It took a while but finally I slept, though only for a fitful couple of hours before my phone rings early the next morning.
Adam. He must have found a charging point.
‘Ad, I’ve spent all night thinking about this and—’
He interrupts me. I hear his breath rasp.
‘Romilly showed me some messages …’ he says, urgent. ‘Stef, he’s lying.’
I go to reply; to tell him I had reached the same conclusion anyway and that we’re on the same page now, no word to Marc.
He interrupts me.
‘It was too late,’ he says, desperate. ‘I had already told Marc. I thought it was my … responsibility. To do the right fucking thing. To be an adult. To think of Fleur.’
I feel fear, true fear, in my thighs first, and now they collapse like jelly.
There is no time to comfort Adam.
‘Get her out of there,’ I tell him. ‘Just go. Wherever. As fast as you can.’
I suspect it is coming with the regret that hangs in the momentary silence, but it doesn’t make it easier when he says it.
‘Stef, she’s left,’ he says, and the sobs come thicker, harder. ‘I left her for a few minutes to settle our bill and when I came back … she was gone. A woman who works here said she got in a car. With a man carrying a baby. Marc was already in France when I called him. He’d decided to come out here himself.’
I sit up in bed, in quiet rage.
‘How. The. Fuck. Could. You. Leave. Her. Alone?’
He had to pay, he says. He couldn’t leave without doing that. He thought if Ro packed at the same time; they could get out of there sooner rather than her wasting time standing in line with six other tourists trying to pay their bill with him when the card machine had broken.
I don’t shout at him anymore. What’s the point?
He is as sad and scared as I am. He has the guilt to bear on top.
Instead I dial off. There is only one thing left to do now. And that is to get there, to my friend, and hope that it is not too late.