Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Part One: The Sofa

Penelope had been lying on the sofa for a length of time she had stopped trying to estimate with any precision, her eyes fixed on a stain on the ceiling that she could not have said dated from yesterday or from several years ago, when her phone buzzed for the third time in an hour on the coffee table, right next to an empty tub of ice cream that she still hadn’t found the courage to carry as far as the bin.

She did not look at it.

She knew, without needing to check, that it was probably Agatha, or perhaps Charlotte — one of the two, in any case, reminding her with an increasingly strained veneer of politeness that Mrs Danforth’s manuscript was still waiting for its read-through, and that the third act, as it stood, did not hold together at all. She knew she ought to care more. She also knew, with that slightly cruel lucidity she generally kept for analysing other people’s problems rather than her own, that she would probably not move from this sofa for several hours yet, and that the guilt rising gently in her at the thought would almost certainly not be enough to change her mind.

She had always been good at spotting structural flaws in other people’s work — it was, technically, her entire job, and had been for six years, six years in which Agatha and Charlotte had trusted her for exactly that, six years in which she had learned to recognise, over the course of a manuscript, the precise moment when a story began to ring false, when a character stopped acting according to her own logic and served only the needs of the plot. She found it a little ironic, lying there, to realise that she had not had the same clarity about her own life. She hadn’t seen it coming. Or rather — and it was a nuance that had been gnawing at her for several weeks, one she dared to put into words only for herself, in the silence of this flat that no longer looked like anything — she had perhaps seen certain things, without ever allowing herself to call them what they were.

She turned her head towards the kitchen, where the takeaway cartons were piled on the worktop with an almost methodical regularity, each one representing a different evening, a different meal she had ordered alone, eaten alone, most of the time without even switching on the television, simply because the noise of silence seemed to her, on certain evenings, slightly more bearable than that of an imaginary conversation coming from a screen. She had stopped counting the days. She knew vaguely that she hadn’t worked for several weeks — a fact she had justified, at the start, with a sick note she hadn’t even bothered to have officially drawn up, and which Agatha, with a kindness that touched her as much as it crushed her, had never questioned.

She remembered everything about that last day with Alfred, with a precision that surprised even her. She remembered the dress hanging from the wardrobe door, still in its garment bag, which she had stared at while he talked, unable to tear her eyes from that white fabric which seemed to her, at that precise moment, to belong to another woman, another life. She remembered Alfred’s voice, lower than usual, hesitant in a way she had never known in two years of living together — he who had always known exactly what to say, in any situation, with that quiet assurance she had first mistaken for strength of character. She remembered thinking, in the very first seconds, that he was joking. Then understanding, with a slowness almost insulting to her own intellect, that he was not joking at all.

He didn’t love her any more.

He wanted his freedom.

She had offered to postpone the wedding. She still remembered the sound of her own voice as she said it, a voice that hadn’t seemed to be hers, too calm, too reasonable for what she was living through. She had asked, once, then a second time, whether he was sure. She remembered hoping, right up to the last moment, that he would think better of it, take back his words, tell her it was tiredness, stress, any excuse commonplace enough for her to go on believing that the life she had built over six years was still standing.

He had not taken back his words.

The next day he had boarded a ship bound for Antarctica — a photographic expedition organised months in advance, she had learned afterwards, which meant that he had already known, while preparing the trip, that he would not be there for their wedding. That discovery, more than the break-up itself, had left her speechless for days on end. It wasn’t so much that he had left her that haunted her. It was that he had left her knowing for a long time that he would, while carrying on, for weeks, discussing the seating plan with her, the flowers, the choice of cake, as if nothing were wrong.

She had spent the first two weeks more or less incapable of getting out of bed before the middle of the afternoon. Then, gradually, she had managed to drag herself out of the bedroom and settle on the sofa, which constituted, in the frame of mind she was in at the time, a form of progress she would never have allowed herself to call that in front of anyone else. She ate ice cream straight from the tub, without bothering to look for a clean spoon if the one she’d been using was lying around within reach. She slept a great deal, a heavy sleep without real rest, the kind of sleep that was more like flight than repose. She had stopped answering Eloise’s messages after the third day, not from any lack of affection for her friend, but because she knew that if she opened that conversation she would have to put words to what was happening to her, and she was not yet ready to do that.

What struck her most, lying there, was not so much the sadness itself — an emotion she understood, knew how to name, had felt before, to varying degrees, at other moments in her life — but this new, more diffuse sensation that was harder to pin down: that of no longer really knowing who she was outside the life she had built around Alfred. She tried to remember what she had liked doing before him, her own habits, her own wishes, and realised, with a mixture of shame and bewilderment, that she struggled to draw a clear line between what she had always wanted and what she had ended up wanting only because he wanted it.

She thought back, without really meaning to, to an evening perhaps a year earlier — a perfectly ordinary memory in appearance, which was nevertheless resurfacing with an insistence she couldn’t account for. She had suggested, that evening, going to see an exhibition she had heard about, a retrospective on Flemish painting that she had been dreaming of for weeks. Alfred had said he’d rather stay at home, that exhibitions tired him, that it would be better if she went with a friend. She had never gone. Neither alone nor with a friend. The exhibition had ended, and she hadn’t thought of it again until this very moment, lying on her sofa, wondering why she had never insisted, why it had seemed to her, at the time, entirely normal to drop something she wanted simply because he didn’t feel like it.

It was only a detail. She knew that. One detail among so many others of the same kind, accumulated over two whole years, each too small to justify, on its own, the slightest rethinking — but whose sum, now that she was beginning, in spite of herself, to count them, formed a picture she wasn’t sure she wanted to look in the face.

She had met him on the way out of university, the evening of the graduation ceremony, in the garden of a hall of residence where lukewarm punch was being served in paper cups, and he had been, at twenty-five, with his too well-cut suit and his quiet assurance, the first serious man who had ever asked her what she planned to do with her life, and who had seemed to find the answer interesting. That was six years ago. Six years, which is to say almost her entire adult life: her first job, her first salary, her first flat where he had ended up moving in, and even the way she took her coffee in the morning, which she had changed without noticing to match his.

She was not prepared to tell herself that Alfred had been a terrible man. That would not be honest. She had loved him, truly, for a long time, and a large part of her went on thinking that he had loved her too, in his way, until something in him changed, or perhaps until he finally understood something he hadn’t dared admit to himself for a long time. She had no clear answer to that question, and she was beginning to suspect that she never would.

Her phone buzzed again. This time, out of sheer weariness rather than real curiosity, she reached out and picked it up, squinting at the brightness of the screen in the gloom of the living room, whose curtains had stayed closed since — she no longer knew precisely how long.

Eloise: I’m coming. Don’t argue.

She read the message twice, feeling a wave of apprehension rise in her, mixed with something that almost resembled, against all logic, relief. Then she looked, almost in spite of herself, around her — really around her, for the first time in days, as if Eloise’s message had given her back, for a moment, the ability to see her own flat with a minimum of objectivity.

What she saw was not pretty.

She sat up on the sofa, feeling her body protest at the sudden movement after hours of almost total stillness, and swept the room with her gaze in mounting horror. The takeaway cartons, stacked on the worktop like a geological stratum of her own collapse. The empty ice-cream tubs, scattered here and there, on the coffee table, on the floor, one even on the windowsill for reasons she could no longer remember. Clothes worn and then abandoned on the floor over the days, never washed, never folded. A smell, too, that she had stopped really noticing since she’d been living in it, but which she suddenly imagined through Eloise’s eyes, and which struck her, all at once, as absolutely unbearable.

She got up hurriedly, with the energy of despair, and glanced at herself in the hallway mirror as she crossed the living room to go and open the windows.

The verdict was final.

She was not presentable. Not even vaguely. Her hair formed a shapeless mass that no hair tie, however optimistic, would manage to tame in a few minutes. She was wearing a football shirt printed with “Bridgerton” — a present from Gregory, Eloise’s younger brother, who had given it to her six years earlier, the summer he was sixteen, after persuading her to go with him to see Arsenal, a present she had found hilarious at the time and considerably less so two weeks later, when she had learned that Gregory was telling anyone who would listen that this “date” had gone wonderfully well, and that he was quietly convinced she would end up marrying him one day or another. The conversation she had had to have with him afterwards still counted, to this day, among the most embarrassing moments of her adult life, and the shirt, which she had never had the heart to throw away, had ended up, over the years, as the most comfortable of her nightclothes.

She ran a hand through her hair, without much hope, then froze at the sound of knocking at the door, sooner than she had imagined — Eloise must have sent her message from the landing itself, a perfectly calculated tactic to leave her no chance of preparing an excuse or escaping through the window, which, considering the current state of the flat, would in any case have been a rather unrealistic option.

“Penelope! We know you’re in there!”

That voice. She had heard it once before, one evening, through another door, ten years earlier.

It had been in November of their first year, in Hartley Hall, on the third floor of staircase C, room 14, where Penelope had been living alone since her roommate — a young woman named Cressida, whom she had never known whether to pity or to fear — had left university overnight to study in Edinburgh, leaving behind a bare bed, a poster of dolphins and a smell of patchouli that nothing had managed to dispel. She didn’t have any friends yet. She had a literature seminar on Wednesday mornings, in which she had allowed herself to correct a lecturer politely on a date, and where a girl with chestnut hair, sitting three rows behind her, had burst out laughing so loudly that the class had had to be suspended for half a minute. That was all. They hadn’t spoken. They had simply looked at each other on the way out, with that curious wariness of people who have recognised a species.

The following Thursday, at eleven at night, someone had banged on the door of room 14. Not knocked: banged, with a foot, with that absence of ceremony of people whose arms are full. Penelope had opened it, in her pyjamas, with a book in her hand, and found herself facing a mattress.

It had taken a moment to understand that there was someone underneath. A single mattress, blue and striped, on which had been balanced a holdall with a faulty zip, paperbacks sticking out of it, and on top of all that, held in place by one hand, an electric kettle, an item strictly forbidden by the hall’s regulations, which its bearer clutched to her like a newborn baby.

“Good evening,” the voice had said, a little out of breath, from the depths of the mattress. “I’m the girl from the seminar. I laughed.”

“I remember.”

“My ceiling collapsed. Well, it leaked. There’s a puddle. In the sports block they wanted to put me in a cupboard with three rugby players. I’m moving in here.”

“There are rules.”

“There always are,” the voice had said, with marvellous calm. “Say no if you want. I’ll understand. But I’m not leaving.”

She had looked at the mattress. She had looked at the kettle. She had thought, quite clearly, that she ought to refuse, that one did not let a stranger with prohibited electrical appliances into one’s room, that she had always been a sensible girl, that her mother had raised her with respect for forms. She had opened the door wide.

“The bed on the left,” she had said. “The other one smells of patchouli.”

“I’m Eloise.”

“Penelope.”

“I know,” Eloise had said, setting down the mattress with a big grin. “You said ‘Penelope Featherington’ when the lecturer asked you a question. I made a note of it. I make a note of the names of people I’m going to love.”

She had stayed three years. She appeared, in the hall’s registers, under the heading permanent visitor, following a four-week negotiation with the warden, who had ended up giving in, sighing, in the face of the file on their friendship.

Penelope opened her eyes again. On the landing, behind the door, was the same voice. It was ten years older. It said we know you’re in there with exactly the same absence of doubt.

She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in deeply, before going to open the door.

Eloise stood on the landing with a shopping bag in each hand, and Penelope had time to see, before a single word had been spoken, her friend’s face pass through several different expressions in the space of barely two seconds — relief at seeing her finally on her feet, followed almost immediately by a shock that Eloise didn’t quite manage to hide on glimpsing, over her shoulder, the state of the living room.

“Okay,” said Eloise slowly, walking in without waiting to be invited, which, considering the circumstances, seemed the only reasonable attitude. “Okay.”

“I know.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You were going to.”

Eloise put her bags down on the only corner of the worktop not already occupied by a half-eaten carton of food, then turned to her with that particular expression she kept for situations she considered serious — an expression Penelope had known since their very first year at university, when Eloise had turned up in her room one evening without warning, simply because she had decreed that they were going to be friends, and had never really left any room for doubt since.

“How long is it since you had a shower?”

Penelope felt a rush of shame climb to her cheeks, disproportionate to a question so innocuous in appearance, but which touched, she knew, on something far larger than personal hygiene.

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Pen.”

“I’m not counting the days, Eloise. That’s different from not knowing.”

Eloise said nothing to that — not immediately, at any rate — and simply looked at her a moment longer, with a tenderness mixed with worry that Penelope found almost harder to bear than any remark could have been. She looked away first, unable to hold that gaze any longer, and began, out of automatism rather than any real intention, to pick up a few wrappers lying on the coffee table, as if the gesture could, in some way, make up for everything Eloise had just seen.

“Leave that,” said Eloise gently, taking the cartons out of her hands. “We’ll deal with the tidying. You’re going to have a shower. A proper one. With soap and everything.”

“I know how to wash, Eloise.”

“I don’t doubt it. But you’re going to do it now anyway, not in three hours, when you’ve managed to convince your brain it isn’t that important.”

Penelope could have protested further. She thought, for a moment, of finding a retort dry enough to close the conversation, something in the register of the slightly brittle humour she knew how to wield with the people she loved — but she felt too tired, in truth, to fight a proposal that, deep down, was not unfair. She gave in, without much conviction, and headed for the bathroom under her friend’s satisfied gaze.

Under the hot water, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, she stood for more than three minutes without feeling that the mere fact of standing up constituted, in itself, an insurmountable effort. She lowered her eyelids, let the water run over her face, and tried, without much success, to think of nothing — an exercise she had read somewhere was supposed to soothe the mind, and which, in her personal experience, generally only gave her more direct access to all the thoughts she was precisely trying to avoid.

When she came out again, hair wet, dressed in a tracksuit she had had to rummage for at length in her wardrobe, the living room had already changed its face. The cartons had disappeared. The coffee table, which she had almost forgotten possessed a visible surface, reappeared before her eyes like an old memory. The cushions were back in place on the sofa, with a rigour that clearly betrayed Eloise’s energy rather than any intervention of her own.

“How did you do that in so little time?” she asked, almost suspicious.

“Rage,” Eloise answered simply, gesturing at a dish she had evidently prepared — or at least heated up — while Penelope was away, set on the now-cleared worktop. “Sit down. Eat. We’ll talk afterwards.”

“Talk about what?”

Eloise did not answer immediately, busy clearing away the last remnants of the surrounding disorder, and Penelope felt a dull unease settle in her — that familiar, almost animal impression of sensing a conversation approach that she wasn’t sure she wanted to have.

“About your life,” Eloise finally said, sitting down opposite her with an expression that had nothing light left in it. “About what we’re going to do so that you stop disappearing for weeks on end without a word.”

“I’ve sent word.”

“You’ve replied ‘I’m fine’ three times in two weeks, Pen. That’s not sending word. That’s sending a minimal survival signal.”

Penelope had nothing to say to that, mainly because it was true, and she had never been good at arguing against facts she knew to be accurate.

“I’m fine,” she tried anyway, without much conviction.

“You’re not fine. It’s normal not to be fine, mind you. Nobody expects you to be fine a month after what happened. But you can’t go on like this indefinitely, either.”

“A month,” Penelope repeated, as if the figure itself had something dizzying about it, spoken aloud rather than vaguely felt in the disorder of her days without landmarks.

“A month,” Eloise confirmed, gently.

Penelope lowered her eyes to her plate, unable to meet her friend’s gaze any longer, overwhelmed by a wave of shame she couldn’t quite justify — as if the mere fact of having let so much time pass without reacting constituted, in itself, a fault she now had to atone for.

“I don’t know what to do, Eloise. I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be any more.”

“You don’t need to know right now. But you have to at least start living a little, while you look for the answer.”

Eloise’s phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it, let slip a smile she made no attempt to hide, then turned the screen towards Penelope.

Felicity: On my way. Bringing wine, because you can’t stage a family intervention without wine, it’s in the rules.

“Felicity’s coming,” Eloise announced, unnecessarily, since the message spoke for itself.

Penelope felt something warm in her in spite of everything, at the thought of seeing her little sister — a feeling that coexisted, with little logic, with the exhaustion and apprehension that had been weighing on her since the start of this conversation.

“The two of you planned this?”

“Quite a few of us planned it, actually,” Eloise replied, with a caution that did not escape Penelope. “Felicity, Edwina, Hyacinth and me. We even have a group chat now.”

“A group chat.”

“It’s called The Rescue Squad. Hyacinth chose the name. Don’t ask me why there’s a siren in the logo, I still haven’t had a satisfactory explanation.”

Penelope felt a laugh escape her in spite of herself — brief, almost stifled, but real, the first in days that she hadn’t forced out of politeness. Eloise looked at her with an unreadable expression, something between relief and a slightly moved tenderness, and said nothing more, as if she feared, by insisting, to frighten away this barely recovered laugh.

