They stretched unhurriedly into the expanse of white cotton. They raised their arms and pointed their toes, their limbs free from manacles. They exhaled onto each other’s lips.

Rejoicing in her liberation, only a few times Veronica felt her mind slipping back to London, to Simone, to Dominic, to the entrapment she envisaged there, to the continuous question of if they should be doing something more; but mostly she nudged such thoughts away, finding room instead for lazy games of boules in the sand at the foot of the walled city, salted frites at the café, and hikes up the hills, all the while colluding with her husband in fresh determination to be bound together, and free.

Simone

You can threaten somebody too many times. You can tell them you’ll kill them, you’ll kill them, you’ll kill them. And they’ll be scared. And they’ll be obedient. And they’ll cower in a corner. But there comes a day when something snaps. And it just doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no energy left to care.

“If you’re going to do it, do it already,” she tells him.

Dominic is out. It is Sunday and he had nudged her awake to tell her that he was going to Jakub’s, not meaning for Terry, next to her, curled into her body, to overhear. The result was an uninvited thirty-minute speech about the parasitical Poles, but she didn’t intervene in that one. Remaining in bed, she rolled her eyes in discreet sympathy with her son, but Terry’s lecturing was on this occasion verbose rather than aggressive, and it wasn’t worth tainting the good atmosphere between them. There had passed five days with barely a raised voice, five days of gentleness and talk and laughter. Laughter! Besides, she doesn’t think that Jakub’s is where Dominic was really headed. More than once that week she has noticed him hurrying off in the other direction, and she followed him one morning down the road, over the bridge by Chalk Farm, the route that would lead to her parents’ house. At first she was surprised that he remembered this route at all, he’d been so little, but he didn’t actually reach the house. He walked up and down a nearby road – not the right one, but similar enough looking – and he knocked on three different blue doors that could have been a match. She had, however, been careful over the years with what she told him. He doesn’t know her parents’ full names. She refused him their phone number.

Watching from a distance that morning, there was a part of her that hoped serendipity would intervene and he would, miraculously, find them. But in the end, Dominic had given up, trudging back without noticing her crouched in a café, and instead, Simone had begun her own pursuit. She’d gone to the estate.

It had taken only a few minutes to find the old family friend and get Lewa’s email address, and she’d sent the message immediately, from her phone, in a rush of determination before she could change her mind. She’d felt a little traitorous about doing this, particularly in the glow of Terry’s good mood, and she made sure to delete the message quickly. He’d always been tetchy about Noah. If he found out, the seed of insecurity would work its way through him until it destroyed everything. That would be her fault of course, he would say so, and he would be right.