‘Kind of. Yes.’
‘Look, I can have my feelings hurt by you but still be here, still want to be here, with you,’ he says, and he scoots his chair closer to hers. Their knees touch, and Simone is strangely nervous, the happy nerves of first dates, but feeling grateful, too, for that quality of his that is hard to find: emotional maturity. ‘I didn’t want to say this online,’ he says, waving a hand. And then he looks at her, and Simone thinks,Please, please, please don’t say that I did the wrong thing. Please don’t ask me about buying a gun. Trafficking drugs.She can’t deal with anybody’s judgement right now, but much less from him, a man who has always unconditionally accepted her.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Just this. Thank God it was you who got the ransom and not me. I might’ve told the police, and then we might not’ve got her back.’
And Simone closes her eyes. Those beautiful words that must be so hard for him to say but that mean so much to her. She did the right thing, even though they ended up here, in a one-horse town in Texas, the three of them on the run.
‘Thank you,’ she says, her voice thick. ‘Thank you.’ She clears her throat, and he passes her his lemonade wordlessly. Something about this gesture touches her as she sips it. ‘Thank you,’ she says again.
Simone’s body begins to unwind slowly as they sit there, together. Adrenaline she has become accustomed to feeling begins to stop burning.
And then she starts to talk. Every moment, from the beginning to the end. And the thing she actually wants tolinger on is the shooting. That man,survived by a wife and child, taken by her. It’s been waiting there, the images boxed up in her mind to tell somebody safe, someone who is not her child. She tells him about the blood and the feel of the handgun, the body, losing the pulse, their panicked phone call. All the while, Damien holds her hands and doesn’t ask any questions, just lets her talk. Just listens.
‘I wake at four every morning. The time she was taken. I dream of her disappearing.’
‘Understandable,’ he says, later. ‘I wouldn’t even have woken … so you’re a better parent than me.’ It’s an olive branch, Simone thinks, offered there in the desert.
Then he tells her, ‘The police, they … I don’t know. From the sheriff’s call, they seemed to take against you.’
‘You know about that call?’
‘Uh-huh,’ he says calmly. ‘They told me everything. They interviewed the cop who you lied to. He said he feltsureLucy was there.’
‘But why?’
‘Said you seemed too calm,’ he replies, and Simone cringes. Her ability to mask in situations where she’s under pressure, taught to her by a shitty childhood. Now the unravelling of a great adulthood. ‘Said Lucy’s things were all around. Said he didn’tnoticea broken door.’
‘Did they go back there?’
‘Don’t know. He’s a key witness for them. They checked the ANPR footage of your car, but it’s blurry. Just saw it driving to the border. You can’t tell if Lucy is inside or not. Then someone – whoever, the British man, maybe – said you weren’t alone on the coach. Then the call to the sheriff – they think it was some sort of bluff. Drugs drop gone wrong – you needed to invent a story.’
‘We didn’t call the sheriff. The operator put us through to him. We called a fucking ambulance.’
‘Oh,’ Damien says. ‘I guess, the thing is …’ A hesitation. ‘I guess to the police maybe it felt like there was such public interest in this story that they didn’t want to listen to you, I suppose,’ he says, his tone low. ‘They were looking for a perpetrator, like they always are. It’s easier to assume that’s you. Everyone believed the headline, so they forged on with it.’
‘So they don’t care to investigate it,’ Simone says, her tone deadpan. ‘They just want a conviction.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How stupid.’
‘No. I know,’ Damien soothes. ‘I know.’
‘Is it me they want, mostly?’ Simone asks him.
Damien waves a hand, but it’s exaggerated, the sort of thing you do when keen to move the conversation on, away from this topic. She looks at him closely. He stands and double-checks the window is closed even though he saw her do it. He’s buying time, thinking.
She isn’t usually opposed to this. Damien fills the gaps in their marriage with thought and careful planning. Simone drives the rest forward with action. It is how they have always worked. Her messy cooking, his quiet tidying up. She always reinventing the menu, he wanting to stay the same.
‘They want you for murder and drugs crimes, but Lucy is a full accessory, plus wanted in her own right for shooting at the Buick, which they have interpreted as an attempted homicide on a cop,’ he says in the end softly, turning to her.
‘Do you know what we would get?’ Simone asks, without thought, and if Damien knows, he says that he doesn’t; he’s always sparing her.
He looks at her. ‘They asked me over and over about ourphone calls. I told them everything I knew about the kidnap, about your description of it. They said it’s a very common defence to any crime around here: say you were forced to do it by organized criminals.’
‘But that’s! That’s –’
‘I know,’ he interrupts. ‘Mad. And unfair.’
