Keep Her Safe Read online

  Dedication

  For Lucy Hale, who has encouraged and

  supported my writing from the start

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  For the longest time, I thought my sister, Emory, was the lucky one. Sometimes I still feel that way. She died before they could kill her. No life at all is better than a life spent waiting to die.

  The hardest thing is when the Kind Smiles promise I’ll survive—not just another day or week, but until I’m an adult, maybe even until I’m old. If that’s true . . . but it can’t already be true if it hasn’t happened yet. If it does in the future, I’ll have to stop envying the sister I never met and start feeling guilty because I made it and she didn’t.

  I’ve gotten this far, but that means nothing. I can’t allow myself to hope. Which I guess means I shouldn’t believe the Kind Smiles.

  Once the tiniest doubt creeps in, you start to wonder about everything.

  When I’m alone, I whisper over and over, “My name is Melody Chapa, my name is Melody Chapa.” It makes me feel worse—as if the girl trying to convince me must have a different name—though there’s no one there but me.

  I

  1

  October 9, 2017

  If I could turn and run, I would. Run back home, however long it took. Six months, probably—and I’d need to be able to sprint across the Atlantic Ocean. My legs twitch with the urge to race back to Patrick, Jess and Olly and pretend none of this ever happened.

  Not that anything has really happened yet. So far all I’ve done is fly and land.

  I’m standing outside a café called Lola Coffee in the arrivals hall at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport in Arizona, waiting for the hire-car man. All around me are people in dark suits, brightly colored T-shirts with underarm sweat stains, crumpled linen dresses, checked shorts with bulging pockets. I spot the man who had the seat across the aisle from me on the second of my two flights. He snored most of the way from Chicago, where I changed planes, to Phoenix, oblivious to the flight attendants tactfully lifting his belly to check that his seat belt was fastened.

  One by one, the other passengers stride confidently out of the airport, or else they linger to hug loved ones who have come to meet them. They all sound relieved and happy as they say “Let’s go home” in a dozen different ways.

  No one’s saying it to me. As an experiment, I whisper the words to myself. They sound like a threat.

  Breathe. Stop thinking crazy thoughts. Be patient. Count away the panic. 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .

  The hire-car man is thirty-five minutes late. I try to persuade myself this might be a good thing. It means I’m off the hook. I can decide not to wait any longer and I won’t be letting him down. If I want to book myself on the next flight back to Heathrow, I’m in the perfect place. There’s nothing stopping me, apart from a decision I made.

  The right decision. Just because it’s hard doesn’t make it wrong.

  Where the hell is he? He promised he’d be here. I’ve paid for the car already. It’s 10:05 P.M. Arizona time and 6:05 in the morning in England. I’ve missed a night’s sleep, which probably explains why I can feel myself swaying from side to side in my attempt to stand still. Driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time in my life is going to be fun. Assuming I ever have something to drive.

  I don’t want to think that I’ve ruined everything before I’ve gone anywhere or achieved anything, but it’s a conclusion I have to keep batting away as I wait and wait and still no one appears. I should have hired a car the way most people do, from one of the companies at the Phoenix airport, but they were all so expensive and I’d spent bone-chilling amounts of money on this, whatever it is I’m doing, already. So I opted instead for the suspiciously good-value internet advert with the cheesy typeface: “The best cars, dirt cheap, delivered to wherever you are!”

  I pull my phone out of my bag and stare at it. Should I switch it out of flight-safe mode so that I can text the hire-car man?

  No. Out of the question. I wouldn’t have the willpower to ignore all the texts from Patrick and Jess, Jess especially. She and I are the proficient communicators of the family. She, more than Patrick, would know how to craft a message that would leave me no choice but to reply. Olly won’t have sent a text. He’ll assume there’s nothing he can do, that Patrick and Jess will be saying all that needs to be said.

