‘We could even set up a little food van,’ Damien says, ‘something low-key, but still cooking.’ Perhaps he feels he must be the voice of optimism, his face into her neck in the wind, and Simone is so, so glad that he managed to be with them. She closes her eyes. Maybe she is just exhausted. Maybe these thoughts are just tiredness, the tail end of adrenaline leaving her body. The identities, the delay, how far they have been running, all the way from Fort Davis to the coast.
And that’s when it happens. The lights. So sudden they blanch her closed eyelids.
Damien’s body stiffens behind hers, his arms unintentionally tightening uncomfortably across her body. There they are. Torches, high-vis: four police, then eight, then more and more, multiplying exponentially like a virus. They’re on the deck beneath them like invaders, pointing their beams up and down so much that they strobe the sea air around Simone and Damien.
They both hear it: an American accent. ‘Police!’
‘What’s with the delays?’ somebody asks.
‘We have to remove somebody – just getting to their cabin,’ he says, and that is the moment Simone knows it’s over. She and Damien don’t say anything to each other, instead just stay there, husband and wife alone, together, at the edge of the world, his arms tight around her, as the realization hits: they have been corralled on to the ship. Three criminals, caught. It’s the perfect place to hold them until arrest. Nowhere to run or to hide. A bobbing ship about to depart.
All they can do is wait. There’s nothing to say, anyway. They just look at the straight horizon together, two people in love, divided over a ransom but brought together by it, too, in a bid to stay free.
And then Damien speaks: a secret he’s kept all this time.
CHAPTER 67
Damien does that thing he sometimes does where he cups the back of Simone’s head in his huge palm.
Eventually, he seems to come to some decision, there on the deck as the boat swarms with police sent to capture them, to take their family and tear them apart. ‘Simone,’ he says. His voice is hot against the nape of her neck. It is warm and intimate in contrast to the cold and chilled sea air.
‘What?’ she says, her voice full of trepidation.
He takes a breath, exhales slowly, this time through his nose. It’s cooler, dizzying against her neck. He’s done it thousands of times, her husband, but never like this. Their intimacy now feels awful, loaded, dangerous.
‘I should have said this before, but I didn’t want to tell you until I had to.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Do you remember, a while back, you asked me what I knew, from the time I spent with the police?’
‘Yes,’ Simone says, and the officers are moving down the deck, towards the stairs. They don’t have much time.
‘You were right to ask me. I do know something,’ he tells her, his voice low. He’s still behind her, speaking directly into her ear. He covers her hands with his. She turns within the circle of his arms to face him.
‘There is a reason I didn’t tell you,’ he tells her. ‘It’s – I didn’t want to.’ A pause. ‘I didn’t want tohaveto.’
Simone merely stops still, horrified and waiting for him to finish.
‘They always said, in the briefings and in the interviews with me, that if you handed yourself in and pleaded guilty to every count, then they would spare Lucy her charge of wounding the police officer,’ he tells her. ‘I can’t – I can’t let you not know this –’ his eyes to the police – ‘now.’
Simone blinks at him, her eyes wet, and everything falls into place. ‘No trial,’ she says softly. ‘Just guilt and – and then prison.’
‘Yes,’ he says, in a sad whisper.
She turns away from Damien, stares out to sea, and then, there with the swirling sky and the crisp, salty air, everything Lucy said to her last night coalesces into one single thought. Parenthood isn’t just loving your child; it is sacrifice.
Lucy wants to be free. She told her as much. Maybe she didn’t know that Simone could make it happen, but she requested that she try. Parents have to let their children go.
Lucy wants to move away from Simone, she always did, to RADA, only she didn’t know how to say. And she wants freedom now, too. And this is what Simone should be fostering: not only love, but independence, too. An eighteen-year-old needs her liberty more than she needs her mother. This is the truth; it just is. And if they’re on the run, Lucy does not have her freedom.
Lucy doesn’t want to live in the Bahamas. And now Simone has a way to give her freedom.
Here’s the answer to the conundrum. It isn’t finding the kidnapper. It isn’t going to trial at all, and hoping to find a defence or get off. It’s this, a simplethis: parental self-sacrifice. It always was. It would’ve broken Simone’s heart when Lucy moved out, but it would’ve been the right thing to do. And this is a mere extension of that.
She has got to hand herself in. She should have done so weeks ago.
Simone’s body goes into shock. She hums with it, a guitar string plucked and left to shiver. She’s going to go to prison.