Felicity arrived about twenty minutes later, as promised carrying a bottle of white wine which she held out to Penelope the moment she crossed the threshold, with that particular energy she had always had, since childhood, of believing that most of life’s problems could at least be slightly softened by a good glass shared between sisters. She hugged her tightly, for longer than usual, without saying anything, which, coming from Felicity, was probably worth every speech she might have given.

“You look terrible,” she announced at last, stepping back to get a better look at her.

“Thank you, that’s exactly what I needed to hear.”

“I say it with love. You look terrible, but you’re alive, which, given the number of worried messages we’ve been sending each other about you these past weeks, is already good news.”

Penelope wanted to protest, to explain that she had never been in danger, only tired, only lost — but something in her sister’s eyes, a sincere anxiety she made no attempt to hide, dissuaded her. She contented herself with hugging her once more, harder this time, with that mute gratitude she often felt towards Felicity without ever quite knowing how to express it properly.

Edwina and Hyacinth arrived almost at the same time, a few minutes later, Edwina carrying a bag full of what looked like toiletries and Hyacinth proudly brandishing her phone as if it contained, on its own, the definitive solution to all of Penelope’s problems.

Theo, for his part, arrived last, twenty minutes late and with no excuse, which was strictly in keeping with the idea Penelope had had of him since primary school. He walked in without knocking — the door having been left ajar since Edwina’s arrival —, cast a circular glance over the living room, and nodded with feigned gravity.

“It’s worse than Eloise described,” he announced. “And yet Eloise is not someone who understates.”

“Hello to you too, Theo.”

“Hello, Pen.”

He crossed the room to hold her against him, longer than he usually did, without saying anything, and Penelope felt something give slightly in her chest — that way he had always had of disarming her defences with a single gesture, without needing to say a word.

She watched him settle into the armchair he had considered his own since she’d moved in here, and thought, not for the first time, that the make-up of her living room that evening resembled an improbable cross between two worlds that, on paper, should never have met. Theo had known her since primary school, long before Eloise, long before the Bridgertons, long before Alfred — he had known the version of her who was eleven years old with a catastrophic fringe, which gave him a moral authority no one in this room could seriously rival. Felicity was blood, the childhood home, the squabbles and the alliances against their mother. Eloise was university, the discovery of a friendship chosen rather than endured, and, by extension, an entire family into which Penelope had found herself adopted without ever having had to ask permission. Edwina came later still, by ricochet, arrived in their circle via her sister Kate and Kate’s marriage to Anthony. And Hyacinth was Hyacinth — Eloise’s little sister, who had decreed around the age of fifteen that she was now part of the group, and whom no one had ever found the courage to contradict.

“Wait,” said Hyacinth, pointing at Theo with an expression of undisguised curiosity. “Aren’t you the Theo from...”

“Yes,” Theo replied, without looking up from the bag of pastries he was opening.

“My sister’s?”

“Your sister’s.”

Penelope saw Eloise freeze slightly, then take a sip of wine with a slowness that, in her, amounted to a more or less complete confession.

“That was six years ago,” said Eloise, without looking at anyone in particular.

“Four,” Theo corrected.

“Six.”

“Four and a half, if you count the period when you pretended we weren’t seeing each other when we still were.”

“Nobody needs to count that period.”

“I do. It was formative.”

Penelope exchanged a look with Felicity, who raised her eyebrows with manifest delight, and found herself smiling for the second time that evening — a statistical feat, given her general state over the past few weeks. Theo and Eloise had kept up for years a relationship neither of them had ever agreed to define clearly, made of long stretches of silence interspersed with reunions that Penelope had stopped trying to follow, before it ended by mutual consent, without drama, with a simplicity that had almost offended her at the time, so much had she hoped for a little more chaos. Theo now lived with a man, and had for two years, which had changed absolutely nothing in his dynamic with Eloise, which consisted essentially of trading precise and well-documented barbs the moment they found themselves in the same room.

“Right,” Edwina cut in, setting her bag down on the table with the methodical assurance of someone used to bringing order to conversations that drift. “We have a plan.”

“I’m afraid of the word ‘plan’ in your mouth.”

“You’re right to be afraid,” Hyacinth confirmed, with a smile that did nothing to reassure Penelope. “But it’s a good plan. Well, I think so.”

Penelope looked at them one after the other, feeling a familiar apprehension settle in her stomach — the kind she knew well from having felt it every time this particular quartet decided it knew better than she did what she needed, which, historically, had proved right in a high enough proportion of cases that she took their suggestions seriously as a matter of course, even when she would have preferred not to.

“We think,” Edwina began, with that pragmatism that was her trademark, “that the problem isn’t only Alfred. The problem is that your entire adult life was organised around him for six years, and now that he’s gone there’s not much left to fill the space he’s left behind.”

“That’s a very clinical way of putting it.”

“I am a clinical person,” Edwina replied, without losing her calm. “It doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Penelope nodded, unable to find a retort convincing enough to contradict an analysis that, she had to admit, corresponded almost exactly to what she herself had begun to feel, lying on that sofa, barely a few hours earlier.

“So,” Hyacinth resumed, with the slightly overdone enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting for this moment since the start of the conversation, “we think you should try a dating app.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Not to find the love of your life,” Eloise specified at once, sensing no doubt the categorical refusal already rising in Penelope’s voice. “Just to... get out a bit. Talk to people. Remind yourself that the world didn’t stop just because Alfred went off to explore the ice floes.”

“I don’t want to meet anyone.”

“Nobody’s asking you to fall in love,” Edwina insisted. “We’re only asking you to prove to your brain that there exists, somewhere in the world, something other than the memory of Alfred and a boat to Antarctica.”

Penelope felt the weight of their four gazes resting on her — five, counting Theo, who hadn’t said anything since the start of the exchange but who was watching her with an attention she found, at that precise moment, considerably more unbearable than all the arguments put together.

“No,” she said.

“Pen—“

“No, Eloise. I’ve barely spent a month recovering from something that was supposed to last my whole life. I’m not going to download an app to talk to strangers. The very idea makes me want to go straight back to bed.”

There was a silence, longer than the previous ones, during which Penelope saw Edwina open her mouth, then close it again, then exchange a look with Felicity that clearly meant something neither of them said aloud.

“Fine,” Eloise said at last.

“Fine?”

“Fine. We won’t force you. That would be ridiculous.”

Penelope looked at her with undisguised suspicion, knowing from experience that Eloise never abandoned an idea so easily, and noticed, without yet drawing the obvious conclusions, the little smile her best friend didn’t quite manage to suppress.

They didn’t force her. They did something considerably worse: they waited.

Group chat: The Rescue Squad 🚨

Hyacinth — Tuesday, 11:04
just casually, no ulterior motive whatsoever: how are you?

Penelope — 11:31
I’m fine Hyacinth

Hyacinth — 11:31
great! and so have you thought about

Penelope — 11:32
no

Hyacinth — 11:32
you don’t even know what I was going to say

Penelope — 11:32
yes I do

It was in the middle of the second week, on a Thursday for no reason she could quite name, why that Thursday rather than any other, that Penelope got up a little earlier than usual, showered without being told to, and stood for a long while in front of her wardrobe before realising she wasn’t getting ready for a date, or for a visit from Eloise, or for anything that involved anyone other than herself.

She had seen, a few days earlier, a poster for a retrospective devoted to Flemish painting in a small gallery near Bloomsbury — not the same exhibition as the one she had missed a year ago, that one had ended long since, but another, on a subject close enough that the coincidence seemed almost personally addressed to her. She had looked at the poster for a long time, on her phone, before closing the app without doing anything, exactly as she had done a year earlier with the previous one.

That Thursday, she reopened the app, bought a ticket, and left her flat without telling anyone — not even Eloise, not even Felicity, in a discretion she granted herself as a precise, almost selfish luxury.

The gallery was half empty, silent, and she spent nearly two hours walking from room to room at her own pace, without having to negotiate with anyone the time spent in front of each canvas, without having to justify why she lingered longer in front of this one than that one. She stayed a long time in front of a portrait of a woman whose gaze, turned slightly away from the viewer, seemed to carry something she recognised without being able to name precisely — a form of patience, perhaps, or simply the quiet awareness of existing outside the frame that had been chosen for her.

She didn’t think of Alfred once in those two hours — which, in itself, was not yet a novelty at this stage, she had already known moments of passing forgetfulness. What was new, however, was the quiet certainty, stepping back out into the fresh air of Bloomsbury, that she had just done something solely for herself, without it repairing anything, proving anything, serving any purpose other than the tiny but real satisfaction of having wanted something and given it to herself.

She sent Eloise a message that evening, without really thinking, almost on reflex.

Penelope — 19:22
I went to see an exhibition today. on my own. it was good.

Eloise — 19:24
which one?

Penelope — 19:24
Flemish painting. nothing special. I just felt like going.

Eloise — 19:25
Pen

Eloise — 19:25
that’s amazing news

Penelope — 19:26
it’s just an exhibition Eloise

Eloise — 19:26
no. it’s you deciding to do something because you want to, for the first time in a month. it’s not “just an exhibition”.

Penelope didn’t answer that, mainly because she had nothing to set against it, and went to bed that night with that strange and welcome sensation of having, without much ceremony, begun to find her footing again.

The weeks that followed the exhibition — those of the first month, which Penelope would later, looking back, call the month of the awakening — resembled nothing spectacular, and that was precisely what made them hard to tell. There was no turning point, no great decision, no triumphant montage set to rousing music. There were cartons to empty, a mother to face, a manuscript to tame again, and a whole host of tiny things that had to be redone one by one, the way one relearns to walk after a long period of immobility, holding on to the walls.

Felicity arrived one Sunday morning with three rolls of bin bags, a stack of flattened removal boxes she had salvaged from behind a supermarket, a portable speaker which she set down on the worktop without asking permission, and the determined air of someone who had rehearsed her speech on the Tube and fully intended to deliver it before she lost her nerve.

“I’m not going to ask whether you’re ready,” she announced, dumping the lot in the hallway with a thud. “Because you’ll say no, and it won’t change anything. I’m only asking where we start.”

Penelope, who had hoped until the last second that her sister had simply come for a coffee, looked at the boxes, then at the corridor, then at the door of the hall cupboard which she had learned, over the weeks, to walk past without turning her head — the way one learns to skirt a house where one knows a rabid dog lives.

She hadn’t decided on this avoidance. It had settled in all by itself, with that perverse discretion of habits born of evasion: she didn’t look at the pair of running shoes Alfred had left by the door the morning he took his suitcase, a grey pair with the laces still tied, which she nudged aside with her toe every time she took out the rubbish rather than actually moving them. She didn’t look, either, at the right-hand side of the bathroom, where his razor still sat enthroned, and his shaving foam, and the little brush he used for his beard and always stored upside down, a quirk she had found touching for the first six months and irritating for the following eighteen. She had ended up buying a second toothbrush mug purely so that she would no longer have to look at the old one.

“The shoes,” she said at last, because it was the only thing she was certain she could get through without collapsing.

“Perfect. The shoes.”

Felicity picked them up with the perfectly studied casualness of someone who had understood, without anyone having explained it, that the way of doing it mattered more than the act itself, and set them at the bottom of the first box without comment. The mere sight of them disappearing from the hallway produced in Penelope a disproportionate effect, a kind of light dizziness, as if the whole flat had suddenly breathed a little more widely.

“There,” said Felicity. “One down. See, it’s not so terrible.”

“There are two hundred and forty-seven more.”

“Then we have two hundred and forty-six steps ahead of us, and we’ve got all day.”

They worked for four hours. Penelope would never have believed it could take so long to empty a single flat of the presence of a single man, but Alfred, she gradually realised as she opened drawer after drawer, had left traces in places she wouldn’t have thought to look: in the glove compartment of her own car, on the kitchen shelf where he kept his food supplements, in the laundry basket where a T-shirt still lay that she hadn’t dared to wash because it still carried, faintly, the smell of his shampoo. Felicity, for her part, had chosen the method that seemed to her most effective — that of permanent joking, light, never cruel, which allowed Penelope to laugh between two more painful stages and never to stay in the silence long enough for it to become dangerous.

She laughed, truly, and was surprised to find that the laugh cost her nothing, that it came with no feeling of betrayal. Alfred had ceased, for a few hours, to be an overwhelming presence and become once more a man with objects — a corkscrew shaped like a flamingo, a collection of ski hats he had never worn, a subscription to a finance magazine whose covers she had always found depressing.

It was towards the end of the afternoon, in the bedroom, that they came upon what she hadn’t until then been able to bring herself to look at.

The suit hung inside the wardrobe, in its grey garment bag, next to her own dress, which she had left in place since the evening of the break-up without ever taking it out, or putting it away elsewhere, or even looking it in the face. Two garment bags side by side, one white, one grey, hanging there with the stubborn stillness of two people who had not yet been informed that the ceremony was cancelled.

Felicity said nothing for a long moment. Penelope felt her throat tighten in a way she hadn’t anticipated at all, and had to sit down on the edge of the bed to recover a more or less acceptable composure.

“That one I’ll deal with,” Felicity said at last, gently, unhooking the grey bag with precise movements. “I’ll put it in my car and drop it off at his mother’s. You don’t have to talk to her, you don’t have to see him, you don’t have to do anything.”

“And mine?”

Felicity hesitated, which, in her, was an event rare enough for Penelope to notice.

“I don’t know. We could sell it. We could give it away. We could keep it in the cupboard for ten years and get it out one day to marry you off to someone else, if you fancy. Or we could, I don’t know, burn it, ritually, in Mum’s garden, which would cause a memorable family incident.”

“Not yet,” said Penelope.

“Not yet is a perfectly valid answer,” Felicity replied, without the slightest trace of disappointment. “It stays there. It’s very well where it is.”

They finished sorting in silence that evening, with that tired efficiency that follows difficult moments. It was at the bottom of the last drawer of the chest, under odd socks, that Penelope found the card — a little rectangle of folded card which she recognised before she’d even opened it: the one Alfred had given her for their first anniversary, with a clumsy drawing of a sleeping cat on the front, which he had drawn himself while claiming, with a false modesty that had made her laugh, that it was a work of contemporary art.

Thank you for being the person with whom everything is simpler.

She read the sentence twice, standing in the middle of the bedroom, with the dizzying sensation of holding in her hands an object whose meaning had just changed without anyone telling her. She had loved that sentence, at the time. She had kept it, reread it, shown it to Eloise with a slightly naive pride. And she read it now with the eye of the editor she had become, that eye which stopped automatically on words that rang true and on those that hadn’t been chosen by chance: simpler. Simpler for whom? Simple in what sense? She couldn’t decide whether it was the loveliest thing anyone had ever said to her or the most revealing.

“What’s that?” asked Felicity, coming up behind her to look over her shoulder.

“Nothing. A card. He was kind, in it.”

“I never said he wasn’t.”

“No, that’s true. But everyone would have let me believe it. That he was a monster. That I’d spent six years with someone horrible without noticing. And that would have been simpler, precisely.”

“But that’s not what you think.”

“No,” said Penelope, slowly. “That’s not what I think. I think he loved me. I think he truly loved me, in his way, until he decided he didn’t love me any more. And I think I was happy, most of the time, which is exactly what makes all of this so hard to understand.”

Felicity didn’t answer, knowing no doubt, as she often knew this kind of thing without needing to be told, that there was nothing to say to that. She sat down beside her sister on the edge of the bed, without touching her, and simply stayed there, in this flat where half the shelves had just been emptied, waiting for something in the room to change its nature.

It was the last shelf of the wardrobe, right at the top, behind the empty suitcase that nobody had opened in months, that produced that something. Felicity, looking for somewhere to put the pile of clean laundry, moved the suitcase and brought down onto the bed a rectangular shoebox, slightly crushed, which bore on its lid, in handwriting Penelope took a moment to recognise as her own — more slanted, quicker, the handwriting of four or five years ago — a single word in black felt-tip: Before.

She had forgotten the existence of that box. More exactly, she had made sure she forgot it, when she moved in with Alfred, when it had been necessary to free up space in the wardrobe for his things and she had hastily gathered together everything that seemed to her superfluous, everything that had no place in the more orderly life they were building. She had said at the time that it was temporary. She had said she would sort it out later. Later had never come.

She opened it on her lap. There was a spiral-bound notebook with a dog-eared cover, concert tickets whose ink had faded, a photo of her and Theo at fifteen in front of a carousel, two sisters in pyjamas on a beach, a hand-burned CD whose tracing-paper sleeve bore, in Theo’s hand, the words for when you’re sad (and for when you’re unbearable), a little white pebble whose origin she could no longer recall — and, at the bottom, a pile of sheets stapled together in a homemade way, which she took out with an almost ceremonious care.

