Extract: Caller Unknown by Gillian McAllister

Simone's holiday to Texas was meant to be some much needed bonding time with her teenage daughter, Lucy.

On their first night in the desert, Simone wakes to find Lucy missing and a mobile phone in her place. The phone rings: Lucy has been taken and, in order to get her back, Simone must commit a crime.

As Simone prepares to follow the kidnapper's instructions, she feels certain that there is nothing she wouldn't do to save Lucy. But becoming a wanted woman is just the start...

Read an exclusive extract of Caller Unknown by Gillian McAllister below!

Your children are only ever on loan to you. Simone glimpsed this phrase last month on a billboard in London advertising a film and then spent the rest of the day arguing in her head with it. Of course that isn’t correct, she had thought. If you do it right, your children are yours forever.

But it has plagued her in the way things sometimes do when they contain an uncomfortable truth. And so Simone is thinking of that billboard once again now as she sits cross- legged on a motionless baggage carousel in Del Rio Airport, Texas, waiting to go and meet her daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer here.

Everybody else’s cases have come and gone. Simone’s is, a jaded attendant told her, ‘Probably somewhere here, but honestly? Could be on the moon,’ and Simone had to do something she only recently learned at the age of forty-three: hold her tongue.

She opens a note buried deep in her phone – she’d be mor- tified if anybody ever found it – on which she has written the days of August to cross off. Just a simple list, no app or fanfare.

1 August – X

2 August – X

And now it’s the thirty-first, and she ought to be seeing Lucy right now, except Simone’s flight was delayed three times over, she arrived in Atlanta late, missed the connection. And her bag is on the moon, and it is ten past ten at night, the airport sleeping. The only person around is a porter cleaning the floor back and forth in rhythmic strokes. She sends Lucy a text: Landed late! I think I should just grab an airport hotel?

Her phone rings immediately. ‘The lodge is remote check- in,’ Lucy says the second Simone answers. This is how they begin conversations: in the middle. They end them there, too, their sentences understood and finished by the other. They have always been this way, right from when Lucy learned to talk. ‘That will be so late for you,’ Simone says, thinking pain- fully of her phone note ticking into September but hiding it, ‘just come tomorrow. Get some sleep. I don’t even have my bag yet; it’s lost somewhere,’ she adds. She pauses, listening.

‘What is that?’ ‘Fargo.’

‘Movie or series?’

‘Movie,’ Lucy says, just a note of disparagement in her voice. Simone’s daughter, aspiring actor, is never not watching something she would call seminal, always with the same battered brown notebook and pen out. Lucy continues: ‘Airbnb don’t care when you check in,’ and Simone hears the movie go off, motion begin in her daughter’s voice, footsteps, doors closing. ‘Besides, it’s only ten or whatever.’ A pause. ‘Has it been a nightmare?’

‘No,’ Simone lies. ‘Just sitting around waiting. Not half as boring as Fargo.’

‘Touché! It’s supposed to be boring. Because it reflects the bleakness of – No,’ Lucy says, and Simone can just see the hand her daughter is holding up. ‘We’ll talk Fargo later. Go find that bag.’

‘They have no idea where it is. Said it could be on the moon.’

‘How stupid. Demand they go to the moon.’

Simone smiles into the phone. Lucy is so like Simone was years and years and years ago, full of verve and offbeat obses- sions and humour and (sometimes) explosions of temper. Life and Damien and running a restaurant mellowed Simone out, but nevertheless something about this similarity fills her with happiness. She always figured her own messy childhood made her the way she is, but not so: Lucy’s childhood has been charmed, and look.

‘Anyway, I’m getting a cab now,’ Lucy says.

Simone notes the half-American lexicon, cab, born out of a summer spent over here. Or maybe she’s always said ‘cab’, and Simone just hadn’t noticed until now.

‘Let’s do it,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you at the lodge,’ and they hang up. Just then, like a sign, the carousel starts up again, jud- dering Simone to standing, but no bags come.

She looks for the porter, but he’s gone. She stands around, watching the conveyor belt deliver no bags to no people, then wanders to a nearby vending machine. She’s just pondering the American snack selection – mediocre, but why do things always seem more exciting when purchased overseas? – when a lone employee drifts by with an overstuffed burrito in one hand. She knows just from looking that despite its arrogantly large size, it is bland, the tortilla completely unbrowned, for starters. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to him. ‘I’ve lost my case, I bet you can’t help, but . . .’

