My husband and his mother emptied our hotel room and left me in Velmara with no passport, no phone and no flight home — they forgot I knew one number by heart.

***”Let’s see who comes and saves you now.”***

She knew I was an orphan. She had made sure to know. My parents died when I was eleven and she had asked me about it, in detail, on the second time we met, in 2018, over a very good lunch.

No mother to ring. No father. No brother waiting somewhere with a card and a plan.

And then the room phone rang.

“Mrs Navarro. I’ve checked your booking with the airline.”

“Have I missed the flight?”

A pause.

“No, madam. Your return was cancelled yesterday afternoon.”

I sat down on the end of the bed.

Yesterday afternoon. We had eaten dinner together on the terrace at nine. Adrián had cut Mila’s chicken up for her. He had put sun cream on her shoulders.

And he had already cancelled my seat.

I looked at the two notes on the table. One from my husband. One from his mother.

And I sat there in a hotel dressing gown with no passport, no money, no phone and no way home.

And then I remembered the number.

The number.

Ronan Quist was my father’s oldest friend. They were at school together in 1968.

At my parents’ funeral, in the February of 2003, when I was eleven, he knelt down in a car park in Ludworth and gave me a piece of card with a phone number written on it in biro.

And he said: “That’s me. Not the office. Me. Any hour, any country, any reason. You don’t have to explain yourself on the phone. You just say where you are.”

And then he told me the other thing.“And if it’s serious — if it’s really serious — you say: the greenhouse is open. Because your dad would never in his life have left that greenhouse open. So I’ll know it’s you, and I’ll know it’s real, and I won’t ask you one question until I’ve got you somewhere warm.”

I was eleven. I thought it was a game he was doing to stop me crying in a car park.

I memorised it that night anyway. Eleven digits.

I have known them for twenty-two years and I have never dialled them once.

Not when I was in care. Not at eighteen. Not at university. Not when I got married and he sat at the back of the register office in a suit that did not fit and left before the photographs.

The call.

The girl on reception let me use the desk phone. Her name is Núria and she is twenty-six and I will come back to her.

It rang four times.

“Quist.”

And I said: “Ronan. It’s Elise.”

And there was a sound at the other end like somebody sitting up.

And I said the rest of it, and my voice did something on the way through.

“The greenhouse is open.”

Silence for about two seconds.