"So I packed." She said it simply. "I came inside and I got on the laptop and I booked the first flight I could, and I rang Mum, and I got the suitcases down from the loft and I started putting things in them. And I told Caleb we were going to Nana Grace’s for a while, and we had to go tonight, before Grandma came home. Because I could not, Marcus, I could not stand in this kitchen and watch her walk in that door and set her Bible on the counter and ask if anyone wanted pie."
"London," Marcus said.
"London."
The word sat between them on the table. It was where Danielle had been born, in a maternity ward in Lambeth, to a Jamaican nurse and a Jamaican bus driver who had come over as children in the sixties. It was where she had grown up, in a terraced house in Thornton Heath with a pear tree in the back garden, before a scholarship had carried her across the ocean to Emory and a man in a Georgia Tech sweatshirt had sat down next to her at a friend’s barbecue and asked her to say water again. Her mother still lived in that house. Her brother Andre lived twenty minutes away in Brixton with his wife and twins. She had two passports, one American and one British, and both of them were in the blue leather wallet on the counter.
"Show me," Marcus said.
She unlocked her phone and slid it across the table to him without a word.
It was a booking confirmation. Delta, Atlanta to London Heathrow, departing 11:05 PM tonight. One way. He read it once, and then he read it again, because the first time his eyes had snagged on something and slid off it, as if refusing to see.
There were three passengers.
REED/DANIELLE MS. REED/CALEB MSTR. REED/MARCUS MR.