They were short stories. Six or seven, written at twenty-three, twenty-four, in that period when she had written every evening after work, without ever showing anything to anyone, with that slightly shameful fever of people who feel they are committing an illicit act by lining up words that serve no purpose. She read the first page standing, then sitting, then lying across the bed, no longer paying much attention to her sister’s presence, and was struck, as she went on, by something she hadn’t anticipated: it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t even really clumsy. It was lively, funny, a little insolent, full of those sentences that set off in one direction and ended up in another, with that unplanned audacity she hadn’t found again in years, neither in her work as an editor, where she contented herself with recognising in others what she no longer allowed herself, nor anywhere else.

“You wrote really well,” said Felicity, who was reading over her shoulder without having asked permission.

“I wrote wildly.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Yes you do,” said Felicity, simply. “You moved in with a man who preferred things tidy.”

Penelope said nothing. She stayed a long time staring at the first page of her own short story, that slightly slanted handwriting she hadn’t allowed herself for years, and felt something crack gently inside her — not sadness, not exactly, but a mourning of a different kind, stranger, older: that of the woman she had been before deciding, one day, without ever putting it into words, that she would be easier to live with by taking up less room.

She carried the box into the living room, set it on the coffee table, next to the tea Felicity had ended up making, and did not put it back in the wardrobe.

It was while tidying the living room, that evening, that she noticed the plant.

It had been on the windowsill forever, so familiar she had stopped seeing it: a spider plant with variegated ribbons, in a cracked terracotta pot, which had known better days and worse house moves. It was greener than it had ever been. It had survived a winter in which nobody had watered it, weeks of drawn curtains, a man who thought it ugly and had threatened on several occasions to replace it with a cactus from a good family. It was the only living thing in the flat that hadn’t protested against the collapse.

“You kept Wilhelmina,” said Felicity, who had followed her gaze.

“She’s indestructible.”

“She’s Eloise’s.”

“She’s ours. It’s written on the pot.”

She turned it between her fingers. Beneath a layer of dust were two words traced in black marker, in two different hands: Wilhelmina — joint property.

They had bought her at the end of their first year, in a charity shop on the high street, for two pounds, because she was so scrawny that Eloise had declared one could not let a plant die of shame. They had christened her on the way back, on the pavement, with a ceremony full of seriousness, pouring a dregs of cold tea over her head. She had lived three years in room 14, by the window, between the illicit kettle and a pile of novels, and she had known with them three house moves, two floods, a fire alarm, an oral exam of Penelope’s during which Eloise had held her in her arms, in the wings, like a lucky charm. On graduation night they had split her in two with a kitchen knife, with the solemnity of two surgeons. One half each. So that you’ll never have the right to lose me, Eloise had said, planting hers in a mustard jar.

Penelope looked at the plant. It had grown. It had put out offshoots, little green babies hanging in clusters at the ends of long stems. She wondered, with a shiver, what had become of the other half, in Eloise’s flat, and whether there was more patience there than here.

“She’s doing well,” she said.

“She’s doing better than you,” said Felicity.

“Is that a compliment?”

“She’s a plant,” said Felicity. “They don’t need compliments.”

Portia turned up the following Wednesday, without warning, as she had done for thirty years, with a Pyrex casserole dish wrapped in a tea towel, a big cloth bag from which the corner of a newspaper stuck out, and that particular expression — chin slightly raised, lips pressed into a thin line whose function was to signify to the entire universe that she was not in the least worried — which Penelope would have recognised out of a thousand, and which, in her mother, almost always heralded maximum anxiety.

She had a key, naturally. She had had a key since the day Penelope moved in, four years earlier, and had never ceased to regard it as a simple maternal precaution rather than an invasion of privacy, which had given rise, over the years, to several incidents the family now referred to under the collective name of “the key affairs”.

“You weren’t answering the phone,” Portia announced from the hall, without preamble, already taking off her coat. “Fourteen calls, Penelope. Fourteen. Your sister Prudence told me I was exaggerating, but honestly, I’m your mother, I don’t see what’s exaggerated about worrying when my daughter hasn’t picked up for more than three weeks.”

“I sent messages.”

“You sent ‘I’m fine’ three times. That’s not a message, that’s a distress signal in code.”

Portia crossed the living room with that inspector’s gait she adopted whenever she entered anywhere, sweeping the room with a quick, professional glance that stopped, a moment longer than necessary, on the shoebox sitting on the coffee table, on the two cartons lined up by the door, on the sudden emptiness of the shelves at the back.

She settled into the kitchen, set the casserole down on the worktop, and began rummaging through the cupboards with a naturalness that defied all contradiction, looking for plates, cutlery, glasses, all the while continuing, aloud and without transition, what was manifestly a monologue prepared several days earlier.

“I spoke to Alfred’s mother, of course. She called me. She’s very embarrassed, you know. I told her it wasn’t her fault, naturally, but all the same, one has a right to be a little put out. As for the flowers and the caterer, it was Eloise who dealt with those, I didn’t understand it all, she had an idea and she phoned everybody before I’d even had time to think. The flowers went to charities that help women who’ve been victims of violence, apparently they were delighted, though I still wonder why they weren’t simply brought round here to you. And everything the caterer had prepared was distributed to charities, people who needed to eat. Eloise explained to me that it was better than throwing it away, which is true, I’m not saying otherwise. The venue was more complicated, they kept the deposit. I’ve told the neighbours, too, so they won’t ask you questions on the stairs.”

“You told the neighbours.”

“To spare you having to.”

Penelope closed her eyes, for a moment, with the almost physical sensation of being crossed by a contradictory wave of exasperation and tenderness. She was thinking of Eloise, above all, who hadn’t said a word about it for weeks — Eloise who had made the phone calls in her place, without asking her opinion, without asking her to relive the slightest detail, and who had found for those peonies, chosen over three fittings, the only destination that didn’t make her want to cry: a room where women who’d had far more reason than she to fall apart came to catch their breath. Her mother had manifestly not grasped the logic of that gesture. Penelope understood it perfectly. She saw perfectly, in the way her mother slammed the cupboard doors a little harder than necessary, in the way her hands seized the plates with a precision slightly too emphatic, that the kitchen was only a pretext, a way of keeping her fingers busy while the rest of her searched for where to begin. She knew that technique. She had practised it herself, two weeks earlier, with a coffee cup.

“And work? Agatha phoned me too. She was very proper. She only asked whether you were all right, she demanded nothing. She’s a decent woman, that Agatha.”

“You spoke to Agatha?”

“She had my number. You remember, at last year’s drinks.”

Penelope, who had completely forgotten that detail and would far rather have gone on ignoring it, picked up her fork and ate a mouthful of gratin to spare herself from answering, which proved, incidentally, an excellent gastronomic decision: her mother’s gratin had been, since childhood, the only thing in the world capable of making her feel simultaneously eight years old and very tired.

They ate for a while in silence. The gratin cooled on the plates, the late-afternoon light slid along the worktop, and Penelope noticed, after a moment, that her mother’s hand, resting beside her plate, was trembling slightly — almost imperceptibly, with a small continuous, regular tremor that owed nothing to age or fatigue.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” said Portia, suddenly, in a lower voice, without raising her eyes from her plate. “So I ask questions. That’s how I do it.”

Penelope set down her fork.

“I know, Mum.”

“I know it’s tiring.”

“It’s a bit tiring, yes.”

“But it’s how I know how you are, without you having to tell me.”

There was a silence, brief, during which Penelope understood something she had always known without ever having put it into words: that all her mother’s frenetic activity — the phone calls, the neighbours, the casserole, the monologue about the caterer, the names of her sisters told off like a rosary — was her own way, clumsy, intrusive, sometimes exhausting, of saying the same thing as Eloise, as Felicity, as Theo, in her own words. I’m here. I don’t know how to go about it. But I’m here.

Portia turned her fork in her plate, once, twice, with the diligence of someone looking for a place to rest her eyes, and Penelope understood from that gesture that she hadn’t finished.

“The night before my wedding,” Portia said, “I cried for an hour in your grandmother’s bath.”

Penelope looked up. She knew the story of her parents’ wedding by heart, or rather she knew the official version, the one told in the family at birthdays, with laughter in the right places and well-rehearsed grimaces; she had never heard about the bath.

“You never told me.”

“I never told anyone. It had to be funny, the day we talked about it. And it was funny, as a matter of fact, with hindsight. The cake that collapsed in the marquee because of the heat. The caterer who got the day wrong and turned up a week late with twenty-two cold chickens. Archie’s best man who lost the rings in the hedge, and the whole family on all fours in the rosebushes while the vicar waited. And your grandmother who said at every catastrophe, with her little smile: I told you so.“

“She told you so.”

“She’d never told me anything, but she had a talent for making it look like a prophecy.”

Portia gave a short dry laugh, which died away almost at once.

“So I told myself, in that bath: it’s a sign. Everything going wrong is a sign. And I didn’t listen to it.”

She set down her fork. Penelope did not move. She had learned, over the years, to recognise the moment when her mother stopped telling a story and started to say something, and that moment had a particular silence, slightly too long, that no one in the family had ever dared interrupt.

“I’m not telling you this to console you,” Portia resumed, looking at the worktop rather than at her daughter. “I’m not very good at that, you’ve noticed. But sometimes, with hindsight — and I know it’s not something one is supposed to say to one’s daughter — I almost feel I’d have preferred Archie to leave me, the night before. Like your Alfred. It would have spared me a great deal.”

“Mum.”

“I know.”

“That’s not very consoling.”

“I haven’t finished,” said Portia, and her voice, for the first time since she had arrived, lost every trace of the slightly theatrical liveliness she had worn on entering, like a coat taken off. “Because there is one thing I don’t regret. Just one. One thing, in this whole story, that I would do again with my eyes closed, even knowing all the rest in advance. And that’s you. You four. Prudence, Philippa, Felicity, you. If I’d been left at the altar, you wouldn’t exist, and that, Penelope, that, I can’t even imagine.”

Penelope did not quite know what she felt at that instant. She discovered, searching, that it was two things at once, and that these two things did not contradict each other: a slightly childlike embarrassment, the kind one feels when a person who never says such things finally says them aloud in a kitchen; and, beneath it, something warmer and more disarming, which was rising slowly, without asking permission.

She looked at her mother. She really looked at her, which she perhaps hadn’t done in a long time, with that editor’s attention she could never switch off: the deeper lines around the mouth, the hair she always dyed in the same shade, slightly too dark, the ring she turned round her finger out of an old habit. And all at once, without having sought it, she remembered.

She remembered the house of her childhood, always full of noise: the doors slamming, the telephone ringing, her parents’ voices rising in the next room for reasons a child did not try to understand, and her mother, in the middle of it all, perpetually elsewhere, her head half turned towards one crisis or another, her eyes on the bill, on the argument, on the next catastrophe that would need containing. She remembered the parents’ evening, when she was ten, to which nobody had come, and the way she had told her teacher that her mother was ill. She remembered her eighth-birthday cake, bought at the supermarket, which bore the name of another little girl because nobody had checked the label. She remembered the school play, in which she was a tree, and her mother arriving just in time for the last scene, Felicity on her hip, out of breath, apologising in a whisper to the whole hall. She remembered, above all, the three weeks of piano lessons when she was nine, and what she had never told anyone: that she had stopped at the first three bars of her mother’s lullaby because she had dared neither to ask Portia what it was called, nor to admit that she wanted to learn it for herself. She had learned very early to ask for nothing, in that house. She had learned that one got more peace by making oneself small.

For years, she had kept those memories like exhibits. She had put them away somewhere, never taking them out, but never throwing them away either, with that discreet obstinacy of children whose parents did not know how to look at them. She never really paid attention to me. The sentence had served her as a compass, for a long time, for locating herself in her own family: the middle daughter, the one you notice last, the one who doesn’t make trouble.

And there she was, in her kitchen, that same woman, with her Pyrex casserole, her fourteen phone calls, her three pages of handwritten notes on how to reheat a gratin. That woman who had told the neighbours to spare her from doing it herself. Who had phoned Agatha, a number picked up at last year’s drinks, solely to ask whether her daughter was all right. Who said I don’t know what to say to you, so I ask questions while looking at her plate because she did not dare look in the face what she had just confessed.

Penelope understood then something she could not have put into words an hour earlier: that both things were true at the same time. She had lacked attention, as a child, and she had suffered from that absence, truly, without exaggerating, without being mistaken. And she had been loved, very strongly, always, with a clumsy, distracted, intrusive or too-late love depending on the year, but never an absent one. The one did not cancel the other. The one had perhaps never even ceased to exist alongside the other, in the noise, under the slamming doors, and it had taken everything collapsing around her for her to finally hear it.

She reached across the table and laid her hand on her mother’s, the one that was trembling. Portia said nothing. Her hand stopped trembling, gently, like an animal growing calm.

“I know, Mum,” said Penelope. “About the four of us. I know.”

They stayed like that for a long moment, without adding a word, in the fading light of the kitchen, with the gratin cooling on the plates and the distant sound of a television in the neighbours’ flat, the neighbours her mother had warned.

“I’m getting better,” she said. “Not very well. But better.”

“I can see that,” Portia replied, and her eyes misted very slightly before she turned her head away, with an abrupt movement, to rummage in her bag for a handkerchief she never took out. “You’ve got some colour back.”

She left at nightfall, after doing the washing-up despite Penelope’s protests, leaving the casserole in the fridge with three pages of handwritten instructions on how to reheat it, and kissing her daughter on the cheek with a gesture at once quick and emphatic, as if she wanted both to be done with it and to prolong it. On the threshold, she turned round.

“You can call me, you know. Not for the big things. For anything.”

“I know, Mum.”

“I won’t ask questions.”

“You’ll ask them anyway.”

“Yes,” conceded Portia, with an honesty that was not quite like her. “But you won’t have to answer them.”

She had tried, one Sunday afternoon, to get back to Mrs Danforth’s manuscript — less out of a surge of professional conscience than as a sort of test she set herself, a way of checking whether she was still capable of doing anything at all that resembled her life before. She had opened the file, reread the first thirty pages of the third act with the sincere hope of rediscovering that familiar reflex, that capacity she had always had to feel, almost physically, the exact place where a story began to limp.

She had felt nothing at all, that day. The words had scrolled past her eyes without ever organising themselves into anything coherent, each sentence slipping out of her concentration before she had even finished reading it, and she had caught herself, after twenty minutes, rereading the same paragraph for the fourth time without having retained a single word. She had ended up closing the laptop with a brusqueness unlike her, overwhelmed by a shame out of proportion to what was, after all, only one manuscript among others — but which had made her aware, with a clarity she hadn’t anticipated, of the exact extent of what she had lost. Not only Alfred. Not only the wedding. But that version of herself, able to concentrate, to create, to do the job she loved without every sentence turning, insidiously, into a reminder of everything that was wrong.

She had started again the next day, this time with a slightly obstinate determination rather than sincere hope — less to rediscover her talent than to prove, mainly to herself, that she could at least try without collapsing. She had lasted twelve minutes, had reread an entire paragraph without losing it along the way, and had closed the laptop with a satisfaction out of proportion to so modest a result. The day after, twenty minutes. Then, the next day, almost a whole hour, and she had even corrected, in the margin, a line in the second act that had rung false from the beginning without her ever having known exactly why — a tiny detail, a misplaced comma that broke the rhythm of a sentence, but which gave her, on spotting it, an almost disproportionate joy, that same sensation of regained competence which she had feared, these past weeks, to have lost for good.

She also began again, little by little, to do things alone, things with no justification other than herself. One Saturday morning, she settled on the terrace of a café she had loved even before she knew Alfred, ordered a cappuccino and a croissant, and stayed there nearly two hours with a book she only half read, preferring to watch people go by, without checking her phone more than once every twenty minutes — a feat she measured herself, not without a certain pride. She rediscovered a park fifteen minutes from her home, which she had frequented in another life, before Alfred, when she still had the habit of walking with no particular aim simply for the pleasure of walking, and went back three Saturdays in a row, taking a slightly different path each time, as if to prove to herself that the entire city had not been confiscated from her.

One Tuesday evening, she went to the cinema alone — a gesture she hadn’t made in years, since well before Alfred in fact, and which filled her with an almost comic apprehension as she bought her ticket, as if the cashier would guess, from her face alone, that she had nobody to go with and would, any second now, put the question to her. Nobody asked her any question at all. She settled into the middle of an almost empty row, ate popcorn straight from the bag without having to share it, and came out, two hours later, with that strange and precious sensation of having done something entirely for herself.

Penelope — 22:14 (The Rescue Squad group chat)
I just went to the cinema on my own

Felicity — 22:15
and?

Penelope — 22:16
and it was weird for about ten minutes, and then it was just... nice. I ate all the popcorn myself.

Eloise — 22:16
that’s the kind of news that should have its own fireworks

Penelope — 22:17
don’t get too excited. it was an average film.

Hyacinth — 22:17
the film is irrelevant, Penelope. ON. YOUR. OWN.

