Falling Again For Her Island Fling. Ellie Darkins

dipping under the water, exhaling through her snorkel, leaving a trail of bubbles behind her. His skin on hers was too distracting; she needed to put a sensible amount of space between them. She swam over to the reef, her camera on a tether clipped to her top, and waited for Guy to catch her up. She pointed out the areas where the coral bleaching was at its worst, and then over to the other side of the reef where there was a large unstable section and some damage that looked as if it had been caused by a boat anchor.

      This was where she could do the most good. If the bleaching had gone on for so long that the coral had died, that couldn’t be reversed, and even if she transplanted new coral into those areas it might suffer the same fate. But over on this side of the reef she had a chance to repair the damage. If she could secure the unstable sections of coral by transplanting in new colonies from other parts of the islands, then it stood a chance of growing back as healthy and vibrant an ecosystem as it had been in the past.

      But there were no guarantees. She’d been part of several transplantation efforts over the two years that she’d been back at the Environmental Agency. Some of them had flourished; some of them she’d watched as they’d faded and died, despite every intervention that she could think of to try.

      She signed to Guy to let him know what she was doing and dived a little deeper, holding her breath as the end of her snorkel dipped below the water. She took some more photographs, going as deep as she could within the reef without touching the coral and adding to the problems it was facing. She tried to decide if underneath the unstable sections it could support a transplanted colony, and the evidence that she would have to present to the Environmental Agency and to Guy if her plan was going to be approved.

      She looked up towards Guy and kicked her legs to come up to the surface. He had stayed near the top of the reef, watching her rather than looking at the coral. There wasn’t much of interest on this part of the reef to look at, she acknowledged. With most of the coral dead or dying, the rest of the marine life had followed suit.

      When she’d first dived at this reef, back before her accident, before she’d even gone to Australia, it had been a vibrant landscape of marine life. Brightly coloured fish had swum in and out of the coral, and anemones had waved gently in the light current. She had known where to watch out for well-camouflaged stone fish, and where to give a wide berth to avoid getting too close to a lion fish. But global warming and other human interventions had worked fast, turning it into an underwater wasteland.

      She tried not to despair. She was here; Guy was here. They were going to try to fix this. If she thought too much about what the reef had lost, she’d never be able to concentrate on what she needed to do to bring it back to life.

      When she had all the pictures she needed she signed to Guy that they should head back to the boat, and then she bobbed up above the surface, checking that Guy was alongside her. She climbed back onto the deck of the boat, pulling off her mask and fins and squeezing salt water from her hair.

      She was aware of Guy sitting next to her, taking off his equipment, but it wasn’t until he spoke that she turned to look at him and saw the expression on his face.

      ‘My God, what happened to it?’ he asked, his face pale.

      She narrowed her eyes.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I mean, the last time I saw it, it was teeming with life. We could barely move for fish.’

      We? She didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know with whom he’d been here before.

      ‘You’ve swum here before?’ she asked, surprised that he’d not mentioned it yet.

      He nodded. ‘Last time I visited St Antoine.’

      The shock was evident on his features, and she softened towards him a little. It was clear that he did care about the environment of the island, despite his impatience to move on the building project.

      ‘What happened to it?’ he asked again.

      She explained about coral bleaching, the effects of rising sea temperatures and the impact of tourism and watched his face as the information sank in. She would have to wait and see whether that carried through to the decisions that he made as the project progressed. It was easy to be shocked by environmental issues when you were sitting on the water with the evidence right in front of you. In her experience, developers started caring a lot less about the coral when they were back in their offices, staring at a spreadsheet and a schedule.

      Well, that was why she was here, she reminded herself—so that Guy wouldn’t forget. She smirked to herself at the irony of the amnesiac being the one responsible for reminding someone of anything. She softened towards him, though. He clearly was very shocked by what he had seen.

      ‘I know it’s hard to see,’ she said. She knew that all too well. It broke her heart, seeing what had become of what had once been a lively, vibrant reef. ‘But this is why we’re here. You’re doing the right thing, putting this right before the building work starts. Not everyone would.’

      Guy shook his head. ‘Looks like we were too late.’

      ‘Maybe not. I’ve seen other reefs recover.’ Not many. Not often. But she had fresh young coral growing in the lab, waiting to be transplanted out. ‘The situation’s bad, but not hopeless,’ she said as she steered them around the coral, back towards the little dock on Le Bijou. ‘We have to try.’

      Seven years hadn’t seemed so long until he went down under the surface of the water and saw for himself the evidence of how much time had passed. How different the world was now compared to the last time that he had been here. How something that had once been beautiful had been so completely destroyed. Meena had said that maybe the reef could be saved, that they at least had to try. But he could see for himself that it was a lost cause.

      When Meena had denied his applications for the permits he needed, he’d not been able to see it as anything but an inconvenience—and an expensive, time-consuming one at that. But now he could see why she was so concerned.

      He looked around the island after he had waved her off in her boat and tried to imagine how it would look when the resort was finished. He had artists’ renderings and a three-dimensional model, but they couldn’t tell him how it would feel to lie on the beach with the resort behind him and the sea creeping towards his toes.

      Could he lie on the sand, imagining what was happening to the crumbling coral below the sparkling water? That was why he was going to hire Meena, he reasoned. It would be her job to worry about that. Not his. And, now that he had seen her out here, he was satisfied that she knew what she was doing and he shouldn’t have to worry about it any more.