  For some reason it’s the thought of Olly doing nothing that fills my eyes with tears. Mum’s gone. Oh, well. She might come back. I’ll wait and see, I suppose.

  I throw my phone back in my bag, hands shaking.

  Maybe I should go for a walk to calm myself down. There’s a corridor of shops branching off from the main arrivals hall. I can see a bookshop called Hudson and something called Canyon News. I can’t imagine summoning the concentration required to read, but I might feel differently in a few days, once I’ve had time to adjust to the idea that I’ve done the one thing, the only thing, that I would never do.

  I should buy a book. Definitely. To read by the pool at the resort. Pools plural—there are several, according to the website. Also, if I want the hire-car man to turn up, I ought to walk away. As soon as I move from this spot, he will appear—isn’t that the way life works? I’ll walk four paces and turn round and there he’ll be, holding up a sign with my name on it.

  Either that or there are no secret rules governing our interactions with other people, and we’ll miss each other. He’ll leave and I’ll end up taking a cab to the resort, but only after I’ve wasted another hour waiting for a man who’s already come and gone.

  I sigh and look at my phone again. Surely I could go out of flight mode for the twenty seconds it would take to ring him? If I did that, and didn’t allow myself to look at how many texts were waiting for me . . .

  Impossible. Once I knew for certain that I had messages, I’d have to read them.

  With my thumb, I press the “Pictures” icon on my phone’s screen and scroll through my photos until I find my favorite one of Jess and Olly. They’re sitting on the old tractor in the garden of the Greyhound pub, looking so perfectly like themselves. Olly’s mouth is open and his arms are in the air, mid-gesture. He’s trying to explain to me how best to hit-marker a trick shot. As I took the photo, I said, “How to what a what?”

  Jess is sitting in front of Olly: straight backed, chin tilted upward. She’s grinning at my bewilderment from her position of superiority, as someone who speaks fluent Olly. Seconds after I took the photo, he sighed and slid off the tractor with a resigned “Never mind, Mum. You wouldn’t understand.” Jess said, “Of course she wouldn’t. Not everyone is a member of the sniping community. In a game, Mum—not in real life,” she added, seeing my worried expression. “Olly’s not really a sniper.”

  I press my eyes shut. No way for any tears to squeeze out, however hard they try.

  Get a grip, Cara.

  My own stupid fault for looking at family photos. Jess and Olly will b
e fine at home with Patrick. Am I seriously going to spend the next fortnight mooning over their pictures as if I’m not going to see them for years? It’s only two weeks. Two short, insignificant weeks. I’ll be back home before we all know it.

  I should put my phone away and not think about it again. Instead, I swipe right with my finger until I’m staring—for the three-hundredth time since I set off—at the last photo I took before leaving home. It’s an aerial view of the note I left on the kitchen table.

  My family won’t know that the version they read was my fourth attempt. I tried to explain too much the first three times. In the end, hating everything I’d written, I decided to keep it short and simple. “Dear Patrick, Jess and Olly, I’ve gone away for a while. I didn’t tell you before I left because I was scared you’d try and stop me. I need time alone to sort a few things out in my head. Please don’t be angry. I’ll be back on Tuesday 24 October. I love you all very much. Cara/Mum xxx.”

  It’s comforting to see it again in black and white: the date I’ll be home. That’s why I keep looking, I think. Thank goodness I took this photo before I set out for Heathrow. I nearly didn’t bother. Without concrete evidence in the form of a picture, I would by now have convinced myself I’d written something terrible that I didn’t mean and could never take back. Dear Patrick, Jess and Olly, you have finally succeeded in driving me away. It will serve you right if you never see me again . . .

  Behind me, I hear a chair leg scrape against a hard surface. I turn and watch a man lower himself into a seat at one of the café’s tables. He’s young—early to mid-twenties—with dark hair and a wispy beard, baggy terra-cotta-colored jeans with turned-up ends, sandals with running-shoe soles, and a gray T-shirt that says ROCK THE HOLE next to a picture of a hole on a golf course with a flag protruding from it. On the table in front of him there’s a sign with my name on it, though he’s spelled my surname wrong: BURROUGHS instead of BURROWS. He’s staring straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with me as if the two of us have nothing to do with each other.