On the Monday she went back to the office, a little over a month after the day Eloise had forced her door, she climbed the stairs of the small Bloomsbury publishing house with the pounding heart of a schoolgirl returning to school after a long absence, trying to remember, without quite managing it, which of the steps creaked.

It was the third, as ever. She recognised it by the sound, that familiar little whimper of wood under her foot, and felt, with a disproportionate emotion, that these stairs, these walls covered in framed book jackets, this smell of paper, old radiators and coffee left too long in mugs never quite clean, hadn’t changed by a millimetre while she was collapsing at the other end of the city. There was something deeply reassuring in finding a place that had gone on existing without her, without waiting for her, without making a fuss about it.

Agatha greeted her in the doorway of her office, upright as ever, her glasses pushed up on her forehead and a pencil tucked behind her ear, and said nothing — no grand welcome speech, no meaningful look, no comment on her absence. She simply held out a cup of coffee she had manifestly prepared in advance, without asking whether she wanted one, with the ease of a person who had calculated the exact moment of her arrival to the minute.

“Your desk hasn’t moved,” she said. “I only shifted the plant, it was starting to lean.”

“Thank you, Agatha.”

“Don’t thank me for the plant. Thank me when I’ve given you the next manuscript, you’ll be a lot less grateful.”

It was, from Agatha, the most elaborate form of tenderness one could reasonably expect, and Penelope received it as such, with a smile she made no attempt to hide.

Charlotte was less sparing with words. She appeared in the doorway of the reading room half an hour later, a file under her arm, stopped dead on seeing Penelope sitting at her place, and stared at her for several seconds with that frank, slightly abrupt look that made everyone around her instantly incapable of lying.

“You look like someone who’s slept badly for six weeks,” she said.

“Thank you, Charlotte.”

“But you also look like someone who’s come back of her own accord, which is very different, and which I like a great deal more. I prefer people who come back to people who are brought back.”

Penelope said nothing, slightly taken aback by a sentence that had touched, with almost alarming precision, something she hadn’t yet managed to formulate herself.

“I’m half joking,” Charlotte added, setting the file down on the desk. “We missed you, and not only your eye. But mostly your eye, to be honest. I reread Danforth myself last week, to see. I found nothing. And I know there’s something, because I’ve felt it since page one hundred and eighty.”

She spent the rest of the morning rereading the third act, with the careful slowness of a convalescent testing each limb before trusting it. She found nothing for nearly two hours. She went to fetch herself a tea, came back, sat down again, reread the same chapter changing strategy, leaving the sentences aside to concentrate solely on the characters, on what they did, on what they should have done.

And suddenly she saw.

It wasn’t a sentence. It wasn’t a scene. It was an absence: the heroine’s sister, a secondary character who held an important place in the first two acts — who opposed, joked, jostled — disappeared entirely from page one hundred and seventy onwards, without explanation, without departure, without mention, as if the author had simply forgotten she existed. That was the flaw. It wasn’t the rhythm of the third act, as everyone had believed for weeks. It was that the heroine had been deprived of the only person capable of telling her no.

She seized her red pen with that familiar, physical, almost joyful sensation of having found herself again at the bottom of a drawer she’d thought empty, and wrote in the margin, in handwriting a little too fast to be legible: Where is the sister? She’s what’s missing, not the rhythm.

She carried the manuscript to Charlotte without a word, open at the right page, and watched her face pass, in a few seconds, from bewilderment to understanding, then to something that looked like frankly delighted respect.

“Of course,” said Charlotte. “Of course that’s it. There.”

“It was under our noses all along.”

“Everything’s always under our noses all along,” replied Charlotte, with a half smile. “You just need someone willing to look in the right place.”

Penelope walked home that evening, crossing half of London without taking the Underground, and only realised on arriving in front of her building that she hadn’t thought of Alfred for nearly four consecutive hours — and that when she finally did, sliding her key into the lock, it was without any particular pain, the way one thinks of a place long since left, with a slightly absent-minded affection and no wish to go back.

The second month was the month of reunions — not the crisis reunions, those where her friends turned up with wine and an intervention plan, but ordinary reunions, the kind one has with people one loves when one is well enough to simply enjoy their presence rather than call on it like a rescue.

Theo dragged her one Saturday afternoon on a long walk along the canal, in weather that was grey but dry, arriving at her door with two cups of coffee and the announcement, delivered on the landing like marching orders, that they were going to walk until she’d forgotten the time.

“Walk where?”

“Wherever the canal takes us.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means I don’t have a plan, and you’re allowed, for once, not to have one either.”

She gave in, as she always gave in with him, and they set off eastwards in the fresh air, side by side, with no aim other than to follow the water. Theo walked with that nonchalant slowness he had always had, hands in the pockets of his too-large coat, stopping every ten metres to comment on something — an especially ornate narrowboat, a dog in a waistcoat, a half-torn gig poster — and Penelope caught herself slowing her own pace to match his, with that unconscious synchronisation of people who have walked together for twenty years.

They spent a good hour debating, with a comic seriousness worthy of a university conference, whether the narrowboats moored along the canal really belonged to people who lived on them or whether they constituted an elaborate form of staging intended for Instagram photographs — Theo defending with vehemence the property-conspiracy thesis, Penelope the more romantic one of a genuine river community she refused to see reduced to a backdrop.

“Look at that one,” he said, pointing to a green boat whose deck was covered in pots of basil. “That person waters their basil with love. You don’t do that for a backdrop.”

“You do if you’re an excellent actor.”

“You’re cynical.”

“I’m an editor. I was taught to distrust anything that seems too authentic.”

He laughed, that broad, slightly noisy laugh that had always made people turn round in the street, and gave her an affectionate shoulder-nudge that almost made her stumble.

They stopped, halfway, in front of a stall selling waffles at a price neither of them thought reasonable and which both bought anyway, sitting on a bench by the water to eat them in silence, fingers sticky with icing sugar, watching the canal slide slowly past.

“Mathis wanted to come,” said Theo, after a while, his mouth still half full. “I told him no. That it was a thing between you and me.”

“Did he take it badly?”

“He said that was fine, that he had a two-thousand-piece jigsaw to finish and that, I quote, ‘nobody should ever have to choose between a jigsaw and a waffle but I’m a man of principle.’ He sends his love. He also says that if you need someone to play Scrabble, he’s available, because I’m, apparently, an insufficiently bloodthirsty opponent.”

“You cheat.”

“I don’t cheat. I’m inventive.”

She laughed, and the silence that followed had nothing awkward about it — one of those comfortable silences one only has with people in front of whom one no longer needs to produce anything. She noticed, looking at the water, that a dead leaf was drifting down the canal at an almost comic speed, all by itself, without the slightest obstacle, and that this little image, absurdly, did something to her.

“You’re doing well,” Theo remarked at one point, without warning, looking at her with that particular attention he reserved for observations he judged important — not a question, an observation, made with the quiet certainty of someone who knew her well enough not to be wrong about this kind of thing.

“I’m doing well,” she confirmed, surprised herself by the ease with which the sentence came out, this time, without her having to force it, without that little hesitation which usually accompanied it when she said it to reassure someone rather than because she really thought it.

“I can see that. It’s nice.”

“Nice how?”

“Nice like when someone you love stops pretending in front of you. You don’t have to manage my worry on top of yours today. It’s restful, to be honest.”

“I never wanted you to worry.”

“I know. But you made a lot of us do it anyway, which is already proof of affection rather than a reproach.”

He wiped his hands on his jeans, which improved absolutely nothing, then turned to her with that sudden seriousness he sometimes adopted and which, in him, always heralded something deliberate.

“Now I’m going to ask you a question and you’re not allowed to answer ‘I don’t know’.”

“That’s a trap.”

“It’s a method. What do you want?”

“In life?”

“No, right now. Tonight. What do you feel like doing with your evening?”

She opened her mouth, by reflex, to answer that she had no precise idea, that she didn’t mind, that she’d go along with whatever he suggested — and realised, just before the sentence came out, that it was exactly the answer she had been giving for years, to Alfred, to her friends, to everyone, with that polite compliance which had always seemed to her a mark of kindness and which suddenly appeared to her, on this bench, as an elegant way of never asking for anything.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, out of habit.

“Not allowed.”

“I... Wait. Let me look for it.”

She looked. It was surprisingly difficult, as if a muscle unused for a long time refused to contract, and she felt how much the question, apparently harmless, touched something deep and fragile: the ability to desire precisely, to prefer, to choose something for oneself, simply because one wanted it.

“Thai,” she said, at last. “I want to eat Thai. Green curry, very spicy, in my pyjamas, in front of an old film I’ve already seen ten times. And I don’t want anyone else choosing the film.”

“There,” said Theo, with quiet satisfaction. “That wasn’t so hard.”

“It took two minutes.”

“It took two minutes, today. In a month, it’ll take ten seconds. In a year, you won’t even notice you’re doing it.”

She looked at him, and felt her throat tighten slightly — not from sadness, but from that slightly embarrassing gratitude one feels towards those who see us more precisely than we see ourselves.

“How do you know this kind of thing?”

“I spent my school years being a teenager who didn’t dare say what he wanted,” he replied, lightly. “You’ve forgotten, but you were there. You asked me exactly the same question, once, on a bench not very different from this one. I’m just giving you back the favour.”

She didn’t remember. Or rather, she remembered at that very moment, with sudden sharpness — a bench outside their school, a fine rain, a seventeen-year-old Theo staring at his shoes and refusing to say what he’d been carrying inside him for months, and herself, beside him, who had found nothing else to do but ask him, simply, what he wanted. She smiled.

“I didn’t know it had mattered.”

“It mattered,” he said.

They ate Thai that evening, at her place, the two of them, in pyjamas — his own, which he had taken care to bring in a bag just in case, which said everything about his intentions —, in front of an old film she had seen ten times and which he claimed to adore with highly suspect conviction. She was the one who chose the film.

Felicity, Eloise, Edwina and Hyacinth organised, that same week, a dinner that no longer had anything of a crisis committee about it — a real evening, in a little Greek restaurant Edwina had unearthed near her home, with paper tablecloths, a candle stuck in an empty bottle that vaguely reminded Penelope of another, more recent evening, without her dwelling on it further, wine poured without counting, and sharing plates that piled up in the middle of the table until there was no room left for elbows.

The conversation slid from one subject to the next without ever lingering on Penelope more than on any of the others — they talked at length about Edwina’s work, about a conflict she was handling with an overconfident colleague; about a quarrel Hyacinth had had with her flatmate over a cat that technically belonged to neither of them but which both fiercely claimed; about a film Felicity had hated with such disproportionate passion that it became hilarious, listing point by point everything wrong with the screenplay with the methodical rigour of a professional critic. Penelope caught herself laughing, several times, effortlessly, without that permanent awareness of being the one watched out of the corner of an eye, the one whose every silence was weighed to check that it didn’t herald a relapse.

“Wait,” she said at one point, setting down her fork, struck by a realisation that almost made her laugh alone. “We’ve been talking for twenty minutes and nobody’s asked me how I am.”

“Do you want us to?” Eloise offered, with a mischievous smile.

“Absolutely not. It’s just that I notice it, and it’s... good. Really good.”

Group chat: The Rescue Squad 🚨

Felicity — 23:41 (after dinner)
that was a great evening. and not because we rescued you from anything, just because it was fun

Penelope — 23:42
I know. that’s what’s good. I think it’s the first time in months I’ve gone out and it wasn’t an event

Eloise — 23:43
can we stop calling ourselves the Rescue Squad then?

Hyacinth — 23:43
absolutely not. the name stays. we have a logo now.

Edwina — 23:44
we can just redefine what we rescue. before it was Penelope. now it’s just... failed evenings in general. anyone can call us.

Penelope — 23:44
that’s strangely touching, coming from you Edwina

They went to the cinema together the following week, an ordinary Wednesday evening chosen without much thought, to see a film no one would really remember after a few days — an unpretentious comedy that made them laugh more among themselves, in whispers, commenting on the most absurd scenes, than they truly laughed at the film itself. Penelope caught herself, coming out of the auditorium into the cool evening air, realising she hadn’t thought of Alfred at any moment of the evening — not because she was consciously avoiding him, not because she’d had to make any particular effort to keep him at a distance, but simply because her head, all the way through, had been full of something else: the film, Hyacinth’s jokes, the spilled popcorn Felicity had tried in vain to retrieve from under the seats.

She remarked on it aloud, on the pavement, while they waited for their respective taxis.

“I didn’t think about him once, tonight.”

“That’s normal,” said Eloise, simply. “Your head is filling up again. That’s what was supposed to happen.”

“It feels odd.”

“Odd how?”

“Odd good,” Penelope specified, after reflection. “Just... odd to realise that I’m really getting better, instead of just hoping it.”

Violet invited her to dinner the Sunday after the Greek dinner, by a forty-second voice message which Penelope listened to three times in her hallway, her coat still on her back, before understanding that she wasn’t being asked to make an effort, but to come.

“Darling, it’s Violet. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, so I’ll be very simple: Sunday, seven o’clock, there’ll be roast, and your place is laid. If you don’t come, I’ll understand. I’ll lay it anyway, and I’ll keep it warm.”

She hadn’t been back to that house since the wedding that hadn’t taken place. She had thought of it every Sunday, with the painful precision one brings to looking at a door one no longer walks through. She knew, without ever having checked, that the table would be the same, the yellow tablecloth, the cracked salad bowl nobody wanted to throw away, the wobbly chair in the corner that Gregory had occupied since he was twelve, and she knew that what made it hard was not the setting, but the number of people who would watch her come in with that kindness so cautious it became a form of mourning.

She went. She went on foot, with a citrus loaf cake bought from the baker on the corner because she hadn’t dared make one, walking slowly through the streets of Mayfair in the failing light, and she rang the black front door with the feeling of a child bringing home a school report.

“She’s here!” yelled a voice, in the depths of the house.

The door opened on Gregory, a napkin in his hand, bright red, who stood for a second motionless on the threshold, mouth open, before hurling himself at her with the touching clumsiness of a large dog. He hugged her so hard she nearly dropped the cake.

“You came,” he said, into her hair. “I’d stopped believing it. I’d bet Hyacinth.”

“What had you bet?”

“That you’d come. She said you wouldn’t. I won five pounds.”

“You sold me for five pounds?”

“I value you at more,” said Gregory, with dignity. “But it was the maximum Hyacinth was willing to lose.”

She laughed, and it was that laugh, stupid, immediate, that made her understand the hardest part was over.

She found everything again. There was the smell, first, that mixture of roast, beeswax, over-stewed tea and something sweet that always came from the kitchen, and which went through her with the force of a childhood memory, though she had never lived there. There were the walls covered in photographs, faces of all ages, children in trees, dogs in ponds, a man with a great laugh whom Violet had kept in the hall, in a wooden frame, smiling at an invisible garden. There was Daphne, who came out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand and held her close without a word, for a long time, the way one finds someone at a station. There was Francesca, who looked up from her book in the sitting room and gave her a very gentle little nod, with that dreamy gaze which said I’m glad better than any sentence.

Anthony was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. He stood straight, hands clasped behind his back, in the sentry’s posture he adopted when he felt awkward, and he watched her come with an expression she could not decipher.

“Penelope,” he said.

“Anthony.”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said, with the stiffness of a man reading an official document. “I mean: it isn’t my fault. I have nothing to do with it. But I’m sorry all the same. I’d have wanted it not to happen, and that, if it had to happen, it wouldn’t happen to you.”

“That’s very kind.”

“I’m not kind. I’m accurate.”

“It’s the same thing, with you.”

He seemed on the verge of answering. He opened his mouth, closed it, and did something she would never have expected of him: he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, three times, with the precision of a metronome, the way one checks that a valuable object is properly fixed.

“Kate’s made a tart,” he said, and disappeared in the direction of the dining room.

She stood motionless for a moment, one hand on her shoulder, and understood that this was, from Anthony Bridgerton, the equivalent of a three-minute embrace.

There were fourteen at the table. She was placed, as always, between Francesca and Benedict, and opposite her, at the end of the table, was a place setting nobody occupied, with a plate, a folded napkin, a glass already filled with water. She looked at it for a moment, intrigued.

“That’s Colin’s place,” said Violet gently, serving her roast. “I always set it. In case he comes home.”

“When’s he coming home?”

“Nobody knows. He’s somewhere at the ends of the earth. He sends postcards of people who are strangers to us and friends to him. Daphne says he’ll be here for the wedding.”

“He’ll be here,” said Daphne, in a very firm voice.

“He may be here,” said Anthony.

“He’ll be here,” Daphne repeated.

“One never knows with him.”

“You never know with anyone, Anthony,” said Kate, very softly. “That’s your problem.”

Penelope looked at the empty plate. She thought, very quickly, of a man she had never seen, whose silhouette she nevertheless knew from ten years of anecdotes, a phantom brother who made his visits as rare as they were lavish, who made Eloise laugh and Anthony go pale, whom people talked about at table with that mixture of exasperation and tenderness kept for those one cannot manage to hold on to. She told herself he must be exhausting. She told herself that, in the circumstances, it was better never to meet him.

