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I had switched the phone off overnight to conserve battery, but now I turned it back on and was surprised to see that it was almost eleven a.m. I had slept longer than I had imagined. More worryingly, the battery was down to eight percent.
I opened up Signal and messaged Cole.
“Cole, hi, it’s me. I’m sorry to bother you, but I can’t get the electricity to work. Is there a central switch? I can’t charge my phone and I’m almost out of battery.”
I waited for a few minutes to see if he responded, but there was no reply. As I stared at the lighted screen, the battery bar ticked down to seven percent, and I felt a kind of panic rise up inside me. If I had no phone, I was well and truly fucked. I couldn’t even use the laptop without it—I had been relying on the phone for a hot spot.
Another thirty seconds. Still no reply. Fuck. Fuck.
With a hollow feeling in my stomach, I turned off the phone.
* * *
I HAD TOLD MYSELF THAT I would check in for Cole’s reply only every half hour, but I managed just two checks before the battery died completely, sometime between twelve thirty and one. After that I had no way of knowing the time, but it felt like it was three, maybe four hours later that I was seated in a rocker on the porch, well wrapped up in Noemie’s camel coat, and reading one of the curling paperbacks I had found on the mantelpiece. The sun was dipping towards the horizon, the shadows lengthening, when I heard the purr of a car engine from far up the lane. I sat up, ears instantly pricked, listening and trying to figure out if the sound was getting closer or pulling further away.
With the crashing of the distant waves, it was hard to tell for sure at first, but at last I was certain, it was getting closer. Much closer.
A lurch of apprehension sent me stumbling to my feet, looking left and right with a sick feeling of panic. Shit. Why hadn’t I prepared for this? My belongings were strewn all over the cottage. I couldn’t afford to simply abandon the contents of my rucksack—that was everything I had in the world—but if I stopped to pack, it could be too late.
At last, heart banging in my chest, I made up my mind. I flung down the paperback, ran into the cottage, grabbed the phone and what I could of the rest of my stuff, and pelted back out, heading into the dunes.
Then I crouched between two stunted bushes and waited.
It felt like a hundred years. I was closer to the ocean now and could hear very little apart from the waves, the beating of my heart in my ears, and my own panting breath. I thought—though it could have been my imagination—that the engine sound had got louder and then stopped. But I wasn’t sure. What I hadn’t heard, I was fairly certain, was a car starting up again and pulling away.
Was it the police? A friendly neighbor come to check out the lights and smoke? Or just the postman?
The sun had dipped behind the headland now, and it was getting extremely cold, the wind picking up as it had last night around this time. I remained crouched, my arms wrapped around my rucksack, my head buried in its folds, trying not to think about what I was going to do. I couldn’t stay out here all night—I’d freeze. But if the mist came in, perhaps I could make a run for it? I was still wearing the camel coat, and that felt like the one silver lining—not just for its warmth, but for the fact that its color blended almost perfectly with the rain-dappled dunes. If they really wanted to find me, they would do it, I had no doubt about that. My hiding place was no match for a proper search party, let alone police dogs, and I’d made no attempt to hide my tracks from the cottage. But if the visitor was just one casual person come for a cursory check, I might be able to slip away into the darkness when the sun finally went down…
I was still running back and forth over my increasingly desperate options when I heard it. The sound of a low whistle, not quite a tune, just a strange little up-and-down riff that sounded immediately familiar, and yet I couldn’t place it. I stayed where I was, trying to work out what was going on. Was it just an evening dog walker, making their way to the sea, whistling as they went? Perhaps, but it was a strange tune to pick… not the kind of easy-listening foot-tapper that people usually hummed, and why was it so familiar to me? The melody gave me a strange pain around my heart—a kind of unhappy yearning out of all proportion to the brief snatch of notes.
There was a pause, and then the sound came again, a little closer but fading in and out with the wind, and then suddenly, with a lurch of shock, I knew. I knew where I’d heard it before, and why it had given me that strange, bittersweet feeling of loss: it was the opening riff to a Talking Heads song, “This Must Be the Place.” And the reason I recognized it, the reason it had made my heart hurt, my body making the association even before my brain had slotted the pieces together, was that it was the song Gabe and I had danced to at our wedding, our first dance, swaying together on a Greek beach beneath strings of fairy lights as our friends and family stood around and smiled.
Only someone who knew us both intimately would have whistled those opening notes. Only they would have remembered, would have known what that song meant to me. Without second-guessing, without thinking about how potentially stupid I was being, I dropped my pack and stood—and there, two or three ridges away on the hummock of a dune, silhouetted against the sky and staring out to sea with a worried expression, was Cole.
“Cole!” I choked out, and he turned, his face lighting up as soon as he saw me.
“Jack!” He stumbled through the sand and threw his arms around me. “Why the hell are you hiding out here? Didn’t you get my message?”
“The phone died,” I explained, holding it out.
Cole swore. “I thought maybe I’d seen your message too late. I tried texting and then when I couldn’t get hold of you I panicked, and thought I’d better drive down. When I got to the cottage and found half your stuff gone—” He trailed off, leaving me to imagine what he’d thought.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I heard your car and I didn’t know what to do. I thought—well, look, never mind.” I glanced up and down the darkening beach. It was deserted, but I suddenly felt very exposed. The thought of Cole driving down in his car, automatic number plate recognition clocking him every step of the way… “We should get inside.”
Cole nodded, picked up my bag, and we headed up through the dunes, back to the cottage.
Inside Cole lit the lamps, and I rekindled the fire while he tried to figure out the fuse box in the little lean-to. At last he gave up and came back into the main room, shaking his head.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Something’s gone bang, and I think it’s going to take someone with real qualifications to put it right, but look, I bought a battery pack, you can recharge your phone at least.”
He pulled what looked like a chunky mobile phone out of his pocket and handed it to me, and I gratefully dug in my rucksack for the charging cable and plugged in my phone.
“How many charges will it do?” I asked as the battery icon began to tick reassuringly upwards.
Cole shrugged. “I don’t know, but it does mine at least four times, minimum, and I can top it up in the car before I go.”
“God.” I sat down on the couch. “I have to say, Cole, I’m happy to see you, but… do you think it was a good idea to come down in the car? What if you were followed?”
