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‘Well,’ says Lucy, watching the lift doors open and sliding through, ‘we’ll get in touch with him soon. But first, let’s go and check out our lovely room.’ She can’t think about it now. She just needed him to be here. To be herenow. She doesn’t want to search for him, to wait for him. She needs him just to be here and needs to know that Phin is safe.
Their room is beautiful. She booked the most expensive room they had; the Aurora Suite is its name. It’s four times the size of the room they used to live in in Giuseppe’s building in Nice. Marco gets his own sofa bed in a separate section of the room. They also have a terrace and a kitchenette. It is decorated in shades of aqua and washed-out ochre with framed botanical prints on the walls and an ice-blue neon light over a sideboard formed of the word ‘aurora’.
Stella scoots about the room, enjoying the sense of space. Marco unloads Henry’s iPad and laptop from his fancy new backpack and climbs on to his sofa bed with a bottle of Coke from the mini-bar and a packet of nuts. Lucy sits in an upholstered chair, her hands hanging between her knees, her head heavy on her neck, and allows the stresses of the journey, of the last four days, of in fact every living moment since she received that text message from Henry on Friday afternoon, to pass through her from her gut to her lungs and then out to her extremities, and she sighs so loudly that Stella and Marco both look up at her.
‘You OK?’ says Marco.
She finds a smile. ‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just very, very tired indeed.’
She sends Henry a message, although she knows it is futile.Henry. Who knows if you’ll ever see this. But we’re here. We’re in Chicago. We’re at the Dayville. Please please call. PLEASE.
She glances up and sees Marco smiling at her. ‘What?’
‘Wanna know where Henry is?’
‘Yes,’ she begins, ‘of course I do. But not today, not yet, we’ll start looking for him tomo—’
But then she stops. Marco has turned around the screen ofHenry’s iPad and is showing her a hotel in another part of Chicago called the Angel Inn. He taps it with one finger and smiles at her from underneath his overgrown curls. ‘About ten minutes from here, in an Uber.’
‘I don’t understand?’
‘The guy with the bike. Kris Doll. I just WhatsApped him. I said that the man we were looking for also goes by the name of Joshua Harris and we were still trying to find him to let him know his dad was dying. And Kris said that funnily enough he’d just seen Joshua this morning at this hotel.’ He taps the screen of the iPad again. ‘Kris said he thought something seemed off with him. He asked him about Henry Lamb but he pretended he’d never heard of him. And get this, Mum,get this. The guy with the bike told me that he is friends with Phin.OurPhin. He actually knows him. And not only that, but Phin is in Chicago right this very minute.’
Lucy gasps. ‘Seriously?’
‘Oui, maman,seriously.’ Marco’s face is alight with triumph. ‘Shall we go?’ he says. ‘Shall we go now?’
‘Go where?’
‘To the Angel Inn?’
‘No, Marco. Not now. We’re all shattered. Let’s—’
‘No, Mum. Let’s go now. What if Henry moves again? What if he finds out we’re here and decides to run off? We might never ever find him again. Come on. It’s not even five. Please.’
Lucy sighs again, then straightens her neck and her back, slaps her hands against her thighs and says, ‘Yes. Of course. Yes. Let’s go.’