“You’ve got some colour back,” Benedict remarked from the corner of the table, without raising his eyes from his meat.

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s an observation.”

“You make a lot of observations.”

“It’s my way of being polite,” said Benedict. “I say what I see. I never say what I think. The first is accurate, the second is risky.”

“And what do you think?”

“One doesn’t say,” replied Benedict, with perfect tranquillity, and raised his fork towards her, the way one raises a glass.

Dinner lasted three hours. There was the roast, the gratin, Kate’s tart, a heated discussion about whether one could serve fish at a winter wedding, a digression from Gregory on the great principles of sports betting, a quarrel between Hyacinth and Francesca about a novel one thought immoral and the other sublime, and not once, all evening, did anyone ask her how she was. She understood, towards the end of the main course, that this was the family’s most accomplished form of delicacy: they had put her back in her place, that is to say among them, without making a fuss about it.

“Pen,” said Francesca, at the end of the meal, slipping a parcel into her hand under the table. “It’s for you.”

It was a small notebook, with a grey linen cover, blank pages, and a green ribbon for a bookmark. She turned it between her fingers.

“It’s for writing,” said Francesca, very low. “Not for work. For you.”

“How do you know that...”

“Eloise told me. A long time ago. She said you used to write, before. That you’d stopped. I’m not saying you have to start again. I’m saying a blank notebook costs nothing, and it can wait without complaining.”

She could not answer. She clasped the notebook to her, and Francesca, already bending over her plate again, shrugged with that discretion which served her for tenderness.

Violet saw her to the door. She laid a large woollen shawl across her shoulders, taken out of a cupboard without asking her opinion, and stood for a moment in front of her, on the threshold, in the golden light of the hall.

“You’ll come back next Sunday,” she said.

“I don’t know...”

“You’ll come back. I’ll lay your place. I lay it every week, even when people don’t come. It’s not an obligation, darling. It’s a habit. Habits are what hold us when we no longer have the strength to hold ourselves.”

“Thank you,” said Penelope.

“He’s coming home in a month or so,” said Violet, apropos of nothing, straightening the collar of the shawl for her. “Colin. Daphne is very keen. You’ve never met him, by the way. It’s absurd. I don’t know how we managed to miss each other for ten years.”

“We’ve been unlucky.”

“No,” said Violet, with a little sphinx’s smile. “Perhaps we’ve been unlucky. We’ll see.”

She walked home across London, in the cool night, the linen notebook pressed against her chest, with the clear feeling, mingled with shame and an obscure joy, of having just been adopted a second time by people who had never noticed.

Daphne invited her to lunch on a Saturday in the last week of the second month, by a message of alarming brevity — Are you free at 1? I have something to ask you and I’d rather do it over a plate — which Penelope reread four times before answering yes, trying to guess what could lie behind so carefully neutral a sentence.

It was a little restaurant in Marylebone, with green velvet banquettes, a menu written in chalk and waiters who spoke in low voices, and Daphne was already waiting, sitting very upright by the window, a glass of white wine untouched in front of her. She was wearing a cream blouse and an expression Penelope had never seen on her: that of a woman who had rehearsed her sentences in the taxi and was about to forget them all.

“You look wonderful,” she said, getting up to kiss her. “You’ve got some colour back.”

They ordered dishes they barely ate, talked of things of no importance with the mutual diligence of women who know they are delaying something, about Penelope’s work, about an exhibition Daphne hadn’t had time to see, about a caterer who had just gone bankrupt six weeks before the date. Penelope let the first course go by, then the second, watching Daphne turn her glass between her fingers with that slight nervousness she hid badly, she who spent her life defusing everyone else’s.

“Daphne,” she said at last. “Do you want me to help you?”

“With what?”

“With asking me your question.”

Daphne laughed, a short, slightly guilty laugh, and put down her glass.

She took a breath, with the seriousness Penelope had always known her to have at the big moments.

“I’d like you to be one of my bridesmaids.”

The restaurant went on humming around them. A waiter went by with a tray of glasses, a woman laughed at a neighbouring table, and Penelope felt something happen in her chest, a slow shift, like a piece of furniture moved a few centimetres to see what was underneath.

“Before you answer,” said Daphne, very quickly, “because I’m afraid you’ll say yes out of kindness, I want you to know that if it hurts too much, you say no, and I won’t hold it against you, and I won’t look at you sideways at the wedding, and we’ll stay on exactly the same terms. I’m not asking because I think you ought to be better, or because Eloise suggested it, or out of pity, to be perfectly clear. I’m asking because for ten years, every time someone in this family goes through something, you’re in the room. And because I couldn’t imagine that day without you.”

Penelope did not answer straight away. She looked at the glass of wine, the tablecloth, Daphne’s hand resting near hers, with the ring she had worn for a year and unconsciously turned round her finger, and she understood that what she was about to say had to be true, that there would be no polite way of sidestepping half of it.

“It frightens me,” she said.

“I know.”

“I don’t know how I’ll react. I don’t know whether I’ll cry during the vows or be very calm and very dignified and fall apart at ten o’clock in the loo. I can’t predict it. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to bear seeing a wedding dress.”

“All right.”

“But it also makes me very happy. Both at once. I think I was afraid you’d ask me not to come.”

There was a silence, very gentle. Daphne lifted her glass, set it down, lifted it again, with a look of confusion she made no effort to conceal.

“I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone,” she murmured. “I’m not sure I know what I’m doing. I know I love Simon. I know I want to get married. But since your... since what happened, I’ve been looking at my own wedding with slightly different eyes. I tell myself that you learned in twenty-four hours something many people take twenty years to understand, and that it’s made me... more honest, I think. Less sure. In a good way.”

Penelope smiled, in spite of herself, and felt, to her great surprise, a small distinct warmth spread behind her eyes, which had nothing of the panic she had dreaded.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, I’d like to. I’d like to be one of your bridesmaids.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But I’m sure I want you to be married to someone you love, and that I want to be there when it happens, and that if I had the chance not to be there, I’d regret it far more than I’m afraid of crying.”

“There’ll be tissues,” said Daphne. “Lots of tissues. I’ve ordered them in lots of fifty.”

They laughed, and Daphne took her hand across the table, with that energetic gentleness she had in all her gestures, and Penelope realised that at that moment she did not feel like a woman being done a favour, but like someone who had been chosen.

“There’ll be a lot of people too,” said Daphne. “The whole family, of course. My brothers have all committed to being present, on pain of exile. Colin gets back in three weeks, he’s supposed to help me with the photographs and everything else. He’s insufferably charming, he’s probably the most elusive of the lot, he’s already missed Anthony’s wedding and I’ve made him promise not to miss mine. You still haven’t met him, by the way. It’s absurd. I’ll fix that. He’ll think himself irresistible,” she said, with an affection so dry it hid none. “Scare him, please. You’re the only person I know who can tell Colin what he needs to hear without him being able to run away.”

Penelope took her glass, raised it halfway, and said something she would never forget afterwards, with the cruel lucidity one has for little sentences that take on an unexpected meaning:

“I’ll do my best. But I don’t promise anything. I’m very bad at frightening people.”

It was during one of those evenings, at the very end of the second month, over a bottle of wine opened for no particular reason on some ordinary Thursday night, that the subject of the app came back onto the table — no longer carried by worry, but by pure amusement.

“Right,” said Hyacinth, setting down her glass with the air of someone who has just had an idea she personally considers brilliant. “Now that you’re well, can we talk about the app again?”

“Hyacinth.”

“No, but wait, listen to me. Before, it was an intervention. Now it would just be... a game. You’re well. You’ve gone back to work, you go out, you laugh at my jokes, which is in itself a sign of complete recovery. It would just be for fun.”

“For fun,” Penelope repeated, with a scepticism she didn’t quite manage to maintain, already feeling, against all expectation, a sincere curiosity poking up under the façade of mistrust.

“For fun,” Eloise confirmed. “Nobody’s asking you to look for anything. You’re in great shape. It would almost be a shame not to take advantage and enjoy yourself a bit.”

Penelope looked at her friends, one after the other, and felt, for the first time since the subject had been raised weeks earlier, that she no longer saw in it an escape route or a plaster, but simply one possibility among others — something she might try, for play, because she wanted to and not because she needed to.

“All right,” she said, with a smile she made no attempt to hide this time.

Hyacinth — 21:20
WAIT. seriously?

Penelope — 21:20
seriously. but let me be clear: I’m still not looking for a relationship. I’m just well, and I feel like having a bit of fun. that’s all.

Edwina — 21:21
that’s exactly the right reason, actually

Felicity — 21:21
I’m proud of you Pen

Hyacinth — 21:21
in that case I have exactly what you need

They turned up at her flat the following Friday, all four of them, with wine and a determination that left no room for renegotiation.

The app was called NoStrings — a name whose total lack of subtlety made Penelope roll her eyes, but which, she reflected, at least corresponded honestly to what she was looking for, or rather to what she wasn’t looking for. The phone sat enthroned in the middle of the coffee table, surrounded by the four women bent over the screen with the collective concentration of a selection committee.

“You need a username,” announced Hyacinth, scrolling through the interface with an ease that hinted at personal experience she did not elaborate on. “Nobody uses their real first name on this. It’s actually very frowned upon. And look — screenshots are disabled. If anyone tries, the other person gets a notification.”

“Why do you know so much about how it works?”

“Next question.”

The debate over the username lasted almost twenty minutes, punctuated by increasingly absurd suggestions from Hyacinth, before Felicity, with that quiet authority she always produced just when you least expected it, settled the matter once and for all.

“LadyWhistledown,” she said. “You watch everyone without anyone really noticing you, you know absolutely everything about everybody’s lives, and you could demolish someone in a single sentence if you really put your mind to it. It’s you, Pen.”

Penelope felt something tighten slightly in her chest, but had to admit, thinking it over, that the username suited her better than she would have liked to confess.

“Right,” said Eloise, scrolling down the screen. “Now the photos. And there’s a rule here.”

“An app rule?”

“A rule of ours. No face.”

Penelope looked up, surprised.

“Sorry?”

“Think for two seconds,” said Eloise, with an unusual seriousness. “You work in London publishing. It’s a tiny world. Your mother knows half of Chelsea. And you’ve just cancelled a wedding to which a hundred and forty people were invited. If anyone comes across your photo on there, you’re the most interesting conversation at every dinner party in London for six months.”

There was a silence in which Penelope seriously considered the scale of that scenario, followed by a perfectly sincere shudder of horror.

“No face,” she confirmed.

They spent the next hour selecting photos in which one could guess at her without ever recognising her: a silhouette seen from behind at the edge of a lake, hair loose, a badly placed duck in the background which Hyacinth insisted on keeping on the grounds that it “gave it character”; a hand holding a cup over an open book; a pair of boots on a gravel path, taken against the light on an autumn afternoon she could no longer even place.

“It’s terribly mysterious,” Hyacinth judged, satisfied. “You look like you’re hiding a body.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“On this app, absolutely.”

Next came the bio, and the first real disagreement of the evening.

“You have to say what you do,” suggested Edwina.

“Absolutely not,” cut in Eloise. “‘Editor in London’ — there are maybe thirty women who fit that description in the whole city. It’s a signature, not a bio.”

“So what, then?”

It was Felicity, again, who found it — after several rejected proposals, a bottle well and truly broached and a collective fit of giggles provoked by a suggestion from Hyacinth that Penelope categorically refused to let anyone write down.

“‘Can beat you at darts and at crosswords, in that precise order of humiliation. Here for a good time, not to build a house.’”

“I can’t play darts.”

“They won’t find that out until it’s too late,” replied Hyacinth.

Penelope laughed — properly, openly, her head thrown back, with a laugh that surprised even her by its volume — and did not immediately notice the look the other four exchanged over her head.

Then came the questionnaire.

The app called it, with a commercial euphemism that fooled no one, its “experience preferences”. In practice it was a list of tick-boxes which Hyacinth began scrolling through with mounting relish, and which Penelope tried, without the slightest success, to take back in hand.

“Give me back my phone.”

“Absolutely not. You’ll tick three boxes out of cowardice and close the app. We’ve got perspective.”

“‘Perspective’ isn’t the word I’d use,” observed Edwina, leaning over her shoulder with an expression divided between fascination and professional disapproval.

“First section,” announced Hyacinth, ignoring the interruption. “‘What you’re looking for.’ So: one-off encounter, regular encounters, or ongoing arrangement?”

“One-off encounter,” said Penelope.

“Regular encounters,” said Hyacinth, ticking.

“HYACINTH.”

“Think about it. If you tick ‘one-off encounter’, you’ll have to start this whole process again every single time. Do you want to redo this evening every fortnight?”

Penelope considered the question, considered the number of bottles already open, and gave in.

“Next section,” Hyacinth went on briskly. “‘Level of adventure.’ One to five.”

“Two.”

“Four.”

“Hyacinth, I swear to you—“

“Three,” Felicity ruled. “We’re going with three. It’s a democratic compromise.”

“Nobody here is democratic,” muttered Penelope.

It was the following section that caused the real incident. Hyacinth, on discovering it, paused theatrically for long enough that everyone understood something considerable had just appeared on the screen.

“Oh,” she said.

“What?”

“There’s a ‘specific interests’ section.”

“No.”

“There are twenty-two boxes.”

Penelope reached out to retrieve the phone, in a reflex of modesty that lasted exactly as long as it took to run her eyes down the list — after which modesty gave way to something distinctly closer to amusement, and she surprised herself, as much as the others, by setting the phone back down on her lap instead of handing it over.

“Wait,” she said. “No, actually, give me that for two seconds.”

“There,” said Hyacinth, with the satisfaction of a prophetess finally vindicated.

There was a silence in the living room, of the kind that generally precedes either a very serious declaration or its exact opposite. Penelope looked up at her friends, at her sister, at Theo, who wore that particular expression — one eyebrow raised, a lopsided smile — of someone who knew what was coming and was preparing to enjoy it to the full.

“Right,” she said. “Since we’ve got this far. I’m going to say one thing, once, and only once, and nobody is ever to bring it up against me in ten years’ time at a family dinner.”

“No promises,” said Theo.

“Theo.”

“I’m just saying I’m not promising anything.”

Felicity, who had said almost nothing since the start of the evening, laid a hand on Penelope’s arm — not to stop her, but to slow her down, with that particular gentleness she reserved for the moments when she sensed her sister about to say something important too fast, to be rid of it rather than to really say it.

“Wait, Pen. Give yourself two seconds. You spent six years with a man who preferred organising an expedition to Antarctica to actually looking at you. In your bed, what was it like?”

Penelope felt a blush rise to her cheeks, but something, this time — tiredness, the wine, or simply the exhaustion of having spent six years making herself small — made modesty yield to an honesty she hadn’t allowed herself in a long time.

“Predictable,” she admitted, in a low voice. “Alfred liked everything under control. Tidy. No improvisation. I don’t think I ever really told him what I wanted. I’m not even sure I always knew how to name it myself.”

“And what did you want?” asked Theo, from his armchair, in a perfectly neutral tone, without an ounce of judgement or unhealthy curiosity — just a question asked with the same seriousness he’d have brought to asking her opinion on a career choice.

She stared at the ceiling for a moment, searching for the words.

“Not to have to guide everything myself. Someone who pays attention to what I feel without my having to supply a detailed instruction manual every time. Desire, the real thing, not polite habit. If I’m going to see a stranger, I don’t want politeness under the duvet. I want to feel that I exist.”

A silence followed — short, but dense — before Theo went on, more gently.

“You know it’s nothing to be ashamed of, wanting that, Pen? Desire doesn’t need a vow of eternal love to be legitimate. You’re allowed to want something just because you want it, without having to justify it with some grand feeling.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure you do, really. But we’ll work on it.”

Edwina, who was not the kind to freeze easily, stayed silent for a moment, visibly moved by the sincere turn the conversation had taken.

“I think you also need to set your limits,” said Eloise, speaking for the first time since the start of this conversation, with a gravity that contrasted with the prevailing lightness. “Just because you’re exploring what you want doesn’t mean you have to accept just anything from anyone else. Tick what makes you tingle. But tick, clearly, what’s out of the question too. Both matter just as much as each other.”

“Noted, Eloise,” said Penelope, touched by this seriousness she hadn’t expected to receive in the middle of an evening that had nonetheless begun in general hilarity.

“So here,” she went on, gesturing at the screen with a sweeping hand, gradually regaining her composure, “I’ve decided I’m going to tick exactly what I want. Not what seems reasonable. Not what won’t bother anyone. What I want — and nothing but.”

“That’s the most exciting speech I’ve ever heard you give,” commented Hyacinth, with a respect that was clearly sincere, already leaning over the screen with unfeigned curiosity. “Right. So. What do we tick first?”

“Shut up and pass me the phone.”