  For a second, I wonder why he hasn’t worked out that the only other person anywhere near Lola Coffee must be the woman he’s supposed to be meeting there. Then I get it: his brief doesn’t include working anything out. All he’s paid to do is turn up at the airport with the car I’ve hired and a sign with something resembling my name on it. Both of those things he’s done; why should he try harder?

  Patrick, my husband—whose official title should be “Patron Saint of the Can’t Be Arsed to Do Any More than the Bare Minimum”—would defend Mr. Rock the Hole for sure, using a version of his famous-in-our-family cutlery-divider defense. Shortly after we got married, I tactfully pointed out to him that he might in future return clean forks to the fork section of the cutlery drawer, knives to the knife section, spoons to the spoon area, and so on, instead of throwing them all in haphazardly and letting them land wherever. He sighed and said, “Cara, I put away a lot of cutlery. Mostly things end up where they’re supposed to, but if something falls into the wrong bit, I’m not going to dig it out and move it to a different section.” He said it as if doing this would be anyone’s definition of insanity. Approximately twelve years later, his perfectionist daughter got sick of reaching into the cutlery drawer for a yogurt spoon and pulling out a steak knife instead, and gave him a savaging he still hasn’t forgotten. Ever since, our forks, knives and spoons have known their places.

  I blink back new tears—no more thoughts of home allowed, not tonight—and introduce myself to Rock the Hole, who neither apologizes for his lateness nor offers to help carry my luggage.

  It’s warm outside, verging on hot—as if Phoenix is trying to fake an October night and not putting much effort into the pretense. I remember from the website that my hire car is supposed to have something called “climate control,” which I’m hoping means air-conditioning. It must be the same thing. I know next to nothing about cars, apart from the absolute basics of how to drive them.

  The air here smells nothing like at home. I wonder if this is a specifically Arizona smell. Does New York smell different, and Chicago? I’ve never been to America before, so I have no way of knowing.

  The car is a Range Rover, black and glossy, with three parallel silver stripes on each side. It looks and smells brand-new. We sit in the front—me in the driver’s seat and Rock the Hole next to me—to do the paperwork. His handwriting is a bit like Patrick’s: incomplete circles for o’s, a’s and e’s, like broken links in a chain. I wonder how surprised he’d be if I smiled knowingly and said, “I can imagine what your cutlery drawer looks like.”

  Having covered the basics of how the car works, he starts to describe, in a bored drawl, its unnecessary features: eight different color options for the interior lighting; retractable sunroof; memory buttons numbered M1 to M4, so that four driver’s-seat positions can be stored.

  Hasn’t he noticed I’m alone? The car might be ready and able to remember four people, but it’ll have to make do with only one. It’s a shame—Olly would love these lights, which can be orange one minute and bright green the next.

  You can still go home. You can step out of the car, and . . .

  “I need you to do me a favor,” I say to Rock before I have a chance to change my mind. Pulling my phone out of my bag, I hand it to him and say, “Keep this for me. Give it back when I drop the car off in two weeks. I’ll pay you an extra hundred dollars—fifty now, fifty when I get my phone back.”

  “Okay.” He shrugs, not even a tiny bit curious.

  Now that he’s agreed, I’m not sure I want to do it. How many decisions made and immediately regretted can a woman be expected to stand by in one week?

  Rock holds out his hand. I throw my phone at it harder than I need to. Take that, doubts.

  It’s the only way. If I have it with me, I’ll crack in a few hours, or a few days, and read all the texts that are waiting for me. I won’t be strong enough to resist the pleas for me to come home. “Thank you,” I mumble.

  “Fifty bucks, lady.” Rock holds out his hand again.

