everyone knew each other. Alicia was a year above Mia at school, but it was impossible not to be aware of Mia. Wearing the latest fashion—even then—Mia had expensive bikes, was driven to school in winter in her father’s Jaguar (then the only one on the islands), and threw the most sought-after birthday parties.

Alicia had not been invited to any of the Eriksson family functions until last summer, when Patrick had persuaded her mother, Hilda, to bring her and Uffe along to their Midsummer Party, the highlight of the islands’ summer calendar. Hilda jumped at the chance to mingle with Åland’s high society. Alicia wanted to stay at home, but it became too impolite to do so. Besides, her mother would never have forgiven her.

It was during the party that Patrick and Alicia had kissed for the first time, on a beach built by Kurt Eriksson for his grandchildren. Alicia often wonders what would have happened if she had stuck to her guns and not gone to the party. Would Patrick and Alicia have had the tumultuous affair that had consumed them last summer? The affair that Alicia had ended after discovering that her son had made Frida, a local girl, pregnant. She’d wanted to try to make her own marriage work for the sake of her new family.

In the end, Liam and Alicia had grown too much apart to save their marriage. Liam was committed to his work as a consultant in a busy London hospital and Alicia didn’t want to go back to the UK. When it turned out that little Anne Sofie wasn’t their granddaughter after all, they had nothing left in common.

Alicia turns toward Patrick and sees that he’s closed his eyes. It’s been a busy weekend, and they’d both been tense, wishing it to go as well as possible with the girls. She decides to let Patrick sleep and gets out of bed.

Walking through the lounge, she gazes at the turquoise velvet sofa, with the fluffy pillows, and the vast rug with a swirly pattern. She looks at the white bookcase against one wall, filled with pot plants and trendy publications, and then at the two pale lounge chairs with wooden armrests placed opposite the sofa. She examines the chairs more closely. They’re made of pleated leather webbing and much more expensive than she’d thought when she first saw them.

Now she can see Mia’s touch everywhere.

Even the bed, where she and Patrick just made love, and had done so many times before, is in Mia’s style. Did she buy the white linen bedding as well?

Alicia’s immediate reaction is to flee the place and never touch anything in the apartment again, but she knows that’s impractical. What does it matter if Mia chose the interior?

If she did.

It is possible that Mia is twisting the truth. Alicia needs to ask Patrick, but she doesn’t want to wake him up and start another argument tonight.

Alicia sinks into the trendy sofa and puts her head into her hands. She’s fooling herself. She’ll never feel happy here again.

FIVE

The place is one of the trendy, buzzy restaurants that surrounds Södermalm, the southern part of the city, close to Patrick’s apartment. While Alicia has been getting used to living in Stockholm, they’ve eaten out nearly every night. And it’s often Patrick who picks up the bill, something that bothers Alicia more than she thought it might. She’s sensitive about the balance of their relationship, especially today, after the fight they had yesterday.

All night she’d been thinking about Mia. Why, if she’d known all along that Alicia was living with Patrick, did Mia want to see her now? Perhaps it was to do with the girls? It had been the first time Alicia had stayed in Stockholm on one of Patrick’s weekends with the children. It had gone reasonably well. The oldest, Sara, had been a little cool to begin with on the Friday Patrick brought them home, but she had warmed up when they’d found a trendy new store selling reclaimed clothes on Ringvägen. The girl was