‘I’m Border Patrol,’ he says, but he does so apologetically. ‘I’m going to meet my daughter – God, I just want to get there. I’m so late already. I’ve missed her so much,’ she garbles. ‘Let me see what I can do,’ he says. He brings a radio out, says through the burrito, ‘You’re meeting tonight?’

‘Supposed to be. We have remote check-in. Please, please try to find the luggage.’

Another bite of the burrito, a kind smile around flapping tortilla. ‘Hang on,’ he says. He speaks quietly into the radio. ‘Lost luggage, flight . . .’ She holds out her ticket. ‘FR1839,’ he says.

He signals a hand up to her to wait, then walks away. Simone watches him leave. He scratches his behind lazily as he goes, and Simone thinks she is never getting that luggage. She waits again by the baggage claim. Twenty minutes later, to her surprise, he arrives with her case wheeling behind him. ‘Almost ended up in another hold,’ he says with a rueful shrug. ‘Who knows what they’re thinking in this place.’

She thanks him, grabs the bag, putting an imaginary X next to 31 August: the day is almost done. Soon, she will get to press her cheek to Lucy’s. Not for long. And not as often as she wants to. But she still gets to do it for now.

Lucy has sent her a pin on a map. Like most things in Texas, there doesn’t appear to be much near to it, but Simone will be there before midnight.

Simone slides into the hire car and tries to get to grips with the controls. The parking button is on her right, not her left. She tests the pedals, the car jerks. She leaves, drives on the left, then remembers and swerves.

She turns on the radio and fiddles with the controls, trying to find a station that will keep her awake. Different accents, different songs. She lands on country, and, suddenly, she is here, and she is excited. A strumming guitar plays out across the airwaves, and, as it often does, Simone’s mind turns to day- dreams of food. Cooking outside on the fire just as it starts to get dark, huge steaks, warm, smoking tomatoes, and Lucy. Two weeks of just her and Lucy.

After a while, she dictates a text to Damien: ‘You awake? I’ve landed, and am driving.’ It’s five thirty there, but Damien is an early riser, the sort of person who is organized enough to go to bed on time.

Aah, he replies, I’d love to chat, but we’re in crisis over non- delivered fish!

‘Where is it?’ Simone dictates into her phone.

On route!!! Don’t worry! he replies, and Simone wants to tell him that it’s en route, and that she will worry. About him, about the fish, the lot of it. She thinks of the back corridor in their restaurant where the fresh produce is delivered, perhaps her favourite place on earth. Nothing special to look at. Just a poured-cement floor, two worn stone steps, a pink back door. But every morning she takes a builder’s tea out there – teabag left in, no sugar, drop of milk – and sits and watches the fresh food come in, the day’s potential.

‘If it’s late, make sure to smell it,’ she tells Damien. ‘It should all be odourless.’

Any other co-owner – and husband – might bristle at this, but Damien doesn’t, isn’t like that. :) he sends (‘smiley face’, reads the car’s dictation), and so Simone can’t help herself and adds, ‘And touch your hand to it – check it’s properly cold.’

He calls her, now. ‘Hey,’ he says, a long drawl as slow- moving and considered as he is.

In the background, she can hear him quietly pottering. She’s worked with him for long enough to know what he will be doing: sorting the kitchen so the day runs smoothly. Prepping the vegetable station. At night he washes the pots from the cooking chaos – usually hers – and sweeps crumbs off counters into the palm of his hand.

‘I’m almost at the lodge,’ she says through the hands-free. ‘Say hi to her from me. Tell her I’ve downloaded Citizen Kane to watch when she’s back,’ he says. And Simone is struck, suddenly, that in the mother/daughter bond, she sometimes forgets him, that the father/daughter relationship is just as important. Is almost as important?

‘I will, of course,’ she says. Simone knows that Lucy has already watched Citizen Kane, but she also knows that she will be kind enough to lie about it.

‘I don’t know how you do these long shifts. I’ve done one and feel like my legs are going to fall off,’ Damien remarks.

‘Cooking keeps you very fit. Offsets the calories from tasting.’

‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘Citizen Kane, tell her.’ ‘She will like that.’

