Page 76 of The Trap by Catherine
“Are youready?” Denise asked again.
“I... But what about—?”
“You’ll be a great guard, Angela. I’m just making sure of it.”
Denise’s phone started to ring then.
Angela, on the verge of tears, turned and looked out of the window at the white overalls and flak jackets milling around Caroline O’Callaghan’s property and took what she hoped would be calming deep breaths, trying to compose herself.
“Chris,” she heard Denise say. Angela couldn’t make out the words that came down the line then, but she knew this: there was a very panicked man on the other end. “Hang on, hang on, slow down. She’swhat?”
She was sent to the caravan to await her punishment.
It was a four-berth tourer from the seventies whose exterior might have once been a vibrant tangerine but which was now a faded peach color, tinged green from tree sap and rusted with age. The interior felt damp and smelled terrible, and everything was either fake beech-effect or upholstery printed in a swirling pattern of browns and oranges with a fringed edge.
But the top half of the door was open, the curtains were drawn and the caravan sat in the shade of an enormous oak tree, so it was much cooler in here than it had been in the cabin. She’d even been furnished with a large jug of cold water and something to wear.
It felt less like punishment and more like a reprieve.
For now.
The caravan was parked at what they all referred to as the “top” of the property even though, geographically, it was the lowest point: just after the stone pillars that marked the entrance, about halfway along the only road in. In the early days, Bastian had told her—back when Bastian still told her things—it had served as a sort of security office, a makeshift gatekeeper’s lodge. But during the lockdowns, the rest of the world seemed to forget they were here, and nowadays no one ever came wandering up the road.
She herself had been the last person to do it, over a year ago.
The caravan had been empty that day and pretty much abandoned since—until Bastian started implementing hisrulesand everything changed. Now, it was used as a place to separate troublemakers from the rest of the community until they agreed to stop making trouble, or leave.
Her stomach flipped at the idea that she might be forced to go, might be expelled back out into the world, banished back to her Before life, the one she’d blown up into a million little pieces when she’d left. (Well, she’d set a fuse and lit its end. She hadn’t stayed to witness the explosion.) She couldn’t do that, and she had nowhere else to go.
And despite everything, she didn’twantto leave.
She just wanted things to change, to go back to how they’d been when she’d first got here.
When she’d thought she could stay in this place for ever.
When she would’ve been happy to.
Footsteps, on the gravel path outside. She stood and saw through the half-open door the person they belonged to: Jamie, already dressed for the day in a T-shirt, shorts, and muddy boots, his long limbs tanned and sinewy. He was wearing his trademark baseball cap, the one that was seemingly glued to his head; she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen his hair, or even if he had any.
He was carrying a plate of fruit in one hand and a battered tin mug of what smelled like coffee in the other.
“I brought you some breakfast,” he said.
Jamie was from Northern Ireland, somewhere in Fermanagh she’d never heard of, and she loved the sing-song lilt of his accent. He’d been the last arrival before her, and on her first night here had stood and made a speech about the relinquishing and transfer of his newbie status. She’d laughed so much. Everyone had.
Things had been so different then.
“Are you allowed?” She made a face. “I thought I’d have to make do with gruel. Or starve.”
“Ah, now, don’t be like that.”
She opened the door and stepped back to allow him to come inside. He set down her meal on the little table at the caravan’s far end, the one with a window that offered a view, underneath the oak’s branches, of the stone pillars at the entrance.
Then he took a seat there.
“You’re staying?” she said, surprised.
“Well, you can’t leave, and I wanted to talk to you.”
