The terrain has changed. The smooth tarmac we followed out of Nevada gave way to packed dirt, then to something looser, sandier, the kind of surface that shifts under tyres and makes the steering wheel fight back. Arthur wrestles the car through a dry wash, the chassis groaning, and I feel every stone through the floorboards. The headlights sweep across creosote bushes and the skeletal arms of Joshua trees, their shadows stretching long and distorted before dissolving back into darkness.
‘We need to stop,’ I say. My voice comes out hoarse. ‘Just for an hour. You’re going to drive us into a ditch.’
He doesn’t argue. That’s how I know he’s exhausted. The Arthur I met in San Francisco would have insisted he was fine, would have made some self-deprecating joke about British driving skills and carried on. This Arthur just nods, his eyes never leaving the patch of ground illuminated by the headlights.
We find the alcove as the first real light touches the desert. It’s not much — a crescent of red rock jutting from the earth like the spine of some buried creature, creating a shallow bowl sheltered from view on three sides. Arthur kills the engine and the silence rushes in, immense and complete. No traffic. No sirens. No drone. Just the wind worrying at the rock formations and the distant call of a bird I can’t name.
‘This’ll work,’ he says, and the relief in his voice makes my chest ache.
We climb out. My legs are stiff, my spine compressed from hours of sitting. The air smells of dust and something green, something alive despite the aridity. Sage, maybe. I was in a perfume commercial once where they sprayed synthetic sage scent on my wrists and told me to look contemplative. This is nothing like that. This is raw and sharp and it clears my head in a way the bottled version never could.
Arthur pulls his phone from his pocket and holds it above his head, turning in a slow circle. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Not a single bar.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
He considers the question longer than I expect. ‘Both.’ He slips the phone back into his jeans. ‘I was just thinking — I haven’t filmed anything since the motel. That’s nearly two days of content, gone. My subscribers are probably wondering if I’ve died.’
‘All forty-seven of them?’
He looks at me, startled, and then a laugh escapes him — a real one, surprised and slightly embarrassed. ‘You remembered.’
‘You told me. At the party. You were very drunk and very earnest about it.’
‘God.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘I was, wasn’t I?’
I want to tell him that his earnestness was the thing that made me trust him. That in a room full of people performing indifference, he was the only one who seemed to want something honestly. But the words feel too large for this moment, too fragile, so I let them sit unspoken and instead reach into the Mustang’s back seat for the supplies we grabbed from the last petrol station.
The water bottle is warm and the biscuits are the kind that come in a sleeve, dry and faintly sweet, the sort of thing you’d give a child as a treat and they’d accept only because they didn’t know any better. We sit on a flat rock near the car, passing the bottle back and forth, eating in silence. The sun crests the ridge and the desert transforms — the muted greys and blues ignite into ochre and rust and a hundred shades of gold. It’s beautiful in a way that feels almost aggressive, like the landscape is demanding I acknowledge it.
‘I keep thinking about my grandmother’s cabin,’ I say.
Arthur turns toward me. He’s got biscuit crumbs on his shirt and his hair is a disaster and I have never wanted to kiss someone more in my entire life.
‘In Maine,’ I continue. ‘She bought it in the seventies, before I was born. No electricity. No phone line. A wood stove and a well and a porch that looked out over a lake so still it might as well have been glass.’ I break a biscuit in half, watch the crumbs fall. ‘My mother hated it. She said it was primitive. But I loved it. It was the only place I ever felt like I could breathe.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘Marcus sold it.’ I keep my voice level. ‘He said it was a liability. Too far from anywhere useful. He had papers drawn up and I signed them because I was nineteen and I didn’t know I could say no.’
Arthur is quiet for a moment. Then: ‘He sold your grandmother’s cabin.’
‘He sold a lot of things.’ I take a sip of water, feel it slide down my throat, warm and insufficient. ‘He controlled everything. My money, my schedule, where I went, who I saw. He had a key to my flat. He chose which restaurants I was photographed at. He decided which charities I supported based on their PR value. He was my controlling manager, except I was supposed to call him my partner, my mentor, my saviour.’ I let out a breath that’s almost a laugh. ‘You probably thought I lived this impossibly glamorous life.’