‘Do you know, I’ve never seen it,’ he says, and she hears their cat, George, meow in the background. Almost twenty years old, they had him before Lucy, before they opened the restaurant. Old and decrepit, he’s moved with them multiple times across London, the houses and the mortgages getting larger, George getting slimmer and slower. Now he sits in a bay window all day in their Victorian house; the first thing any of them sees when they come home. Of course, every day Lucy says she thinks this is the day he’s died there, something which Damien doesn’t find funny at all but Simone kind of does, but, so far, he’s in great health.

‘Good luck with your second shift. Most chefs would’ve had a lie-in.’

‘I’m better busy,’ he tells her; he feels no qualms about missing her, nor saying it. ‘Fourteen days to go.’

Simone feels a lurch of longing for him, her calm husband, the restaurant, that bay window, their old cat, and something else, too. All this driving on the right side of the road, the late hour . . . there is something unsettling about it.

She turns off the highway, the slip road on the right – there’s no one around, and she has to tell herself she isn’t simply driving up it the wrong way – and on to roads that get narrower and narrower until they’re just tracks covered by a lattice of late-summer trees, the scenery only headlights, fluttering moths in their twin beams, and Simone, her face reflected twice in the passenger and driver windows. She can see Lucy’s exact features lurking beneath hers; under the veneer of age.

And here it is, their lodge: a squat wooden building that sits with a handful of others on a wide, dusty street. It overlooks the mountains in Fort Davis, Lucy told her when she sent the booking confirmation. There are cabins with pine porches, craggy rocks, big bonsai-style trees all around, and not much more that Simone can see, such a contrast to built- up London. She stops and cups her hands around her face, looking out of the driver’s-side window. It’s so silent, the other lodges perhaps unoccupied: windows as blank as closed eyes, no cars around, security lights off.

Lucy spent a week here at Easter – Simone counted down then, too – at a spring camp that she wanted to come back to for longer this summer. She can see now why Lucy likes the landscape. It’s wild and different, just like her.

As she ascends the creaking porch steps, she feels it: a kind of trepidation, unusual for Simone, who has fended for herself her entire life. She ignores it, finds the code Lucy sent, types it in, then wrenches a screen door that doesn’t feel techy at all. As she steps in, she suddenly misses Damien’s pro- tective, bear like frame with a real yen. Simone becomes too cynical when she’s alone for too long, getting pissed off about people’s flavourless burritos and her own lost luggage. He calms her; they ought to have made a trip out of it. She ought to have told him they could both leave the restaurant, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d want him here. Anyway, isn’t it always after the fact that you know how you truly feel? It is for Simone, anyway.

It’s warm and dark inside the lodge, so warm Simone – who feels the cold – is immediately looking forward to sleeping cocooned up in it, feet tucked into the end of the duvet. There are cheaply panelled walls everywhere, beds with old-fashioned covers, second-hand books on window-sills. That curious holiday feeling descends: footsteps echoing around unfamiliar rooms, searching for light switches and which cupboard contains the mugs.

She will cook while she waits for Lucy, who’s now five minutes away. The kitchen is perfunctory but fine. Blunt knives, an electric hob with a coating of something on it, but there is milk and a bowl full of eggs.

She cracks one open, checks it’s still good, and starts to make two three-egg omelettes. A stocking-filler of a meal, comfort food. As she begins, she can feel her body relaxing, limbs becoming soft and tender. In the unfamiliarity of an empty lodge in Texas, she is home, here, bent over the cheap hob with the stuck-on something. Hot butter bubbling strawberry-blonde at its edges, eggs, (cheap table) salt and dusty cayenne pepper from the back of a cupboard. She makes them baveuse, runny in the middle, no colour and no crease. The proper way, the French way, the way people may say is pretentious but Simone knows to be simply correct. She sets them on two plates, steaming hot and beautifully yellow. Headlights outside illuminate the street with a quick wink, a flash of the mountains, and then an engine begins to idle, and the countdown is over. Simone checks her watch: just after midnight on 1 September. It’s the longest time they have ever been apart. Five weeks and three days. And then Simone is out on the wooden porch, rushing so much she starts the swing seat moving in her wake, and there she is: her daughter. Shorts, T-shirt, tennis socks pulled up to her calves, Crocs. Enviably cool Lucy.

