‘I can’t remember any of our list, now,’ Lucy says. ‘But this feels like a pro.’
‘Maybe,’ Simone says.
‘It’ll blow over,’ Lucy says. Perhaps she can’t yet see the scale of their problems. Simone is not minded to tell her; there’s time for her to get there, to realize. There’s time for a solution.
A pause. ‘Do you think Dad is trying to find us?’ she asks, returning to Damien once more.
‘Yes, definitely,’ Simone lies.
‘Maybe he’s trying to find the kidnapper, too.’
Simone moves closer to her, and sees Lucy’s expression is open and true.
‘When you saidbring him to justice, what did you mean?’ Simone asks.
‘He’s ruined our lives,’ Lucy snaps, and it’s clear that Lucy knows exactly what the score is, that their old existence is gone, that she just manages to compartmentalize it most of the time. ‘It’s like I imagined it. We have so little evidence.’
‘No, you didn’t imagine it. I was there,’ Simone says.
‘He was – his hand … that first journey in his car. Then in his arms again, he handled me so roughly as we went in the door to his house. I heard a key turn, a big one, maybe.’
Simone listens, hoping that if Lucy keeps recounting the events, details will begin to emerge that will help them. That voice, Lucy’s voice, throaty and rich and full. It drifts up into the heavens. And even though it has within it some pain, it is also ambitious and feisty and real. Simone could listen to Lucy forever. She would see a one-woman play of her that lasted a lifetime.
‘I’m going to wash my hair,’ Lucy says, drifting to the edge of the stream.
‘No – it will make it so much more tangled,’ Simone says.
‘I can’t resist. It’s so dirty.’
She gets out, a darting white silhouette in the night. Simone cannot resist either. It feels so good to dunk her head, to slough off the grease, the sweat, the tang of adrenaline. She submerges fully under, opens her eyes, staring at the rocks and the silt in the darkness.
She pops up, and Lucy is returning with a shampoo and – ludicrously – an intensive conditioner.
‘This will help get the fork through it!’ she tells Simone.
‘A leave-in conditioner.’
‘Great hair is always a must,’ Lucy says lightly.
They stay with it on for ten minutes, fifteen, talking about small topics, how the restaurant might be doing, what Terlingua is like, if George the cat is wondering why Damien left, too, until Simone’s teeth begin to chatter. ‘It’s so cold I can’t feel my body,’ Simone says, washing off the conditioner with a satisfying oily slick.
‘Do a little wee – warm yourself up, I have!’
‘You haven’t!’ Simone exclaims.
‘I most definitely have.’
‘I’m out now,’ Simone says with a laugh. ‘But thank you. That was the best moment of my day.’
They get dressed and Simone thinks that actually, perversely, that might have been one of the best moments of her entire life, here, in the wilderness of right and wrong, fugitives, but together. And then she sees that Lucy has made the bed for her again.
‘Tell me something,’ Lucy says, sitting in the tent, the soft patter of their hair dripping. ‘Just one thing. One weirdthing about your trip. From leaving the UK, to losing me, to rescuing me. Tell me something that could be a clue.’
Simone pauses, thinking. The baggage claim, the hire car, the drive to the lodge. The kidnap, the ransom. Border Patrol. The bag in the empty garage.
Nothing stands out, until one thing does. The relaxation, the swimming. It’s broken something open. All this time, Simone had been asking Lucy about the kidnapping, but they hadn’t focused on what Simone might know, too.
‘There was a man on the coach to and from Mexico,’ she says. ‘He checked if I was OK. There was just something slightly weird about it. I don’t know. Overly familiar.’