What followed was, by Felicity’s own later admission, one of the best quarters of an hour of her recent social life. Penelope commented on every box with growing aplomb, some rejected with an “absolutely not, we’re not in a Scandinavian film”, others ticked with a naturalness that made Edwina’s eyebrows rise, others still debated collectively with a comic seriousness that no longer had much to do with the initial embarrassment.

“That one,” she said at one point, jabbing a finger at a box. “That one, yes. Without hesitation.”

“I didn’t know that about you,” said Eloise, genuinely surprised.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Eloise. I spent six years making myself unobtrusive. I don’t intend to any more.”

“I love this new Penelope,” declared Hyacinth, raising her glass.

“This Penelope has always existed,” corrected Theo, with a tenderness he immediately disguised beneath a lighter remark. “She was just very busy pretending otherwise.”

She thought back, for a second, to a squared page.

She had written it at nineteen, in room 14, on a Thursday in February, during one of those rituals that no one else had ever understood: List Thursday. There was a spiral notebook, adorned with an octopus drawn in felt-tip by Eloise, which was called, on the cover, Things We Will Never Do, and in which they wrote down each week, at midnight, by the light of the illicit kettle, solemn prohibitions they imposed on themselves the better to break them. We will never get married before forty. That was Eloise. We will never fall in love with a man who wears a waistcoat. That was Penelope, and it had taken her years to understand that she didn’t believe a word of it. On page four, in red letters, underlined twice, was the only sentence she had ever written without joking: Never apologise for being hungry.

She had been proud of that sentence. She had copied it onto a sheet of paper, which she had pinned above her bed, and kept until graduation. She no longer knew what had become of it.

She looked at the screen of Hyacinth’s phone, with its twenty-two boxes, and told herself, without bitterness, that tonight, for the first time in six years, she had started to be hungry again.

Penelope finished the section with a satisfaction she hadn’t anticipated when she opened the app that evening — something that resembled a small personal victory, tiny and entirely devoid of immediate practical consequence, but which gave her, in the moment, the feeling of having taken back possession of a territory she had left abandoned for far too long.

Eloise, for her part, had remained strangely silent for a good part of this exercise, far more silent than her temperament generally suggested, and Penelope, too absorbed in her own little revolution, did not immediately notice the expression that had crossed her friend’s face at one particular moment: a frown of concentration, eyes raised to the ceiling, like someone trying to remember where she had heard a phrase before without managing to lay her hands on it.

“You’re very quiet,” remarked Penelope, finally closing the app.

“I’m thinking,” said Eloise.

“About what?”

“Nothing. Really nothing at all.”

Penelope put this silence down to the wine, the tiredness, the unexpected gravity the evening had taken on, and decided not to press. She simply promised herself that she would ask her friend, one day, what she had been thinking about that night. She didn’t remember to.

“We also need to establish some rules,” announced Edwina, once the profile was finished.

“Rules?”

“A contract,” Hyacinth specified, with renewed enthusiasm, already typing on her own phone.

What followed resembled a diplomatic negotiation more than the drafting of a simple memo, the four women proposing, debating and amending each clause with a seriousness that, as the evening wore on, became ever harder to tell apart from pure joking. The final document, which Hyacinth insisted on reading aloud in its entirety, ran to a dozen rules: no serious relationship, no promises, no plans for the future, no official introductions to anyone, no mixing of lives, no people in common, no searching on the Internet, no unnecessary messages, no overly detailed conversations about work, no jealousy — and, in the very last clause, added by Felicity with a smile she made no attempt to conceal, that if the whole thing came to seem ridiculous, they would simply stop following it.

Penelope listened to the entire list with a mixture of amusement and apprehension, and told herself that twelve rules was about the number one could reasonably hope not to keep.

The three weeks that followed did a great deal for her sense of humour and very little for her faith in humanity.

The first was called Marcus — a name he announced within the first five minutes with the assurance of a man convinced that this information alone justified the bill. They met in a wine bar in Marylebone, on a Tuesday evening, and Penelope realised she was in trouble after about eight minutes, when he launched, without any transition, into a technical description of his bicycle.

She waited. She thought at first that it was an opening, an anecdote destined to lead somewhere else. She nodded, asked a polite question about cycling in the city, and regretted it immediately, because the question opened up an entire new section of a lecture that had already been going for a quarter of an hour. She learned the weight of the frame. She learned the material of the frame. She learned why that material was superior to three other materials she didn’t know and had never suspected the existence of. At one point he took out his phone to show her a photo, and Penelope felt a surge of absurd hope that it might be a dog, a nephew, anything alive.

It was the bike.

Penelope — 20:47
SOS

Penelope — 20:47
he’s been talking to me about his bike for forty minutes

Hyacinth — 20:48
maybe it’s a metaphor

Penelope — 20:48
it’s not a metaphor Hyacinth. it’s a bike. he just showed me a photo of the bike.

Felicity — 20:49
no

Penelope — 20:49
yes. he zoomed in on the derailleur.

Theo — 20:51
[Penelope added Theo to the conversation]

Theo — 20:51
why am I here

Penelope — 20:51
because you told me you were observing. observe.

Theo — 20:53
...the derailleur?

Penelope — 20:53
THE DERAILLEUR THEO

The second, four days later, was called Julian and had the initial advantage of being extremely good-looking, which, Penelope decided on seeing him, probably made up for a certain number of potential flaws. That theory held up for exactly as long as it took for the starters to arrive.

He talked about his ex. Not a mention, not an anecdote — a complete, chronological account, with dates, places, and a detailed reconstruction of several rows for which he seemed to consider she possessed the necessary background to arbitrate. She learned that the ex was called Clara. She learned that Clara never listened to him. She learned that Clara had a problem with his mother, a problem with his friends, and a problem with the way he handled money, this last point being presented as a manifest injustice when the description that followed gave Penelope the distinct impression that Clara was probably right.

“Do you think she regrets it?” he asked, towards the end of the main course, looking at her with an intensity that took her completely by surprise.

Penelope put down her fork.

“I don’t know her.”

“But in your opinion.”

“I literally have no information on which to form an opinion.”

“You’re a woman, though.”

She looked at him for a long moment, considered several replies, and finally opted for the one that would let her get home as quickly as possible.

“She regrets it enormously,” she said. “I have to go.”

Penelope — 21:33
he asked me whether his ex regrets it

Penelope — 21:33
then he clarified “but you’re a woman, though”

Eloise — 21:34
I’m going to find him

Edwina — 21:34
Eloise no.

Eloise — 21:34
Edwina yes.

Theo — 21:36
I maintain that the caves were a better option

Penelope — 21:36
don’t start

Theo — 21:37
I haven’t said anything. I’m observing.

The third — whose name she forgot almost at once, so completely did the rest of the evening demand her full concentration — arrived forty minutes late, without an excuse, ordered for himself without offering to do the same for her, and waited until dessert to explain that he didn’t really believe in monogamy but that he was “open to exploring what it could look like” with her.

Penelope — 20:04
new record

Penelope — 20:04
“I don’t believe in monogamy but I’m open to exploring with you”

Hyacinth — 20:04
EXPLORING

Hyacinth — 20:05
like a continent

Hyacinth — 20:05
like he’s setting off for Antarctica

Penelope — 20:05
Hyacinth.

Hyacinth — 20:05
too soon?

Penelope — 20:06
yes

Penelope — 20:06
but objectively funny

Felicity — 20:07
she laughed. she just admitted it to me in private. she laughed.

Penelope — 20:07
FELICITY

She went home that night with the quiet conviction that the entire species was going through a crisis for which she had neither the time nor the qualifications to act as volunteer nurse, and opened the app one last time before going to sleep all the same — out of habit now, more than hope.

That was when she came across a profile that stopped her short, her thumb hovering above the screen.

Angkor&Chill.

There was no face. That was the first thing she noticed, and the first thing that surprised her, so used had she become, these past weeks, to scrolling past men photographed shirtless in gym mirrors. The cover photo showed a silhouette from behind, on a weathered wooden jetty somewhere in Asia, facing a sunset whose framing betrayed someone who knew exactly what he was doing. The second showed a hand holding a cup above a Formica table, in a perfectly ordinary kitchen, in the grey light of late morning. The third, a wall covered in moss.

No information. No job, no location, no age displayed prominently. Nothing that allowed him to be placed.

His bio fitted on a single line: Passing through London for an indefinite period. Here for a good time, no complications, no promises, and no speeches about my next flight.

She read the sentence twice. She looked again at the photo of the kitchen — the one that showed nothing, that quite clearly wasn’t trying to impress anybody, and which nonetheless held her longer than the other two put together.

Then she swiped right.

Part Two: The Man with the Suitcases

On the last day, Colin waited for the light for six hours and forty minutes.

He had settled at dawn on the fence of a paddock, at the northern edge of the estancia, where the steppe stretched to a horizon so flat it seemed to have been drawn with a ruler, the camera on his knees, a woolly hat pulled down to his eyebrows and his fingers numb in mittens whose tips he had cut off so he could adjust the ring without taking them off. The wind blew from the west with that stubborn regularity which he had ended up, in three months, noticing only in its absence. The sheep, in the distance, formed a grey and shifting smudge on the brown of the short grass, and he knew, with that certainty he had never managed to justify to those who asked how he did it, that the photograph he had come for existed somewhere in the next few hours, that it was only waiting for a ray of sun to pierce the cloud cover at the right angle, on the right face, and that he had strictly nothing else to do but be there when it happened.

That was the whole profession, when you came down to it, and it had taken him years to understand that it consisted almost entirely of that: a stubborn patience, interrupted by a fraction of a second. People imagined journeys, landscapes, thrilling encounters with strangers who changed a life. They never saw the hours of wind, the frozen fingers, the whole days spent waiting for the world to see fit to arrange itself a certain way, nor that particular solitude, almost comfortable from sheer familiarity, of the man who looks at everything and whom nobody looks at. It was on a fence, at the end of the world, that he felt most exactly his own size.

Anselmo joined him towards the end of the morning with two gourds of maté and that slightly stooped gait of men who have spent seventy-four years fighting the same wind. He was the owner of the estancia, a tiny man with hands like roots, who had welcomed Colin three months earlier with polite mistrust, then with amused curiosity, then with that form of silent adoption which is never announced and which you only notice at the moment of leaving. He had decreed in the very first week that Colin was “English, but nice”, which, in his vocabulary, constituted considerable praise.

“Still waiting,” he said in Spanish, handing him the gourd.

“Still waiting.”

“What are you waiting for, exactly? The sun’s been here since this morning.”

“The right sun.”

Anselmo nodded gravely, as if the distinction seemed perfectly reasonable to him, and sat down on the fence next to him with a grunt of joints. They drank the maté in silence for a long while, side by side, watching the clouds run over the steppe, and Colin, who had learned over time to recognise in people that particular silence that precedes a question, sensed his coming before it was even asked.

“You don’t have a house,” said Anselmo. “Not a real one.”

“I live everywhere.”

“My father used to say that the man who lives everywhere is someone who hasn’t yet decided whom he wants to miss.”

“That sounds like a line off a calendar.”

“It was a line from my father. He had three hundred sheep, no education, and he was never wrong about anything,” replied Anselmo, without the shadow of a smile, and Colin laughed, a little too quickly, with a laugh designed to close the door the old man had just opened a crack.

It was at that moment that the light arrived.

It arrived the way it always arrives, without warning, a slit in the clouds that the wind widened within seconds, and a low, almost horizontal ray, which struck Anselmo’s hand resting on the fence, the gourd of maté clutched between his gnarled fingers, the blurred flock behind him like a promise. Colin had no time to have a thought. He raised the camera, framed, fired, three times, four times, with that mixture of automatism and absolute concentration which had long been the only form of prayer he knew. Then the slit closed, and he stayed motionless for a moment, the camera still at his eye, with the quiet certainty of holding something he would never be able to do again.

“You’ll send me a copy,” said Anselmo.

“I’ll send you a print.”

“You do that for everybody?”

“For everyone I photograph.”

The old man looked at him for a moment, sideways, with an expression Colin couldn’t decipher.

“Then you come back,” he said. “Somewhere. By post, but you come back.”

He had never put it that way, but it was true: he had prints on their way to dozens of places, none of which he would ever perhaps see again, to kitchens, workshops, villages whose street names he had forgotten but never the names of the people, and he had always considered it a simple professional courtesy. He spent the evening thinking it over, in the empty dormitory of the estancia, sitting on his camp bed with his phone picking up, for once, a capricious bar of signal, and he scrolled through the notifications accumulated over weeks — the family group, three messages from Michaella, none of them serious, a fitting reminder from Daphne — looking for something he couldn’t have defined.

There was his mother, of course. There was Daphne, Benedict, all the others. But that wasn’t what the old man had said, not exactly: where someone wonders why you haven’t arrived yet. He had a family that worried about him at regular intervals, that reproached him for his absences with love and forgave him with an almost exasperating regularity. It wasn’t the same thing, and he couldn’t have said why. He switched off the screen, lay down in the dark listening to the wind scraping the corrugated iron, and told himself it was tiredness.

The plane touched down at Heathrow at 6:41, with that slight bounce which Colin had ended up waiting for the way one waits for the last chord of a piece one knows by heart, and he kept his eyes closed a few seconds longer than necessary, his temple against the cold window, while the rest of the cabin was already stirring in a clatter of seatbelts unfastened too early and overhead lockers opened before permission. Twenty-one hours of travel from Ushuaia, two stopovers, a connection in Madrid he had caught by the skin of his teeth running down an interminable corridor with a case of equipment on each shoulder, and at the end of it all a fine rain streaking the window as if the London sky had been waiting for his return to stage its entrance.

He was bringing back from Tierra del Fuego eleven thousand photographs he hadn’t yet sorted, a windburn on his nose that was starting to peel, the phrase of an old man which he had decided to file among the calendar lines, and the beginnings of a feeling which he had chosen, with the rigour of someone who had practised the thing a great deal, to put down to jet lag.

“Purpose of visit?” asked the border officer, behind his glass, without looking up.

“A wedding.”

“Yours?”

“My sister’s.”

The officer finally looked up, examined him from head to foot — the passport covered in stamps, the waxed-canvas jacket that still smelled of woodsmoke and sheep, the four-day beard —, then stamped with a gesture that said quite clearly he wondered whether the sister in question had the faintest idea of the state in which her guest was presenting himself. Colin, who was wondering the same thing, didn’t think to contradict him.

Everything he really owned fitted into three bags: two hard cases filled with camera bodies, lenses and memory cards, and a canvas holdall with tired seams containing seven shirts, two pairs of trousers and a novel he had been dragging around since Oaxaca without managing to finish. The rest, what didn’t fit in those three bags, slept in a storage unit in Camden whose rent he had been paying by direct debit for four years without remembering what he had put in it. He had handed back the keys to his last flat two years earlier, a studio in Lisbon of which he had kept only a potted plant, given to a neighbour, and hadn’t felt the need since to rent another. He liked to say, when asked, that he lived everywhere. Michaella, who knew him well enough not to be softened by the phrase, said he lived nowhere, which wasn’t the same thing, and that he had simply found a way of passing one off as the other.

He switched on his phone in front of the baggage carousel, and two hundred and fourteen notifications poured onto the screen at once, a good hundred of them from a single group he hadn’t opened since Buenos Aires.

The Bridgertons 🏡

Gregory — 06:12
colin when do you land?? are you bringing me something from argentina? anything? a gaucho?

Benedict — 06:14
Gregory, one doesn’t bring back a gaucho.

Gregory — 06:14
you don’t know that

Hyacinth — 06:15
he said he’d bring back dulce de leche in 2022 and we’re still waiting

Violet — 06:50
Colin my darling, tell me when you land! I’ve put clean sheets in the flat and bought bread. Dinner on Sunday, the whole family, and then every Sunday while you’re here. I don’t want to hear any refusals. ❤️❤️❤️

Daphne — 06:58
Colin. Fitting Thursday, 3 p.m. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. You said you’d be here for the preparations, not just for the big day.

Colin — 07:04
I’m here. I’m literally in the airport.

Daphne — 07:04
You’ve been there twenty seconds. That doesn’t count.

Eloise — 07:09
welcome back among the living. I’m a bit busy at the moment with a friend, but see you Sunday

Anthony — 07:10
Colin. You and I need to talk. Sunday.

Colin — 07:11
I’ve just travelled twenty-one hours.

Anthony — 07:11
Sunday.

He read the whole thread, standing in front of the motionless carousel, with that slightly daft smile he knew himself to wear only when reading this particular group — something between sincere amusement and a mild vertigo, the kind one feels watching from outside a room where everyone has already got used to your absence. Daphne was getting married in seven weeks. She hadn’t needed to explain why she insisted he be there beforehand, not just on the day itself: there was Nairobi, which no one ever mentioned and which the whole family had in mind every time his name was associated with a wedding, and Anthony’s “we need to talk” had, quite plainly, nothing of a joke about it.