She is getting her bag out of the boot of the cab, and she looks different. Is she taller? Surely not some late growth spurt, just confidence. Long, tanned limbs, new clothes that Simone has never laundered, never folded or ironed, not that this ought to matter but does. Dirty-blonde hair now sun-streaked. But the rest is the same, the strong nose they both share, the sardonic smile that’s hard to win for most people, the fine bones: clavicles, the tips of her shoulders, slim wrists. Lucy’s never eaten enough.

The taxi driver gets out and begins to help Lucy with her bag. He is in leathers, like a motorcyclist, which creak and strain as he moves.

‘Hey, thanks,’ Lucy says to him, taking the case. She tips him, a seamless transaction, palm to palm, and he thanks her. Simone watches this play out: her daughter, the adult.

‘Ah, it’s this part,’ the driver says, gesturing around him. ‘I thought it was. People are always pulled over for speeding just here, where it goes from an eighty to a fifty. This your mom?’ he asks. Simone sometimes forgets how obvious their likeness is.

‘Mother-and-daughter holiday. Camping,’ Lucy says. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Can’t stand camping,’ he tells her.

Lucy smiles, cocks her head. ‘Why?’ The actor in Lucy is interested in people. She will talk, later, to Simone about his mannerisms, imitate them perfectly.

‘Feel the cold!’ he replies. ‘At night in the desert. Anyway, howdy. You be safe now.’ At this he glances at Lucy for just a beat.

‘I made omelettes,’ Simone says to Lucy as he gets back into the car. ‘Midnight snack.’

‘Good. The singing prison was not interested in feeding its inmates nice food,’ Lucy says, letting her bag fall from her shoulder in the hallway. She’s been at what she calls this singing prison for the final week of her summer, after camp. She has an unconditional offer to join RADA in the autumn, but the letter contained an advisory that she needed to learn to sing. Simone was going to come over a week earlier, but Lucy pushed it back when she found what she called an old- school Southern lady called Bea who she said could teach anybody how to sing. Simone had tried not to feel pushed out, knew it wasn’t reasonable to.

The taxi leaves, clouds of dust around its wheels, and the engine fades to nothing, and, suddenly, they are totally alone. Lucy brushes past Simone to get the omelette. And, no, they’re still exactly the same height.

Simone can’t hug her – Lucy will balk – but she reaches for her hand instead, fingers that used to be fat and jelly-baby-like, that curled around Simone’s thumb in a maternity ward surely only yesterday, and squeezes. Lucy squeezes back before releasing her, and Simone explodes into a puff of multiple Xs, thirty-eight of them representing thirty-eight days, as she is back, whole, with her daughter. A cracked egg, repaired.

Half past midnight, and they’re both cross-legged on one of the beds. ‘The thing was that on the very first night, after we’d finished around the piano, Bea says she’s going to take our phones off us, says she will lock them up.’ Lucy then enacts a perfect Southern American impression ‘Even vocal cords need nine hours’ sleep.’ A pause. ‘One of the other singers there was forty.’

‘God,’ Simone says.

‘Anyway, clearly, she’s just made it up because she realizes right then that she doesn’t have anywhere to lock the phones. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘So she collects them all up and she puts them in her car.

Absurd. Then she has to go through with that every night. Ten tone-deaf singers’ phones into the boot. She said she could teach anyone, but she’s clearly never taught a soul in her life.’

Laughter burbles up in Simone, and she thinks several things simultaneously: God, I have missed you, and Please never leave me again, and Please don’t move away and only invite me to sit in the audience of the plays you’re going to star in.

‘Where did you even find her?’

‘She’s the aunt of someone at camp. I know.’ She holds up a hand. ‘And then she wants us to reflect on the day. That’s the point of it. Singing all day, evenings thinking about singing, watching wacky musicals where people with mad eyes sing their thoughts to no one.’ Simone stifles a laugh. ‘So we do that, we’re all in the living room or whatever. And guess what she’s doing? She’s on her phone. Every night.’

Simone can see where this is going. Lucy shifts position, the soft mattress undulating, and says, ‘So I go, “How come you can have your phone and ours are contraband?” ’ A pause while she gulps tea – Lucy drinks tea at all hours of the day, never seems to have any problem sleeping. ‘And she tells me, “An attitude like that is why you can’t sing.” At this, Lucy throws her head back and laughs.

