‘Sometimes, the rare thingdoeshappen.’
‘Yep.’
‘Lucy’s account of it is so visceral …’
‘She’s a trained actor. The police arewellaware.’
‘So. Fucking. What.’
‘I have missed your swearing.’
‘Believe me, it’s been ongoing.’
His voice turns delicate. ‘This doesn’t mean a court would convict.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Thebusiness opportunitytext from me really wasn’t helpful. And they grabbed on to how you recently also sent some other texts about the restaurant’s overdraft to Luan.’
‘August was a bad month. Wet. They think you flew out to make money to put in our account? Because of the text I sent to you about you having access to our bank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they thinkyou’rean accessory?’
‘I’m not sure. They didn’t caution me.’
‘It’s mental. As if the solution to a restaurant ailing is a drugs drop!’
‘I know. I think they thought you were offered an opportunity, somehow, so flew out.’
‘Did you see the news about the star?’ she asks, and is surprised that, at this above all else, she loses it, her face crumpling up like a child’s while Damien holds her and tells her that he did.
They lapse into silence. ‘Do you think we should hand ourselves in?’ she asks quietly.
Damien pauses for so long that Simone leans back in his arms to look at him.
‘No,’ he says, but it doesn’t sound exactly like a refusal to Simone. Then he adds, ‘Don’t ask me that.’
The breeze begins to cool rapidly the way that it does here. Simone leans into it, but Damien is looking at her strangely.
‘What?’ she asks him.
‘I’ve been thinking about the best thing to do,’ Damien says, and it is precisely at this moment that Simone realizes he isn’t only here because he wanted to join them. He is here because he has made a plan for them. Sure enough, he finishes this with: ‘I’ve got an idea.’
CHAPTER 54
‘You can buy an identity,’ Damien says simply. He places his glass down on the decking at his bare feet, then darts a cautious glance at the bathroom window and at the horizon beyond them.
‘An identity,’ Simone says, staring at the ring of condensation that begins to form around the glass in the heat.
‘A false identity. And then settle somewhere. Somewhere people aren’t looking.’
The world around them seems to stop, for just a moment, for Simone and Damien only. The wind lets up, the ice cubes in his glass stop moving. The desert holds its breath.
‘Right,’ Simone says softly, to buy thinking time. In all her rumination with Lucy, this solution – hiding forever, but intentionally – did not really come up. And she supposes that was because Damien wasn’t with them, so it wasn’t available to them, but … it seems so obvious now, but something else, too. Something painful, something that feels like grief.
They have so much still to figure out. They have to find the man. But here is a solution that feels more viable. Perhaps the answer was not to find the kidnapper, nor to hand themselves in, nor exoneration, either – the answer was to disappear.
