handcuff key?” A woman’s voice filters into my subconscious. There’s a tug at my wrists before the blissful sensation of release, swiftly followed by the intense pain as I try to move them. The woman’s still talking, and I recognize the voice but I can’t place it.
“…absolutely distraught, poor thing. Okay to bring her in?”
“Sophia!” I scramble to sit up just as a mass of dark curls peeps around the open door, accompanied by DI Naomi Butler.
Sophia stares at me, eyes wide and scared, and I lift up the oxygen mask so she can see my face. She’s wearing Butler’s leather biker jacket, the sleeves hanging down to the ground. It’s zipped up, Elephant poking out beneath Sophia’s chin.
“I fell over,” she says. Her bottom lip wobbles.
“You did so well, pumpkin.”
“A teenager picked her up.” Butler lifts Sophia into the ambulance, and she runs to hug me. “Lives next door to the butcher’s—apparently she met Sophia in the park last night? Good kid. She called it in right away.”
“I tore my pajamas.”
“I’ll take you shopping. Buy you some new ones.”
“Mummy too?”
My heart pitches. I open my mouth and flounder, looking at DI Butler, who smiles and hands her phone to Sophia.
“Do you want to show your dad?”
Sophia beams. “Mummy flew the plane.” She taps play on the little screen and presses her head against mine, and together we watch Mina bring Flight 79 safely to land at Sydney.
FIFTY
CHRISTMAS EVE | MINA
“I’m nervous.” I look up at Rowan. “Isn’t that silly?” We’re standing in baggage collection at Gatwick, a place I’ve stood a hundred times before—watching the same cases go around and around. In the center of the carousel is a Christmas tree decorated with cardboard cutout suitcases.
“Because of the press?”
“Yes,” I say, although I hadn’t thought about the press. It’s the prospect of seeing Adam that’s filling me with anxiety. We’ve spoken every day for the last six days, the poor connection doing nothing to help the awkwardness between us. I look at his face on my screen and it’s the same old Adam, yet so much has happened since I last saw him.
He’s told me everything. The gambling, the loan sharks, the dizzying interest rates. The lies he told at work; the fact that he might lose his job. When he told me how the man had threatened Katya, and I remembered how Sophia’s night terrors had started that very week, I couldn’t take anymore. I ended the call and turned off my phone and sat in the bar of my hotel, emotions heightened by one coffee after another.
They put the crew in the same hotel as the passengers, an entire ground-floor corridor cordoned off for interview rooms. We moved like invalids through the restaurants and lounges, shepherded between doctors, police, and journalists, and—whenever we needed it—counselors.
“The relationships between you and the other crew and passengers will be complex,” said the first psychologist. She was talking to us all in a conference room at Sydney airport, arming us with tools to survive the next few days—just in case we had thought our ordeal over. “You might hate one another, because the very sight reminds you of what’s happened,” she said. “Or you might feel closer to one another than you do to your own family. You’ve been through hell over the last twenty hours. Whatever you’re feeling right now is normal, I promise.”
I feel anything but normal. Guilt consumes me, from the second I wake to when my eyes finally close, exhausted from the interviews, the anxiety, the compulsion to go over and over what happened. The hotel was full of traumatized passengers, meeting in corners of the lounge to say, I keep remembering when… Every day, a cluster of tourists would arrive to check in and we’d stare at them, wondering what it felt like to be arriving in Sydney for a holiday, to emerge from a flight with nothing more than jet lag.
Adam gave me space. I ate dinner with Rowan and Derek, wishing Cesca were there. The blade of the ax missed her brain by millimeters. Her condition was still critical, the doctors said, and it remained to be seen what long-term damage had been caused, but she was going to live. They’d keep her in ICU in St. Vincent’s until it was safe to bring her back to the UK. I wanted to visit, wanted to get out of my head the image of the last time I’d seen her, blood matting her hair, but