The taxi dropped him off in the early hours in streets the rain had emptied, and he stood for a moment on the pavement, his cases at his feet, watching London wake up with that involuntary attention that never left him, that way of composing without meaning to, of framing without a camera, of looking for the point where the eye should land first. A bakery switching on its lights, its misted window casting a rectangle of gold onto the wet paving. A man in a raincoat running for a bus he wouldn’t catch. A woman holding an umbrella in one hand and a child in the other, who stopped to retie her lace, in a gesture she must have performed four times a day for years and which, to him, nevertheless amounted to a feat: that tiny trust that there would be a tomorrow, a lace to retie, someone whose hand to hold.

London had this particular gift, with each of his returns, of showing him exactly what he didn’t have. Not out of cruelty. Out of simple clarity, like a raking light that reveals the contours of a face one thought one knew. He loved this city, he wouldn’t have stood for anyone saying otherwise, he loved its wet brick, its pubs smelling of beer and damp coats, its parks where one could walk for hours without meeting anyone, and that was no doubt why he kept coming back, the way one always comes back to the places that make us uncomfortable in the most precise way possible.

The flat his mother lent him was two streets from Hyde Park, on the second floor of a brick building Violet had owned for twenty years and which she officially reserved for “passing guests”, a category into which her own children fell with a regularity that might have been hurtful if he hadn’t found, deep down, that it was fairly accurate. There were clean sheets, a loaf still warm in a paper bag on the worktop, a note on the table whose slanting handwriting he recognised before he had read the first line — Welcome home, my darling. Don’t run off too fast. — and he stayed a moment staring at that last sentence, with the faintly unpleasant impression that it had been written specially so that he would have no chance of ignoring it.

He put his cases down in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed, and didn’t open them.

It was a habit he had never spoken of to anyone, not even Michaella, because he knew in advance what she would say about it: in every place he slept, he never completely unpacked. He took out what he needed as he went along, left the rest in the bag, and the bag at the foot of the bed, closed, within reach. He also identified, in the first ten minutes, the shortest way out — the front door, the service stairs, the Tube station, the line that led to the airport —, not out of anxiety, he would have protested had anyone suggested it, but out of a sort of politeness towards himself, the way one notes the emergency exits in a theatre without any intention of using them.

He opened the chest of drawers to put away a shirt, and the smell of lavender hit his face before he had time to protect himself.

His mother had slipped sachets of it everywhere, always — in wardrobes, in suitcases, in the pockets of winter coats —, and he should have expected it, but there were memories that needed no pretext, that simply waited behind an ordinary smell for the moment when one lowered one’s guard.

His father had been called Edmund, and it had taken Colin years to understand that what he had lost that day was not only a man but a way of being in the world. Edmund Bridgerton laughed a great deal, with that slightly-too-loud laugh that made people turn round in restaurants and which his wife pretended to disapprove of while hiding her own smile behind her napkin. He had a habit of turning any journey into an expedition, any chore into a game, and of putting improbable questions to his children at table, to which he demanded serious answers — if you could be an animal for a day, which one, and why, and what would you do first? — with a judge’s gravity that made the joke funnier still. For Colin’s eighth birthday he had given him an old camera found at a junk dealer’s, a battered body that smelled of leather and dust, and had explained how to use it one Sunday afternoon, patiently, his hand laid over the boy’s to show him how to turn the focusing ring.

“You’re not looking for the right photograph,” he had said. “You wait for it to arrive. It’s different.”

Colin had been nine, that Saturday in July, at Aubrey Hall, and the lavender walk running along the lawn was in full flower, humming with that heavy, golden heat which he would later find in dozens of countries without ever quite recognising it. His father had just lent him the camera for the day, and he had taken one photograph, only one, of his father laughing, head thrown back, blurred because the boy hadn’t known how to wait. Then his father had put a hand to his neck, saying “that’s odd”, with the gentle astonishment of someone noticing a curious detail in a familiar landscape. He had sat down in the grass. He had said: “Colin, go and fetch your mother.”

Colin had run. He remembered the length of the path, which had seemed to him, that day, as if it would never end, and his own legs that weren’t going fast enough. When he had come back with Violet, his father no longer spoke. Nobody had known, before that day, that a man in perfect health could be allergic to something he had passed a hundred times without harm. The ambulance had arrived nineteen minutes later. He had counted — at nine, he counted everything, the way one clings to a handrail.

What he remembered best, however, was not the scene itself, which had set with time into a series of still images whose every framing he could have described, but what had followed: the house, in the weeks after, which had become silent in a way eight children should never have been able to make possible. His mother sitting for hours in the kitchen in front of a cup of tea she didn’t drink, her gaze resting on the garden. The doors that were closed softly. The neighbours who brought dishes and didn’t know what to say, and who said something anyway, always the same thing, he went too soon, as if a departure could ever be anything other than too soon.

At the funeral, he hadn’t cried. He had held Francesca’s hand, watched Gregory, who was only a year old, chewing on the collar of Anthony’s jacket with total seriousness, and observed his mother, who shook hands one by one with a dignity so perfect it became almost inhuman. Anthony had been fifteen. Fifteen, and he had inherited, overnight, a place he had never been asked to accept: that of the eldest who must from now on look after the others, give his opinion on everything, stand firm for everyone. Colin had watched him stiffen, month after month, grow drier, sterner, more controlling, as if mastering everything were the only way never to be taken by surprise again. He had understood, without putting it into words, what it cost to stay: you became the stone on which everyone leans, and a stone, by definition, can never allow itself to move.

He had made a decision that day, with the final sharpness that children’s decisions have, the ones never put into words but which organise everything else: that nothing held. That the things one thought solid could stop between two sentences, without notice, in a lavender walk, and that the only way not to be caught by surprise was never to count on anything. He hadn’t chosen Anthony. He had chosen the opposite.

He had started photographing everything he came across at thirteen — faces on the Tube, hands on banisters, empty chairs in kitchens —, with the obstinacy of a child who has understood that one can at least retain what one cannot keep. At seventeen he had gone off alone for three weeks to Morocco, with a rucksack and a camera, and had known for the first time that sensation which would follow him everywhere from then on: the exquisite relief of being nowhere, in a place where no one knew who he was, where no one was expecting him, where every street might become something else. At eighteen he had left for good. His mother had accompanied him to the airport with a flask of tea that she had slipped into his hands, and she hadn’t asked him to stay. She had only said, at the boarding gate, with that slightly trembling smile he had never forgotten: Don’t run off too fast. He was grateful to her more than he could ever say, and had always felt guilty for not knowing how to listen.

What he had told no one, because the thing didn’t survive being put into words, was that the relief was not only that of anonymity. It was a certainty, and it dated from a September morning, in a dormitory in Marseille, where he had woken between a German who snored and a Brazilian reading Pessoa, with nobody in the room knowing what family he came from, or what funeral, or that there had been a summer and a path. He had waited, going down the stairs, for the weight he had carried every morning for nine years: that of the family table, of glances that rested on him a second too long, of the youngest boy whose slightest crack was watched for, out of love. The weight hadn’t come. He had bought a croissant. He had made the girl at the counter laugh. He had heard himself speak, light, curious, funny, with an ease he didn’t know in London, and he had thought, with the overwhelming sharpness of adolescent certainties: so that’s what I am.

He had never stopped thinking it. In Mayfair, at Christmas, in front of any of the chairs kept for him, he felt his shoulders take back within ten minutes the shape of the child who had been known there; elsewhere, he unfolded. He had concluded, with the stubborn logic of those who have never had to put it to the test, that his true nature was light, mobile, without a past, and that everything that obliged him to stay — a house, a name, the sweetness of a key on a keyring — took it from him. Leaving wasn’t a flight. It was the only way he knew of becoming a likeness.

He had never gone back to Aubrey Hall, and nobody in the family would have risked asking him why. Violet had decided, the autumn after the funeral, that the house where her husband had died would be neither sold nor shut up, and that every year, for the first fortnight of August, her children would gather there as before, with an obstinacy that some took for courage and others for denial, and which she herself called, with the gravity of a pharmacist, hygiene. There were long tables, games of cricket on the lawn, tarts one didn’t dare not to finish, and a wicker armchair in the shade of the lime tree that nobody sat in and nobody had thought of moving. Colin was ten the summer he asked, at the table, in the most reasonable voice he had ever used, whether he could sign up for the holiday camp whose prospectus he had seen at school — a fortnight of canoeing and campfires in Wales, from the first to the fifteenth of August —, and Violet had looked at the prospectus for a very long time, the way one looks at an X-ray, before answering “of course, darling” and signing the cheque without another word. He went back the following summer, and the one after, to the Highlands, to Cornwall, onto a sail-training ship off the coast of Brittany, and later to youth work camps which he chose each year a little further afield, with the happy docility of children who have found a place where nobody looks at them while thinking of someone else. He said he liked canoeing. He had ended up believing it. He had never understood, or never wanted to understand, that his mother signed that cheque every summer the way one opens a door for a wounded animal, with the patience of those who know that one doesn’t hold on to what is hurting, and that she had spent twenty years laying, under a lime tree, the places for a family in which two plates were always missing, his father’s and Colin’s, without ever commenting on either.

He had spoken of his father only once, at Michaella’s birthday, as a joke, in a bar in Mexico City where too much mezcal had loosened his tongue: in our family, we’re allergic to bees and commitment. He had waited for the laugh. Michaella hadn’t laughed. She had looked at him for a long moment, with that quiet attention that never tried to make him talk, then had changed the subject with great delicacy, and he had been grateful to her far more than he had ever told her.

The blurred photograph, for its part, still existed. He had had it printed on paper at fifteen, in a shop in Camden, and it slept in a cardboard sleeve at the bottom of one of his bags, which he never opened, never showed anyone, and could not have justified to any picture editor: a man laughing, out of focus, in the light of an afternoon that would never end.

He had met Michaella six years earlier, in Mexico, in a village in Chiapas whose name he had already forgotten, and the scene always came back to him with the sharpness of an old snapshot.

His bus had broken down in the middle of the mountains, on a misty morning, and he had been waiting for two hours on the roadside, sitting on his case, when a rusty pick-up had burst from the bend in a cloud of dust, in the back of which stood, hanging on to a metal bar, a young woman with black hair tied in a disastrous bun, a tripod under one arm, a camera in the other, and a live chicken wedged under her elbow with which she was conversing in the utmost seriousness.

“Do you speak English?” she had shouted over the engine, barely down from the truck.

“A bit.”

“Perfect. So do I. I’m Michaella, I’m hitchhiking across Mexico for my YouTube channel, it’s called Thumbs Up, nobody watches, and this chicken is called Gérard, he’s decided to come with me. Have you got anything to eat?”

He had given her half a sandwich. She had given Gérard the other half, without asking his opinion. They had spent the next four hours on the side of that road, waiting for a replacement bus that never came, talking about everything and nothing with that particular ease of people who have no reason to impress one another, and when a passing pick-up had finally stopped to take them both on board, chicken included, he had long since stopped looking at his watch.

He was supposed to stay four days. He had a photographic project in Oaxaca, a series on weaving artisans, four days planned, a return flight booked. The project had been finished after nine days. He had stayed five weeks longer. He had followed her from village to village, on roads whose names he never knew, sleeping in hostels where the mattress was merely a hypothesis, filming in spite of himself in the background of her videos, and he had ended up, without ever putting it to himself, understanding that he was staying for someone. Not out of love — Michaella would have laughed had he so much as suggested the idea —, but for that rarer and more precious thing he had never experienced: the pleasure of a companionship that asked for nothing, that demanded neither promise nor justification, and which, for precisely that reason, gave him the impression that he could stay.

She had finally called him on it at the end of the fifth week, one evening, on the roof of a hostel where they were sharing a bottle of lukewarm mezcal.

“You know you were supposed to leave a month ago?” she had said, without looking at him, her eyes fixed on the lights of the village below.

“I know.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re still here?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s an honest answer. I’ll take it.”

She had never asked him again. He had taken the plane three days later. But she had called him for his birthday, six months after, then at Christmas, then for no reason on a Tuesday afternoon, and he had ended up understanding that Michaella was the only person in his life he couldn’t manage to rid himself of — because she had never asked him to stay, and that was perhaps why he never quite left.

There had been Sofia, in Lisbon, two years earlier. Fourteen months, which was a record he didn’t boast about.

She worked in an azulejo restoration workshop, a meticulous trade she practised with that silent concentration of people who never let anything disturb them, and she had a dry sense of humour, a way of reading menus aloud giving them the intonations of Greek tragedy, a passion for plants which she let die with a disarming serenity. She had met him in a café in the Alfama where he was photographing the light on the tiles, had found his subject “very decorative” and told him he was getting the framing completely wrong. He had been won over on the spot.

They had lived fourteen months at a strange rhythm, made of departures and returns, him leaving for three weeks on an assignment, her waiting for him without ever reproaching him for it, which he had taken for independence and which was perhaps, he understood only now, a form of patience. One day, without ceremony, she had slipped a key to the flat onto his keyring, saying simply: “That’s for when you come home.”

He had kept the key a fortnight. He remembered having slept with it one night, clenched in his palm, like a dangerous object, and waking the next day with a certainty that resembled a polite panic. Then a contract had come in, in Chile, six weeks, a project he could have turned down and which he had accepted within the hour. He had given her back the key at the airport, with a kind note, something about the light, about timing, about it being better to say it sooner than later.

She had read it standing at the check-in desk, saying nothing. She hadn’t cried. She had folded the note, neatly, in four, and slipped it into her pocket, then said to him, in that calm voice that had always fascinated him: “You see, it’s not that you leave. It’s that you need it to look like something else.” He hadn’t answered. She had kissed him on the cheek, very quickly, and gone off without looking back. It had been worse than tears.

“You don’t leave people, Colin,” Michaella had told him, when he had recounted the story, months later, with a casualness he had believed would prove contagious. “You evacuate them. Before it becomes a fire.”

He had found the phrase unfair, had changed the subject, and thought about it regularly.

He had always been honest, that was his defence: he always said “I’m off again”. He said it from the very first evening, within the first hours, with a frankness that seemed to him the most elementary of courtesies. He had never wanted to admit that honesty could also serve as an alibi — that one could announce one’s departure to someone for the exact purpose of giving oneself permission to leave.

What made the matter complicated was what attracted him in people. It wasn’t a face, not really, even though he wasn’t insensitive to that sort of thing, nor a body, nor social ease — it was the mind, that way some people had of building a sentence, of turning an idea over, of answering him exactly where he didn’t expect it. Michaella had once attributed the word to him in order to mock him, sapiosexual, which he found a little pompous for something so simple. And that was precisely what made flight costly: one moves away easily from a face; one moves away much less easily from someone whose sentences one wants to finish.

He slept badly, that first night. The silence of the flat was of a particular quality, flat, without any of the relief that other places offered him — no street noises, no voices on the stairs, no boat engine, no wind in sheet metal —, and at about three in the morning, after staring at the ceiling for a time he made no attempt to measure, he picked up his phone.

He installed the app with the distracted efficiency of a man ordering a taxi: because he had to occupy himself with something, and because it was, of everything he knew, what most resembled sleeping in a hotel — pleasant, without a tomorrow, with a door one closed behind oneself. He put in three photos that showed nothing of him, out of professional caution first, because he worked with people who had no need to stumble on his face in that precise context, and out of family caution second, which was a polite way of saying that he had seven brothers and sisters, an extremely attentive mother, and no wish to discover one day that Hyacinth, who was twenty and had no notion of privacy, had come across his profile. A one-line bio, with no job, no anything. He had learned over time that the less he said, the fewer questions he was asked that he didn’t feel like answering.

Daphne’s fitting, on the Thursday, took place in a boutique in Marylebone with walls covered in mirrors and velvet, where Colin spent two hours sitting on a pouffe that was too low, the camera on his knees, photographing dresses with an air of being interested. He was interested, in reality, more than he would have admitted: there was something in the way his sister came out of the cubicle, stood in front of the mirror, turned slowly on herself under the seamstress’s watchful gaze, that moved him in a way he hadn’t anticipated. Daphne had always had that gift of making any moment gentler than it was, of defusing tensions before they set in, of slipping between two brothers squaring up with a light remark that silenced everyone. She had made a vocation of that quality, and Colin, always, had envied her a little.

“You look tired,” she said, looking at him through the mirror.

“I only landed four days ago.”

“That’s not what I mean. You look elsewhere.”

“I’m always elsewhere. It’s my job.”

“Colin.”

He looked up from the camera screen. She had turned round, the dress falling in waves about her, and was watching him with that calm, slightly worried expression she reserved for the moments when she wanted to be heard without having to raise her voice.

“I’m not asking you to stay,” she said. “I’m asking you to be here. It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing, but it sounds better.”

“Then leave me the phrasing.”

