The longing for escape began as a slow burn. Other people’s dissatisfaction had names and they certainly all had cures – Prozac, Botox, Valium. Hey, call my therapist! Join my Pilates class! Listen to my whale music! But I held on to that picture of Temerosa. It stayed stubbornly with me almost as if my head had become a viewfinder for which all other slides had been lost. And over the following months, as emotionally I found myself dropping down to the same latitudinal line as Alaska, the flame of escape stayed lit, warming at low level, like a pilot light in my heart, stopping it from freezing over altogether.

Like Duval said, I was a fugitive, just like the rest of them.

Benjamín is walking up the path to the cabin. He walks slowly, turning his head this way and that as though conducting a heated rhetorical debate with himself. In his hands he carries a loaf of bread and a jar of apricot jam.

‘¡Hola, Benjamín!’

He jumps. ‘Ohh, Alice.’ He looks at me, then to the front cab of the truck as though expecting some unseen chauffeur to fire it up and drive off. ‘What’re you doin’, crazy Alice?’ he says with an attempt at levity that seems to have quite the opposite effect on him, for he bites his lip and looks totally wretched as I slide down off the flatbed.

‘Oh noh, Alice.’ He fixes his eyes on my leg, then on the ground, looking for all the world like he’s going to burst into tears and then – before I know it – he does. Tears wash out of the corner of his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders, still holding the bread and jam, then clasps me roughly to him with a jumble of Spanish until the two of us become one great big teary wet sandwich.

‘Perdóname, Alice, lo siento.’

‘Benjamín, it’s okay.’ I hold on to him clumsily, comforted by the soapy smell of his shirt. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Why do you say it’s okay?’ His nose drips. ‘Something bad could have happened to you. Real bad, worse than your leg.’

‘Yes, but it didn’t,’ I reassure him. For a place with scattered telephone coverage, the grapevine is certainly very efficient round here. ‘I’m fine.’

But Benjamín is not to be cheered. ‘Everything is bad. Everything is changed.’

‘Nothing has changed,’ I lie.

‘It’s my fault.’ He’s let go of me now and distractedly blots his nose on the bread instead of his sleeve.

‘It’s my fault you don’t let M-E come to house any more, it’s my fault you don’t trust me.’

‘I do trust you. I do,’ I protest feebly.

‘No, Alice, you send M-E and Jack to the hotel.’