  I give him the money, wishing I’d offered an extra ten dollars for the right to say, “You will look after it properly, won’t you?” I didn’t, so I keep my mouth shut. I’m going to have to trust him, or stop caring about what happens to my phone—one or the other.

  Finally he says, “Okay, you’re all done.” He gets out of the car and slams the passenger door shut without saying good-bye.

  I’ve never felt more alone in my life. Or more awake. A fizzing mix of fear and excitement, combined with the underlying exhaustion, makes me feel dizzy and nauseous. I open my bag, pull out the driving directions I printed last night and unfold them. “Ready to go,” I say to nobody.

  This is truly happening. I, Cara Burrows from Hertford, England, am on my way to the five-star Swallowtail Resort and Spa in the foothills of Camelback Mountain, Arizona. Without my family’s knowledge or permission. To most people, I would look like a woman setting off on the holiday of a lifetime, not one escaping from an unbearable situation.

  If Patrick and the children are angry when I next see them, if they scream and shout at me, I’ll survive. So will they.

  That’s why I’m here. It’s the only reason. I need us to survive. All of us.

  It’s ten past midnight by the time I arrive at the resort. The GPS on my hire car is broken, it turns out, and I had to pull over twice to memorize the next stage of my directions. At one point, I took a wrong turn, thinking, “This is probably going to be wrong. I bet it’s wrong.” It was twenty minutes before I could safely turn around and get back on track, and then I promptly got lost again and ended up driving God knows where for another forty minutes. A journey that should have taken me half an hour took nearly two hours.

  Now, finally, I’m here, and I hardly dare breathe. I can no longer tell myself I’m on my way somewhere. This is it. I’ve arrived. Whatever’s supposed to happen at the Swallowtail Resort and Spa—the magic, indefinable thing that
will make all my problems go away—could and should and, please God, will start happening now.

  Soon. Not right now as in immediately this second. Setting unrealistic goals is only going to make me feel worse, and I’m pretty sure no life-changing revelation has ever happened in a car park.

  I pull into a space, throw open the door, twist my body around so that my legs are outside the car, and look out at the night. Now that I’m here and the adrenaline rush of handling a strange car on the wrong side of the road in an unknown country has drained away, the tiredness I managed to keep at bay while driving takes hold of me, weighing me down, making patches of my skin ache.

  The night sparkles with so many stars, it looks staged, like a set in a theater. I never see any at home. Never have time to look. I stare at the dark outline of what I assume is Camelback Mountain. “I can’t see you yet, but I know you’re beautiful,” I whisper, and start to cry.

  Cut it out right now, Cara. Get to your room, and then you can do it all: cry, get something to eat, have a relaxing bath, sleep, wish you hadn’t given your phone to a rude stranger . . .

  Getting to my room might be more of a challenge than I anticipated. The scale of the car park suggests that the Swallowtail Resort might be the size of a small town. It could be bigger than Hertford, come to think of it. As well as a sign saying MAIN HOTEL BUILDING/RECEPTION, I’ve already seen several suggesting there are lots of different residential areas here: COPPER STAR VILLAS, MONARCH SUITES, SWALLOWTAIL VILLAGE, THE RESIDENCE, CAMELBACK CASITAS.

  The sign I saw for reception was quite a way back. I close my eyes, thinking of the effort it will take to wheel my suitcases back to that point—and God alone knows how long a walk it will be from there to my room. I’m not sure I can do it—not tonight, at least. I could fall asleep here quite happily, with the car door open to the warm night. Maybe one of the M1 to M4 driver’s-seat-position buttons contains the memory of how to stretch out flat, like a bed.

  The sound of an engine makes me sit up straight. Is it another guest arriving? The noise moves nearer, then stops. No, it isn’t a car. The wrong pitch, and not loud enough. A lawn mower, maybe—one of those big ones you sit on and drive around if you’ve got a big field to cut. But at this time of night?