‘And are you still tone-deaf? Bad attitude and all?’ ‘Absolutely.’ Lucy sings the word, and she is; she hits a perfectly strangled note. ‘I mean, they’re phones. We’re on TikTok and our emails, not sitting on PornHub all night, screeching out our vocal cords.’

Lucy covers the top of her shaking tea with a hand as they laugh. ‘God, it’s so nice and warm in here. We’re going to have such great sleeps.’

‘I thought the same.’ Simone smiles, then adds thoughtfully, ‘I mean, you don’t know no one was on PornHub. Just because you weren’t.’

‘Maybe Bea was.’ She pauses. ‘Porn in D major.’

Simone shifts on the bed, so happy. She is so tired she feels seasick, but she doesn’t care. ‘Did you enjoy it at all?’ she asks.

Lucy makes a face in response. ‘No.’

‘Well, you’re in tune now,’ she lies. ‘It’s done.’ ‘We ought to go to bed.’

Beyond the lodge, crickets shiver the air like maracas. Outside, there is only the alien desert landscape. No lights around as far as they can see, the distant sound of the main road if you listen carefully, though it’s a mile away.

‘Is there even anyone else staying here?’ Simone says as they drift out together into the hallway.

Lucy presses her face to the door. ‘I really don’t think there is. Which is just the way I want it after living with nine singers.’ ‘I can imagine. Right – sleep. And then tomorrow, we camp,’ Simone says. ‘Silently. No singing.’ ‘Deal.’

Simone tries to pull the front door shut. It’s a screen door, flimsy, and bounces back. She must have broken it. It had a code to enter, but now hangs loose. Unless it always did, and the code did nothing? She can’t remember. ‘Huh,’ she says, as she tries again. It has a catch on one side, a wooden frame and plastic translucent windows, but it won’t connect.

‘Well,’ Lucy says, looking at it. She tries to ram it over the catch, but it clatters and rebounds regardless. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Hmm,’ Simone says, wincing as her daughter pulls it roughly; they are about to end up with no door at all.

‘Once we’re camping, our tent won’t lock either,’ Lucy says with a shrug, leaving the door reverberating with her effort. ‘It’s fine,’ she says again, and lets it hang an inch from the catch.

‘True,’ Simone concedes. ‘But we will get loads of bugs in. There are these onescalled stink bugs,’ she says, fiddling with the door. ‘One of the singers – the forty-year-old – was obsessed with them to the point of insanity. Thought they’d travel home with her on her luggage.’ She hesitates. ‘It does get pretty cold in the early hours, but –’ She looks at a box of blankets at their feet. ‘Exactly,’ Simone agrees, and Lucy picks one up, sniffs it, and makes a face. A car begins to hum outside in the distance, then sweeps on by after several moments, lights white, then red. They watch it silently for several seconds, then Lucy indicates the room they were just sitting in. ‘You want that one?

I’ll have this one.’ She points across the hallway.

And then she wordlessly places her elbow on her mother’s shoulder, and stands there leaning, a kind of half hug. Simone rests her head against her daughter’s. And the distance between them that began this spring and continued into the summer has closed, just slightly. Simone almost asks Lucy about it, but then stops herself, knowing better.

They part ways. Simone watches Lucy start sorting, taking wrinkled clothes out of her messy suitcase and putting them on the bed. Lucy pauses, hands on her hips, unaware Simone is still watching, and lets out a small sigh, just one. The softest, most delicate rise and fall of her shoulders, so slight Simone could have imagined it, and Simone finds herself wondering how the summer really was, beyond the bravado. But Lucy is unlikely to say. Simone watches her retreat into the bathroom, the light flickering on and humming, then Lucy closes the door and disappears once more. There’s that parental loan again.

A black room, nothingness, a jolt into consciousness, and Simone is awake and floating contextless as her brain tries to work things out. Where is she? Who’s with her? It comes back to her piecemeal. Texas. Lucy. The lodge. As she stares, itemscome into view in the blackness. The far corner of the bed, mussed-up blanket dripping off the end. The bedroom door with the large brass knob reflecting just a tiny square of light from somewhere.

