She opens his card to her and reads: ‘Sweet Libby Jones, I am so proud to call you my niece. I loved you then and I’ll love you always. Happy birthday, beautiful.’
He looks at her with a slight flush of embarrassment and this time she doesn’t accept one of his cautious embraces. This time she throws her arms around his neck and squeezes him until he squeezes her back. ‘I love you too,’ she says into his ear. ‘Thank you for finding me.’
And then Miller arrives.
Dido was right.
There was something there.
Despite the fact that Roe double-barrels horribly with Jones, that his mother is rather distant, that his stomach wobbles, that he has too much facial hair, no pets and an ex-wife, there was something there that amounted to more than all of that. And what is a tattoo other than a drawing on skin? It’s not an ideology. It’s a scribble.
Miller abandoned his story for Libby. After the night last summer when she was reunited with her family, he’d taken his notepad and he’d ripped out all the pages.
‘But’， she’d said, ‘that’s your livelihood, that’s your career. You could have made so much money.’
He’d silenced her with a kiss and said, ‘I’m not taking your family away from you. You deserve them much more than I deserve a scoop.’
Now Libby takes the empty seat next to him and greets him with a kiss.
‘Happy Birthday, Lamb,’ he says into her ear.
That’s his nickname for her. She’s never had a nickname before.
He passes her a fat envelope.
She says, ‘What’s this?’
He smiles and says, ‘I would suggest opening it to find out.’
It’s a brochure, glossy and thick, for a five-star safari lodge in Botswana called the Chobe Game Lodge.
‘Is this …？’
Miller smiles. He says, ‘Well, yes, apparently. According to the very forthcoming man I spoke to on reception, their head guide is a man in his early forties called Phin. But he spells it with an F now. Finn. Finn Thomsen.’
‘And is it? Is it him?’
‘I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that it is. But there is only one way to find out for sure.’
He pulls some printed paper out of his jacket pocket and passes it to her. It’s an email confirmation of a booking for a deluxe room for two at the Chobe Game Lodge.
‘I can take my mum,’ he says. ‘If you don’t want to come. She’s always wanted to go on safari.’
Libby shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I want to come. Of course I want to come.’
She flicks through the papers, then back through the brochure. And then her eye is caught by a photo: a jeep filled with tourists looking at a pride of lions. She peers closer at the photo. She looks at the tour guide sitting at the front of the jeep, turning to smile at the camera. He has a thatch of thick, sun-burnished blond hair. His face is wide open; his smile is like the sun shining.
He looks like the happiest man in the world.
He looks like her.
‘Do you think that’s him?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ says Miller. He glances across the table at Henry and Lucy, turns the brochure to face them. Their faces bunch up as they examine the photo. And then Lucy puts her fist to her mouth and Henry falls against the back of his chair.
Lucy nods, hard. ‘Yes,’ she says, her voice breaking. ‘Yes, that’s him. That’s Phin. He’s alive. Look at him! He’s alive.’