Perhaps it was easier when she was far away than now, when she is close. When Adam says those words, I kick at the tent in fury. It’s Romilly’s mum who pulls me off.
‘There’s no point, Steffie,’ she says gently, and she holds my head with her fingertips. I think of our hands touching on the plane earlier and in the car. There is an understanding. We’re stripped to the basics, a pair of human beings tied together as we try to navigate a nightmare.
I look around the campsite, as though my friend will emerge from canvas, sleepy hair and blurry eyes, all a mix-up. But she is gone.
‘How long ago?’ I ask.
‘Early morning,’ says Adam. ‘They left about 7.30.’
It is now 8 p.m.
Over twelve hours. Alone.
Aurelia cries like an animal.
All of that time.
‘How did I not realise the truth about Marc?’ I ask into the ether but Aurelia answers anyway.
‘Didn’t you?’ she says.
I look up at her, Romilly’s mother, in flip-flops that make my heart ache for Romilly, who has been spotted in them before now down on the beach in February.
I raise my eyebrows in question but I know what she means.
Did we all know something, but we had our own reasons for staying silent? Bowing to marriage as the ultimate dynamic of adulthood. Bowing to pregnancy as a different plane; one we couldn’t access. A feeling we weren’t close enough to question, in Aurelia’s case.
Excuses, really. We should have tried harder.
I think about her distance – from me more than anyone. Was I too close, Marc? Was that it? Would I have seen too much, if you hadn’t made Romilly push me away?
The confidence she’d always had was replaced with something that bordered, often, on self-loathing. She was too tired to swim. Couldn’t be bothered to paint nails that were usually bright rainbows.
Her hair, shorn. Severe. Without joy.
Aurelia swaps her glasses for prescription sunglasses again as she blinks into the sunlight.
‘Let’s just get in the car.’ She sighs, like Adam and I are her petulant teenagers and I picture Loll and Romilly; another time, another life. ‘There’s no point hanging around here. We have to at least try to find her.’
Her sigh contains a multitude of emotions. It berates herself. It tears Marc apart. It is fear. It is exhaustion.
And something in her expression reminds me of Loll, bringing another lost woman into my mind too.
My stomach lurches again, again, again for two sisters I need to hold close.
We walk towards the hire car, chastised.
‘Adam,’ she barks. ‘You get in the back. I’ll direct you to a place, Steffie. I read a bit about the area when Romilly flew out. It’s the biggest town, the most accommodation. Get maps on your phone, darling.’
I do what she says. Hand my phone to her.
For the first time, I think, pausing for a second to look at her face, she looks old.
Aurelia holds my phone out in front of her. Starts stabbing something into it. The heat is intense and even now, sweat soaks out behind my knees, swathes of it across my face.
‘It’s only a hunch!’ she says. ‘But if we’ve got nothing better, we might as well try it.’
With Aurelia next to me. Adam takes his seat in the back. He reaches round the back of the seat for my shoulder. Squeezes with a clammy hand.
When we’re on a stretch of road where I can, I reach behind for his hand, my own palm damp too. I squeeze back. Hard.
No point holding on to the rage.
It’s rapidly giving way anyway to a different emotion: a fear that we have no idea where we are going and that already, we are much too late.