An old-fashioned clock radio with faded red numbers says it’s 4:02, three hours after they went to bed. Simone can feel her eyes closing again in the warmth. The bed is deliciously soft, a soufflé of a mattress, the room so still and dark. How pleasant to fall back to sleep when jet lag might otherwise have kept her awake. She lets it come, lets go of the obligations: to check in on whether the fish arrived, to see how Damien is, to call out for Lucy. As sleep pulls her under, her mind unconsciously runs over memories. Outdoor date night with Damien, started in the pandemic, continued weekly since. Walks, strawberry picking, ice skating. George the cat curled like a cinnamon bun on their four-poster bed – Simone bought it the day The Times wrote up their restaurant, second- hand from eBay but still. And Lucy, too: her daughter’s monologue as Lady Macbeth earlier in the year, spotlit and striking with her red hands that Simone knew to be covered in tomato puree but forgot because she was so good.

As the memories come, her body slows and she lets her guard, always up, go down. The world becomes dreamlike, Simone unsure what’s real and what isn’t. The crickets outside. An unusual noise . . . is it a wave outside she can hear? No, they’re not near the ocean. Or is it a sigh, a cry, or is it a swell of sleep just coming over her head? She doesn’t know, can’t know, and then she’s gone.

Seven thirty-one according to the red numbers. Wow. Simone did not expect to have such a good night’s sleep. She lets her breath out, still lying on her back. A slow-spinning ceiling fan above rotates lazily. The light here is different. Clearand angular rather than England’s haze, everything sharply outlined by nature as artist.

It’s so quiet. Simone sits up, goosepimples covering her shoulders. That’s right: the concertina door in the hallway wouldn’t close. That’s why she can smell outside air, fresh but burning up already, like a just-lit oven.

Her suitcase is on the floor, splayed open where she left it, same as she knows Lucy’s will be. All she did last night was get out her toothbrush. She pulls a cardigan on over her pyjamas and crosses the hallway. Lucy is very quiet, she thinks, and there it begins: a humming kind of nervousness she isn’t used to feeling.

The cabin is on one floor, four rooms: two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room/kitchen/diner. Long, flat rectangular windows reveal snatched lit-up glimpses of the vista of the desert. Lucy chose this place for them, said the location was good, the rates cheap.

Simone walks into Lucy’s room. It’s empty. Her suitcase lies open and filleted, exactly as Simone expected. She turns and heads back into the hallway and through to the kitchen. A pan, two plates, two knives, two forks, all from the omelettes, and one mug from Lucy’s bedtime tea. Cracked eggs and a teabag in the bin. But nothing else. No signs of life.

She checks the bathroom, the back garden, but she knows, somehow, that Lucy isn’t in the lodge. The specific way the air feels in an empty house: the quiet, some sort of dormant feeling, the echo of one’s thoughts? She doesn’t know. Only that she is alone, and wasn’t expecting to be.

‘Lucy?’ she calls aloud out back. The heat of the day shimmers outside in zigzags above the other cabins. The small shared pool is flat and blue, undisturbed save for a few flies littering its surface. Nothing. Crickets, literally, and the air as warm as an exhalation, clammy against her skin.

She turns around, wondering if she’s missed something, some detail, some other room, some piece of information, maybe Lucy had plans this morning that she’s forgotten . . .

She touches the kettle, absent-mindedly feeling for warmth: nothing. Lucy always has tea first thing. The shower is unused, cubicle dry, no steam, towels still folded on three shelves.

It’s as if she was never here.

Maybe she’s headed out for breakfast things? Simone peers through the front window, the desert a still and unforgiving backdrop. But Lucy would never head out for breakfast things. Simone would, Lucy wouldn’t. If left to her own devices, Lucy would eat a dry piece of bread for breakfast, just to get it done. In this situation she would wait for Simone to wake up and make something nice.

‘Lucy?’ she calls again. Nothing.

In the hallway, the concertina door catches her eye. It is open more than she remembers. An odd amount. Not enough to walk comfortably through. But definitely not how they left it last night, is it? She can’t quite remember. Lucy did it. Look, well, obviously she’s out, so she’s gone out of that door, Simone tells herself, in a particularly stern voice she invented in childhood in order to cope with the way her parents were.