‘I did,’ Arthur admits. ‘When I was in London, in my miserable little flat with the mould on the bathroom ceiling and the Tesco meal-deal wrappers piling up, I used to watch your interviews. I’d see you at premieres, in those gowns, and I’d think — she doesn’t know what real life is. She’s insulated. Protected.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was jealous of an illusion.’
‘We both were.’ I look at the Mustang, its classic lines now coated in a fine layer of desert dust, its grille flecked with the remains of insects from three states. ‘I was jealous of people who could just get in a car and drive. Who could walk down a street without security. Who could make a mistake without it becoming a headline.’ I pause. ‘Who could fall in love with someone without it becoming a kidnapping case.’
The word hangs between us. Love. I didn’t plan to say it. It just arrived, fully formed, and now it sits in the desert air like something physical. Arthur reaches over and takes my hand. His palm is rough from the steering wheel, his fingers warm despite the morning chill.
‘I’ve been thinking about my flat,’ he says. ‘In London. Old Kent Road. You could hear the traffic all night and the heating never worked properly and I thought it was a cage. I thought if I could just get out, get to America, make something of myself, I’d be free.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘But I wasn’t any freer than you were. I was just locked in a different kind of cell. One I built myself.’
‘The YouTube channel.’
‘The metrics. The views. The constant, grinding need to be seen.’ He meets my eyes. ‘I don’t feel that now. Out here, with you, I don’t feel it at all.’
The sun is fully up now, the shadows shrinking, the temperature climbing. I know we can’t stay. Every minute we sit here is a minute Marcus’s resources are closing in, a minute the world is believing his version of the story. But I let myself have this one moment — this impossible, stolen moment on a rock in the middle of nowhere, before I stand up and scan the horizon.
That’s when I see it.
‘Arthur.’
He’s on his feet instantly, following my gaze. To the east, maybe half a mile away, a thin line cuts across the desert floor. It’s barely visible, just a faint interruption in the scrub, a suggestion of a path where the vegetation is slightly thinner, the ground slightly more compacted. It could be an old mining track. It could be nothing. But it’s something.
‘That wasn’t on any map,’ he says.
‘No.’ I shield my eyes from the glare. ‘But it leads somewhere. Things like that always lead somewhere.’
‘Or nowhere. It could dead-end in a ravine.’
‘It could.’ I turn to face him. ‘But staying here is a death sentence. You know that. The drone found us once. It’ll find us again. Marcus won’t stop. He can’t stop, if I’m out here, free, telling the truth, everything he’s built collapses.’
Arthur looks at the track, then at the Mustang, then at me. Something shifts in his expression, a decision being made, a weight being set down. ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘We follow it.’
We pack the few things we have. The empty water bottle, the biscuit wrapper, the map that’s become increasingly useless the further we’ve strayed from marked roads. Arthur checks the oil, the Mustang’s been haemorrhaging since Nevada, the rear main seal gone, the pan gasket possibly damaged, and adds a quart from the container we bought at the Shell station two days ago. The car looks as tired as we feel, but there’s something stubborn about it, something that refuses to quit.
‘She’s resilient,’ I say, running my hand along the dusty bonnet.
‘She’s a 1969 Mustang,’ Arthur replies, and there’s a note of pride in his voice that makes me smile. ‘They built them to last.’
We climb in. The engine turns over on the second try, a deep, throaty rumble that feels like defiance. Arthur guides the car out of the alcove and toward the faint track, the tyres crunching over loose stone and dry brush. The desert stretches ahead of us, vast and indifferent, and for a moment I’m terrified, truly, bone-deep terrified, by how small we are, how easily the landscape could swallow us whole.
But then Arthur reaches across the centre console and rests his hand on my knee, a gesture so casual and intimate that it steals my breath, and I remember that I’m not alone. That whatever this is, this strange, improbable thing we’ve built in the space between running and hiding, it’s real. It’s the only real thing I’ve had in years.
The track narrows. The Mustang bucks over a rut. Arthur mutters something under his breath that sounds like a curse and a prayer rolled together, and I grip the door handle and keep my eyes on the horizon, watching for dust, for movement, for anything that might tell us we’re not the only ones out here.
The sun climbs higher. The desert bakes. And we drive.
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