all I saw was home.
Butler gave me that Christmas off—given the circumstances—and the three of us drove from the airport to Mina’s dad’s house, where he’d left folded towels at the end of the spare bed, the way her mum used to do. On the floor was a single blow-up bed for Sophia.
“I’ll make some coffee,” Leo said, leaving Mina and me standing in the room, our bags on the floor between us.
“I never told him we’d separated,” she said.
“Sophia can go in with you. I’ll take the mattress.”
“No, it’s okay.” She hesitated. “If it’s okay with you, that is.”
I felt my heart skitter. “You mean…”
She nodded.
We slept fitfully, Sophia abandoning her blow-up bed to curl up like a comma between Mina and me, giving us another excuse not to talk. For two individuals whose jobs revolved entirely around talking to people, I thought, we were spectacularly bad at communicating.
We did speak, though, in fits and starts over the following few days. And when Leo took Sophia for races along the windswept beach, throwing anxious glances back at us as she whirled in the wind, I thought that perhaps he had known after all.
I wasn’t suspended. I was sent back to uniform, with a fierce command from DI Butler to sort yourself out, then come and get your job back. There was a referral to welfare and for counseling, an introduction to a debt management advisor. The intelligence I provided in relation to the loan sharks I’d used led to several arrests for associated criminal activity and a laconic nice work email from Butler.
Mina wasn’t charged with any offenses relating to the hijack, despite the witch hunt led by Alice Davanti’s paper. It was a year before we knew—a year of sleepless nights and what if I go to prison?—but eventually, two quietly dressed men came over and said the CPS felt it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute her for opening the flight-deck door. The decision didn’t lessen her guilt. Rowan put her in touch with a friend of his who specialized in PTSD cases, and slowly she came to terms with what she’d been forced to do.
Even slower was the unravelling of what had happened during her pilot training. I’d wanted to punch something—or someone—when she told me about Myerbridge.
“We should complain to the school. Or to the aviation authorities.”
“What would that achieve?” Mina was more sanguine than I was. “It was a different world back then. They have policies in place now—I’ve checked.” She was letting it go, and so I did too.
“No more secrets, though,” I said. “From either of us.”
“No more secrets,” she agreed.
Surprisingly, Sophia seemed to be the only one of us who escaped relatively unscathed. We took her to counseling, but she was pragmatic about Becca and the fire and proud of the special commendation she’d received from the police. Her experiences as a baby had given her a resilience that made me at once proud and sad, and I hoped that one day, she would lose these memories altogether.
“Ready?” Mina says now.
I look at Sophia, who nods. “Ready,” I say. I pick up the car keys.
“My name is Sandra Daniels, and when I stepped on Flight 79, I left my whole life behind.”
The woman in the dock is tiny—under five foot five—and almost unrecognizable from the photograph in the paper of the hijacker known to the world as Zambezi. The months on remand have faded her tan to nothing, and her hair has grown dark brown, the blond ends dry and brittle. Beside me, I feel Mina tense. Daniels is the first of the defendants to give evidence, a part of the trial expected to last at least another two weeks. This morning, the final witnesses were called, including Sophia.
She was allowed to give evidence via video link, her unblinking eyes seeming vast. She stared directly into the camera, the only sign of nerves a twitch as she nibbled at the inside of her bottom lip.
“How long did you spend in the cellar, Sophia?”
She frowned. “I don’t know.”
“A long time?”
“Yes.”
“An hour? Longer?”
Sophia’s eyes flicked to the side, looking for help she couldn’t have, from Judith the court chaperone, who had gray, bobbed hair and sweets for afterward. Mina had held Sophia’s hand as they walked with Judith through a maze of corridors to the vulnerable witness room. As Sophia gave her evidence, Mina sat on a plastic chair in the corridor, while across the Old Bailey, I watched my almost nine-year-old