She wrenches the door open fully. It squeaks along the wooden floor. She walks outside, on to the porch, descends the steps, and looks around. Nothing. No sign she’s left, but no sign she hasn’t, either. Simone’s hire car, nothing else. Terracotta tiles hot underneath her feet, even at this hour, none of England’s dew. Craggy plants, patchy grass. She ventures further, stands barefoot on the dusty road, no markings, and stares. It’s miles long, straight and totally empty. The sandy gravel is tinged red. It could be the sunrise; it could be justthe way it is, Mars-like and eerie. Where would Lucy even be? You can’t walk anywhere around here.

Her thoughts begin to shift from pragmatic to panicked. She gets her phone and dials. An international calling code that Simone has become used to this summer but still dislikes. It’s different. Everything here is different.

Voicemail.

She texts. Two ticks. She pauses, watching, but nothing. It doesn’t get read.

That is when the confusion and worry morph into something else, a desert flower that explodes suddenly and unnaturally into bloom.

Is her daughter missing? Or is she merely out, will return in ten minutes with a bag of American cinnamon rolls? Simone can almost feel the earth moving, turning on a dime. She calls Lucy again but, this time, she hears something. She pulls her own phone away from her ear, cocks her head, walks into Lucy’s room.

Where is it coming from? A muffled and rhythmic vibration, a phone on a soft surface. She palms the sheet and discovers two things: Lucy’s mobile, ringing quietly at the foot of the bed, and that the sheets are cold.

Simone’s back begins to prickle with fear. And then, before she can fully digest it, she sees something else: Lucy’s shoes. The Crocs she was in last night. Simone looks at them, blinking. She doesn’t understand. No. Maybe she . . . Does she . . . She curses not knowing her daughter’s entire wardrobe right now. She is her mother. She ought to know how many pairs of shoes she has. She ought to still be doing her laundry. They’ve separated too early. This is the feeling Simone has all the time, the heartbreak that sits at the centre of parenthood: if Lucy’s independence is so natural, then how come it feels so wrong?

Why would she not take her phone? Even if she was just going . . . No. There’s nowhere Lucy doesn’t take her phone. She was balking about it being locked away from her, after all. Lucy’s mobile prompts her for a passcode she doesn’t know. Six digits. She tries her date of birth – 310308 – but it fails. Two attempts remaining.

Simone spins around. Stupid questions fill her mind. How long does it take a bedsheet to return to a cool temperature after being slept in? How many pairs of shoes does somebody bring camping – surely more than one? And more than just Crocs?

Maybe she left something at Bea’s. But that’s miles away, not walking distance. Would she have called another cab? Left her phone here?

Simone stands there, her hands on her hips in her daughter’s room, and she lets herself feel it. Creeping monstrous fingers reaching towards her. Dark storm-cloud maternal instinct telling her: a hurricane is coming. Watch out.

Simone would say that nothing like this has ever happened to her before, but is that quite right? No, it isn’t, she thinks, doing a thorough walk around the pool, looking – absurdly – under sunloungers, and wondering at what point she calls someone. Damien. The police.

No. This feels familiar. It feels this way, Simone realizes, peering into a little shed to the left of the pool, because you never forget your near misses. That time Lucy ran off in Sainsbury’s when she was two and a half and Simone couldn’t find her for over three minutes. When Damien slammed on the brakes on the motorway, and Simone watched the car behind them fail to realize, and then do so just in time. The near misses are almost-lived experiences, the beginnings of tra- gedies that just do not quite, by luck, take off, like a singlespark that sometimes causes a wildfire and sometimes doesn’t. These are what Simone remembers. This is what she hopes this will be. A near miss. An ember that might catch but doesn’t, no rhyme or reason to it, a grim reaper simply passing them by, unacknowledged.

It’s been half an hour. If by ten past eight nothing has happened, she will ring Damien. She puts a hand to the back of her head. It reminds her of him, is something he does to her sometimes during stressful times. He cups the back of her head soberly, absent-mindedly, with his huge hand, like a priest.

She heads outside again, where the sun heats her skin with a fierce pressure, like somebody has their hands all over her body. Next door, she climbs the porch steps and knocks, but there’s nothing. No answer, either, from the cabin opposite that. They are all empty; faceless houses around a deserted pool. A red life ring sits next to that and Simone stares at it, completely alone in the wilderness, thinking the worst.

Back in, through the hallway, and what she sees stops her dead.