Page 43 of Famous Last Words

‘And you didn’t find somebody to have kids with,’ Cam says. This is the first time they’ve ever discussed anything like this. And all she can think about is why would a junk text message say nine o’clock in it?

She’s got to look at it again.

‘Yes. And wait for the painful irony – guess who has a child now?’ Charlie holds his hands up to her, and she searches his face for sadness, but there isn’t any, just a resigned kind of gloom, which she understands entirely. Somebody who has also experienced suffering. Cam didn’t want to start dating anyone else, and she certainly didn’t want somebody damaged, but there’s something nice about it, not tragic. Just somebody weathered, too, by life.

Charlie puts his cutlery down. ‘The kid looks just like her.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Cam says simply. ‘I know I have Polly … but believe me when I say I really know how it feels when life doesn’t go your way.’

‘Well, I appreciate that,’ he says. He looks at her. ‘Let’s take these as leftovers and go and rot in self-pity.’ He gestures to the tarts.

Cam smiles, then nods. But then her phone lights up again,this time an email, but she snatches for it on impulse, opening the spam message again, knowing it’s rude, but unable to resist.

And, clearly, her mind was still spinning over it while listening to Charlie, because look: it is far more than just a string of numbers, followed by9 p.m. The numbers are separated by a comma.

Cam becomes distinctly aware of her heartbeat, which throbs and warps the room as she stares.

They are coordinates.

She’s got to go. Forget this conversation, that Charlie is confiding in her.

The light on her phone shuts off, and their eyes meet. She springs to her feet.

‘Oh, shit – I’m really sorry, Charlie … I need to – look,’ she says, flashing the phone but not properly showing him a text from Libby which doesn’t exist. ‘Polly’s ill. I’m so sorry. I have to go.’

And it’s probably obvious – so obvious that neither of them even acknowledges it.

‘Oh, for sure,’ Charlie says, and Cam is ashamed to note he doesn’t even seem surprised. ‘You have to do what you have to do.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Take care, OK?’ he says. He stays seated. Cam puts a twenty on the table and tries not to look at him. Tries not to admit to herself what she hopes to be true: that that text is from Luke, her long-lost, long-gone husband.

A few hundred feet down the road, stopping dead, she gazes up at the sky, that velvet blue of June. All around her, London plays out its summer symphony. People smoking, drinking,flagging down taxis. Distantly, she hears a man shout, ‘No – they’ve got two for ones!’

Cam looks back at her phone. A set of coordinates and a time. Now that she understands it, it doesn’t look like a jumble of numbers. It doesn’t look like spam. It looks like the most important instruction of her life.

She checks her watch. It’s twenty past eight.

She puts the coordinates immediately into Google Maps on her phone. All this time. All this time spent convincing herself to stop looking, to move on. And look: coordinates. Instructions.

Contact.

The map loads and Cam stares at the location. It’s a street in central London, Islington, an alleyway between two office buildings that has no significance to Cam whatsoever.

But the timescale does. The application she filled in last night. Does Luke somehow know? And want her to know that he isn’t …?

No. She can’t think this way. He killed people. Heleft. He didn’t come back. Sometimes, it’s been easier for Cam to believe that he’s dead, rather than in hiding. But then – who knowswhatshe believes? At times searching for her husband, at times vowing to move on, at times angry, at times sad. Everyone wants Cam to have consistency on his disappearance, and she just doesn’t. Who could? The truth is, Camisconsistent: she pretends to believe he is dead or bad, while the real, true her believes he is alive and good. That’s the truth of it.

Nine o’clock. Forty minutes to go.

She could make it.

She’s going to go.

The Tube is the other way down the street, and she has todouble back and walk past Côte again. As she does so, feet tripping with hurrying, she sees Charlie, supposedly the new man in her life. He’s got his food to go, in a little white cardboard box, and something sad unspools in her stomach as she sees hers untouched. He didn’t take it.

Eight fifty-five and Cam is one minute from the set of coordinates. She’s fast-walking up the street, eight fifty-six, eight fifty-seven. She can’t bear to ponder it, to hypothesize. Like most people prone to overthinking, in a crisis Cam’s head is cool. Has become more so, since Luke left: she can rely only on herself.

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