CHAPTER 11
Simone is on the highway, and her phone is switched on and immediately ringing. She leans across to get it, where it skitters away from her hand on the dashboard like a beetle with the slight movement of the car. She grabs it, and there on the display it says Damien.
He’s landed. She pulls the car over.
It somehow does not feel strange for Simone to be dealing with this alone.
She recalls a very specific moment when she was taken into care and had started her periods.
She’d realized, then, vibrant blood in her underwear in a dingy bathroom, that no one was coming to help her.
That the staff at the first children’s home wouldn’t, and nor would the foster family that followed.
It was up to Simone. Jaw set, she’d bought pads, decided she didn’t like them, switched to tampons.
She still uses the cheap brand she chose then, the first one she picked up.
Nevertheless, she can’t not answer the phone.
She can’t be that person. She might be somebody who is driving recklessly across a strange country in pursuit of her daughter and against her husband’s wishes, but she isn’t that person, the kind who can go dark on a husband who is desperately searching, too, for answers.
‘Are the police involved?’ Damien says.
In the background, she hears the airport: final boarding calls, beeping, laughter, suitcases being dragged.
Something in that bright, lit-up normality makes Simone, alone on a desert highway in the Texan twilight, yearn.
If only. If only they hadn’t come, got a different flight, chosen a different lodge …
‘Damien, I went.’
‘What?’ he says, his voice cold. ‘Is Lucy there?’
‘No. They want me to – to do something else.’
‘What? Where is she? Where are you? Where are the police?’
‘I came alone.’
Damien responds to this with a resounding silence.
‘You didn’t tell them,’ he says finally.
‘Not yet,’ she says, and she knows there is disingenuous misdirection in this statement. She winces. ‘I had no choice.’
‘What are you doing?’ he says, his voice low, the question so broad and loaded, she finds she doesn’t know how to answer it.
‘I …’
‘What do they want you to do?’
‘They want me to go to Mexico,’ she says, not wanting to incriminate him but not wanting to lie, either.
‘Mexico?’ Damien replies, evidently stunned. ‘What?’
‘The next instructions are in Mexico. I …’ She is about to say she can’t say any more than that, but that would invite more questions. She can’t let him get caught up in this. If she doesn’t manage it, she can’t leave Lucy with no parents at all, both in prison.
‘This is fucking ludicrous. A wild goose chase. I’ll call the police.’
‘Don’t – Damien. I’ve got to do it.’
‘Simone.’ To Simone’s horror, his voice begins to clog with tears. ‘You promised that you were going to.’ Another pause, then he adds: ‘I trusted that you were going to.’
‘I’m going to get her back.’
‘The police help with missing people. With kidnaps. Single, vulnerable women don’t. Why are they sending you there?’
Simone blinks, touched that he cares so much for her own safety as well as Lucy’s – something she hasn’t once considered. Wondering, too, if the single is pointed. ‘I can’t tell you.’
Damien leaves another dangerous silence.
‘You would really have defied that note? If you were here?’ she presses him.
Damien answers without sounding barbed. ‘They always say not to tell the police.’ The background noise suddenly disappears, then a soft-close sound; he’s found a quiet corner, maybe. ‘Simone.’ It’s a full sentence.
‘How do you know they always say not to tell the police? What do you even mean – on TV?’
‘The authorities would want to get her back,’ he says.
‘We’re not …’ The line breaks up then, and Simone temporarily loses him.
‘… everyone is on the same side.’ Simone finds herself thinking how naive.
Another bad thought. Damien had a charmed upbringing with his beautiful siblings and his beautiful parents in a huge four-bedroom house in Tottenham.
He has never had any reason to disbelieve anybody.
Nobody drank too much, nobody had to be woken up by their ten-year-old daughter who was missing school.
Nobody hid syringes in their underwear drawers.
‘The police don’t want to pay ransoms because they don’t want more ransoms,’ she tells him. ‘We are not on the same side. They said they would kill her.’
She closes her eyes. Marrying him, marrying into his family, she almost became one of them. She laughs every day with his sister. She misses it all suddenly. She misses life before this. It’s the first time she’s felt homesick or felt anything besides fear since Lucy was taken.
‘I couldn’t receive that message and not do what it says,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry – I know that is wrong. I’d hate me, too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I’ve got new instructions, now, and I’m going to follow them.’
Damien pauses again, this time for even longer. ‘You won’t tell me what.’
‘It’s better you don’t know. Listen. You would’ve called the police against my wishes if you had known,’ she tells him.
‘Well, I haven’t,’ Damien says simply, eventually, and Simone finds she can’t argue with that.
‘I’m going to get her back,’ she tells him. And she hears the damning silence, his hurt and betrayal folded up within it, but she can’t listen to it. She needs to get back to that focal point on the horizon: her daughter. ‘If you call them now, you will ruin it.’
Damien sighs, and Simone wonders if he will.
‘Is there anything I could say that would change your mind?’ he says with a kind of mournful sadness.
‘No.’
‘Right then,’ he says, downbeat. ‘Go get your baby,’ he says, his words spiteful, but his voice soft and sad, not mean.
‘She’s our baby,’ Simone says.
‘You have made it clear from day one that she is yours,’ Damien says, and here is the red flag, waving starkly in front of Simone, who can’t help but charge at it.
‘Damien,’ she says, a note of warning in her voice.
‘What? No, no, you go and rescue her yourself,’ he says. ‘You make the parenting decisions yourself. You’re in charge; you’re the CEO of her, the mother.’
Simone, stunned, does the only thing she knows how to do: speak the stark and painful truth.
‘Women love their children more than men do,’ she tells him.
‘Everyone knows this.’ And, as she utters this sentiment, something she has felt for years but never spoken aloud, the world seems to change slightly.
‘How can you say that to me?’ he says.
‘I reorganized my whole life around her,’ she says plainly.
And she did. She grew her. She fed her with fluids from her own body.
She cried when she did, she got up in the night, she left work early, missed opportunities, nights out, the lot.
For the first few years, Damien alone ran the restaurant and Simone had Lucy.
He would arrive home after lunch service and leave again before dinner, miss Lucy’s bedtime every night.
He doesn’t know how many thousand moments he missed.
Stories and fights over tooth brushing and cups of warm milk and sizing up a sleep sack.
He missed it. After Lucy was asleep, Simone would sit alone sometimes and think about this, feeling an odd mix of superiority and martyrdom.
‘You’d better get her back,’ he says, and this time it is spiteful. ‘I’m getting the connecting flight now. I’ll be in Texas soon. And don’t worry. I won’t call the police. I would not betray you.’
He cuts the call without saying anything further.
Simone is reverberating with hurt and rage and the kind of cleansed but purged feeling that comes with having spoken an ugly truth.
Damien is unspeakably disappointed with her.
And Simone knows, somewhere deep inside her, that everything that happens from this moment will now be on her shoulders.
If they had told the police, it would have been on Damien’s.
But they’ve gone with her. A single decision.
A single moment. A single truth spoken. And everything that stems from it.