He laughed, in spite of himself, and raised the camera to photograph her — not the dress, but her, her face turned towards him in a burst of light filtering through the shop window —, and felt, as he pressed the shutter, something precise tighten somewhere beneath his ribs. She was going to get married. She was going to leave home, become something other than the sister who waited for him, and he would be there, of course, for the seven weeks to come, for the flowers, the fittings, the photos, for everything he was asked. He would be there. But somewhere deep inside him was a sentence he couldn’t file away: and after?

Lunch with Benedict, the next day, lasted only forty minutes and produced no important information, which, with Benedict, was always a form of performance. He lived in a Hackney workshop converted into a half-finished gallery, an immense space full of canvases turned against the walls and overflowing jars of brushes, and he had chosen, for their reunion, a small unpretentious Vietnamese restaurant where he ordered for two without consulting anyone. He talked about his work, about Daphne, about an exhibition he didn’t intend to go to, about a neighbour who made strange noises at three in the morning. He asked a few questions about Tierra del Fuego, listened to the answers with that distracted attention that was never distracted, and said not a word about Anthony, or about the conversation in the offing, or about anything that might have resembled a subject.

“Are you sleeping well in Mum’s flat?” he asked, as they paid.

“Very well.”

“In the bed?”

“Obviously in the bed.”

“Because I popped round yesterday, to drop something off for her,” said Benedict, with that perfect neutrality which, in him, always heralded a carefully calculated sentence. “And your bag’s still shut at the foot of the bed. Do you sleep on the bag or next to it?”

“Next to it.”

“Hmm,” said Benedict, putting away his card, with the tone of a man who had just confirmed a hypothesis without any intention of elaborating on it.

He said nothing else. He never said anything else. There was always something, with Benedict, that he didn’t say, and Colin, who had learned to read people’s silences the way others read maps, knew that it was better, sometimes, not to try to translate them.

As for Anthony, their first conversation was limited to three silences and one sentence, exchanged in the hallway of their mother’s house, one evening, between a coat being hung up and a door being opened: “We’ll talk about it on Sunday.” It contained more threats than an entire speech, and Colin answered it with a nod that he hoped looked casual.

The days organised themselves, with that strange speed of the early days of a return, and Colin discovered, to his own surprise, that he had a rather complicated relationship with the calendar: every evening, before falling asleep, he mentally counted the days that separated him from the wedding, the way one counts the days of a detention, except that he no longer quite knew, for some time now, whether he was counting to know when he could leave or to know how much time he had left.

Seven weeks. Then Daphne’s wedding. Then he would leave again, and everything would become simple once more.

On the ninth evening, he was scrolling through profiles without much conviction, stretched out on the sofa in his mother’s flat, a documentary about the sea floor playing in the background without his really following it, when a notification appeared at the top of the screen.

New match: LadyWhistledown.

He stopped, his thumb suspended, with a curiosity he couldn’t have justified at that precise moment. No face there either — a silhouette from behind at the edge of a lake, hair loose, and a duck plainly not on the programme in a corner of the frame, which someone had evidently chosen to keep rather than crop out. That detail made him smile before he had read anything at all: he had spent enough years behind a lens to know how many people would have deleted that duck.

The bio ran to two sentences. Can beat you at darts and at crosswords, in that precise order of humiliation. Here for a good time, not to build a house.

He read the first sentence twice. “In that precise order of humiliation.” It was the kind of phrase one didn’t find by chance, which presupposed someone capable of paying attention to word order, and Colin, who spent his life taking an interest in the framing of things, recognised precision when he saw it.

He hesitated before writing.

That detail should have alerted him more than it did at the time, because Colin never hesitated. It was even more or less his only method: send something light, with nothing at stake, and let the conversation take or not — an approach whose effectiveness rested entirely on the fact that he attached no importance to it. This time, he typed a first sentence, deleted it, typed another, reread it, found it too laboured, deleted that too, and heard himself sigh, all alone in an empty living room.

Angkor&Chill: Darts and crosswords, in that precise order. I need to know immediately which of the two is the real humiliation.

The reply came faster than he expected.

LadyWhistledown: Darts. Without hesitation. I’m dangerously bad, but with an aplomb that systematically fools the opponent for at least the first two throws.

Angkor&Chill: So it’s a psychological warfare strategy rather than an actual skill.

LadyWhistledown: Exactly. I much prefer winning by intimidation to winning by talent. It’s far less tiring.

Angkor&Chill: And the crosswords?

LadyWhistledown: The crosswords, I’m genuinely good at. That’s precisely why it’s less humiliating for the opponent. Losing to someone competent is bearable. Losing at darts to someone who has never aimed properly in her life is a wound that doesn’t close.

He laughed — alone, out loud, in an empty flat, with a documentary about the sea floor carrying on without him.

They wrote for nearly two hours. Colin only realised it on noticing that the documentary had ended long ago and another had begun, on a subject about which he would have been unable to say a word. They talked about darts, then about whether there were sports in which confidence counted for more than skill, then, without his being able to reconstruct by what route, about the legitimacy of people who order the same thing wherever they go.

At no point did he ask her first name. She didn’t ask his.

He noticed this absence later, as he put down the phone, and found it restful in a way he hadn’t anticipated. There was something, in talking to someone who couldn’t place him — neither in a family, nor in a profession, nor in a country —, that resembled quite exactly what he loved about being elsewhere.

He told himself, switching off the light, that this was probably why the conversation had been so easy.

He told himself nothing else, because there was nothing else to tell himself, and because he was in London for another seven weeks, after which he would leave again, and all of this therefore had, objectively, no importance of any kind.

Penelope woke on Wednesday morning with the absurd feeling, which she hadn’t known since sixth form, that the day was worth starting, and it took her a good three seconds, eyes still shut, one arm stretched blindly towards the bedside table, to work out why. There were four unread messages. All from the same source, all sent before seven in the morning, and the longest ran to a single sentence.

Angkor&Chill — 06:41
Existential question.

Angkor&Chill — 06:41
Is a croissant a breakfast or a state of mind?

Angkor&Chill — 06:44
I ask because there’s one in front of me and I no longer know whether I’m supposed to eat it or meditate on it.

Angkor&Chill — 06:58
Your silence is surely an editorial stance. I respect it.

She stayed a long while staring at the screen, the phone held in both hands above her face in that ridiculous posture of people reading in bed, with a smile she could feel settling in without her permission. She had spent half the night writing to him, or rather replying to him, without ever managing to determine at what precise moment they had stopped introducing themselves to each other and simply started to talk, and she had fallen asleep with the phone on her chest, like a teenager, which was the one thing she had no intention of mentioning to her friends.

LadyWhistledown — 07:12
A croissant is a state of mind. Breakfast is what we tell ourselves when we don’t have a croissant.

Angkor&Chill — 07:12
You were awake.

LadyWhistledown — 07:13
I didn’t say that.

Angkor&Chill — 07:13
You replied in fourteen seconds. Sleeping people don’t reply in fourteen seconds.

LadyWhistledown — 07:14
Sleeping people can be very responsive. It’s a documented phenomenon.

Angkor&Chill — 07:14
By whom?

LadyWhistledown — 07:15
By me, just now.

She showered with the phone set on the edge of the basin, which she never did, and caught herself looking at the screen through the steam every three minutes, with that slightly shameful feverishness one reserves for things one has decided not to take seriously. She told herself it was curiosity. She told herself it was the effect of novelty, that light dizziness that goes with any conversation with someone about whom one knows nothing, and that it would fade within a few days, when the character stopped being a mystery and became a man like any other, with a bike or an overly present ex. She put on her coat telling herself it was all very reasonable.

On the bus taking her to Bloomsbury, she opened the group.

The Rescue Squad 🚨

Penelope — 08:02
right. I have to tell you something

Eloise — 08:02
go on

Penelope — 08:03
there’s a guy on the app. we’ve been talking since last night. I’m not saying it’s anything. I’m just saying I laughed on my own in bed and the neighbour downstairs banged on the ceiling

Hyacinth — 08:03
PHOTO

Penelope — 08:04
there’s no face. not his, not mine. you’re the ones who told me that was the whole point

Hyacinth — 08:04
ok but you must have seen something. a hand. an ear. a mole

Penelope — 08:05
a kitchen. a cup. a wall covered in moss

Edwina — 08:06
A wall covered in moss. That’s the profile of a man who wants to be thought deep.

Felicity — 08:06
or of a man who likes walls

Eloise — 08:07
send me a screenshot of the profile, I’ll tell you whether he’s a psychopath

Hyacinth — 08:07
screenshots are disabled Eloise, I told you when I installed the app

Eloise — 08:08
oh yes

Hyacinth — 08:08
and no, I won’t be explaining why I know about that feature

Theo — 08:11
what’s he called

Penelope — 08:12
Angkor&Chill

Theo — 08:12
pen

Penelope — 08:12
I know

Theo — 08:13
we’ve reached a historic level of ridiculousness and I’d like it recorded somewhere

Penelope — 08:13
recorded. noted. filed. shut up.

Eloise — 08:15
what does he do for a living

Penelope — 08:15
I don’t know. he doesn’t say. I don’t say either. that’s the rule.

Edwina — 08:16
What rule?

Penelope — 08:16
the one we’re in the process of agreeing on

She put her phone away in her bag with the discipline of someone forbidding herself to smoke, and took it out again four minutes later, outside the door of the publishing house, to find that no message had arrived and to feel a disappointment out of all proportion to what was at stake.

She had learned, over the years, to observe her own reactions precisely when they escaped her, and it was one of the few talents she managed to put to use only once the damage was done. She saw perfectly well what was happening. She saw that she was getting carried away, that she was mixing up the euphoria of a successful conversation with something far less innocent, and that she had told her friends, twice, I’m not saying it’s anything, with the insistence of those who mean the opposite. She saw it, she took note of it, and she changed absolutely nothing about her behaviour.

By noon she was sitting in front of a sandwich she hadn’t touched, facing a manuscript of which she hadn’t retained a line, when the phone buzzed.

Angkor&Chill — 12:03
I have a proposal of a legal nature.

LadyWhistledown — 12:03
I’m listening with the utmost suspicion.

Angkor&Chill — 12:04
I think we should put things in writing. I’ve nothing against improvisation, but I prefer to know exactly what I’m signing before I fail to honour it.

LadyWhistledown — 12:04
Do you have a lawyer?

Angkor&Chill — 12:05
I have an imagination. It’s cheaper.

LadyWhistledown — 12:06
As it happens I already have a contract. I was made to sign one last week. Twelve clauses. My friends had a very precise idea of what I needed to be forbidden.

Angkor&Chill — 12:06
Show me.

She pasted it into the conversation in full, with the slight embarrassment of someone exposing a document whose dignity she doesn’t guarantee.

LadyWhistledown — 12:07
1. No serious relationship. 2. No promises. 3. No plans for the future. 4. No official introductions to anyone. 5. No mixing of lives. 6. No people in common. 7. No details that would let the other be found online. 8. No searching on the Internet. 9. No unnecessary messages. 10. No overly detailed conversations about work. 11. No jealousy. 12. If the whole thing becomes ridiculous, we stop.

Angkor&Chill — 12:11
I’m impressed. It’s the most comprehensive document I’ve ever seen on such a poorly defined subject.

LadyWhistledown — 12:11
I’ll pass your compliments on to the committee.

Angkor&Chill — 12:12
My comments, clause by clause, if you’ll allow me.

LadyWhistledown — 12:12
I won’t allow you, but you’ll do it anyway.

Angkor&Chill — 12:13
1: adopted without reservation. 2: adopted, but I note that “no promises” is in itself a promise, a founding paradox which I find elegant. 3: adopted. I have no plans anyway, which is my main talent.

Angkor&Chill — 12:14
4: adopted with enthusiasm. I have no wish to introduce you to anyone, and honestly, none of the people I know deserve it.

LadyWhistledown — 12:14
Is that a compliment to me or an insult to them?

Angkor&Chill — 12:14
Both, in proportions I’d rather not go into.

Angkor&Chill — 12:16
5: adopted. 6: I have a comment. London has nine million inhabitants. The probability that we have someone in common tends towards zero, so the clause is harmless, which is precisely the kind of clause I love signing.

LadyWhistledown — 12:17
You calculated that?

Angkor&Chill — 12:17
I estimated. Roughly. With a great sense of mathematics.

Angkor&Chill — 12:19
7 and 8: adopted. But I propose an addition. I want us not to tell each other our names.

LadyWhistledown — 12:20
Sorry?

Angkor&Chill — 12:21
Not the real ones, at any rate. We’re already LadyWhistledown and Angkor&Chill, so we stay that. I can’t justify it rationally. But I have the feeling that the day I know what you’re really called, I won’t talk to you in the same way any more, and the way I’m talking to you right now suits me very well.

She read the message twice. She didn’t reply immediately, which for her amounted to a form of confession, and she looked at the screen for a long time, with the slightly dizzying sensation of hearing expressed aloud something she had been thinking since the day before without having put it into words: that the mystery wasn’t an obstacle to what they said to each other, but the condition of its ease.

LadyWhistledown — 12:26
Adopted.

Angkor&Chill — 12:26
Really?

LadyWhistledown — 12:26
I’m an editor, I recognise a good constraint when I see one. It forces you to be inventive.

Angkor&Chill — 12:27
You’re an editor.

LadyWhistledown — 12:27
Clause 10. Overly detailed conversations about work. You’ve just made me breach the contract in under half an hour.

Angkor&Chill — 12:28
I did nothing, you denounced yourself.

LadyWhistledown — 12:28
It’s called intellectual honesty.

Angkor&Chill — 12:29
It’s called a first offence, mostly. I’m noting it. We’ll see how long we hold out.

LadyWhistledown — 12:30
I have a rule to add.

Angkor&Chill — 12:30
I’m listening.

LadyWhistledown — 12:31
Clause 13: the person who says “we said no complications” in a suspicious tone is obliged to explain themselves.

Angkor&Chill — 12:31
Adopted. Unanimously. I should point out that I’m signing it against myself in advance, which is the sign of a man very sure of his ground.

LadyWhistledown — 12:32
Or of a man who doesn’t know himself well.

Angkor&Chill — 12:32
Both, probably.

They fixed the date an hour later, in the course of a conversation that no longer had much to do with the contract, and it was she who suggested the address — a little trattoria near her home, because she knew the menu there, the waiters, the banquette at the back where one could turn one’s back on the room. He said yes without argument. He only suggested the following Friday, rather than the same day, with a phrase she found strange at first before understanding it: I’d rather give you time to change your mind.

She didn’t change her mind. She nevertheless spent the afternoon wondering whether it was elegance or caution, and whether, in the case of a man she didn’t know, the difference had the slightest importance. She walked home, without taking the bus, ruminating on the absurd idea that the following Friday seemed to her at once far too close and far too far away, and checking her phone at least six times on the pavement, with a frequency any specialist would have called pathological.

She hadn’t thought of Alfred all afternoon. She noticed on arriving outside her building, with a little twinge of guilt, the way one notices on leaving the house that one forgot to lock up, and it took her a moment, standing on the pavement, to decide whether this absence was a victory or a betrayal.

Part Three: Six Weeks

The week before their first date was, in Colin’s opinion, the strangest of his adult life, and he would have been hard pressed to say why, since nothing happened in it.

There were whole days devoted to Daphne, who had decided, with that smiling determination he had known in her since childhood, that her brother must not be allowed to disappear before he had seen at least every venue, every florist and every tablecloth of the reception. So he followed his sister through a succession of showrooms smelling of eucalyptus and overpriced candles, where he learned more than he had ever wanted to know about shades of white, and spent an entire Thursday afternoon in the garden of the place chosen for the ceremony, photographing the four o’clock light on a lawn which the groom, Simon, a man of few words who spoke through his eyebrows, surveyed with the wariness of a lawn owner.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” said Daphne, watching the grass turn green in the low sun.

“It’s going to be very beautiful,” confirmed Colin, who had been holding his phone in one hand and his camera in the other for forty minutes, and who had just, without realising it, checked it for the eleventh time.

Daphne said nothing, with that studied silence she reserved for observations she judged premature, and watched her brother slip his phone into his jacket pocket with an air of perfect innocence.

“You’re looking at your phone,” she said finally.

“It’s a phone. One looks at it.”

“You’re looking at it in a rather particular way.”

“Particular how?”

“The way one looks at an oven when one’s waiting for something to rise.”

He laughed, in spite of himself, a laugh a little too quick, and concentrated on his camera with a sudden interest in a willow branch that had asked nothing of anybody.

His phone buzzed a twelfth time. He took it out with a hope he didn’t own up to, and recognised, on the screen, a name that made his shoulders drop.

Anthony — 17:31
Thursday, 3 p.m. You’ve noted it.

Colin — 17:32
Yes. I’m in the garden. I’m looking at the grass.

Anthony — 17:32
You’d noted it last time too.

He didn’t reply. He stayed a moment looking at the three lines, his thumb suspended over the keyboard. Anthony had an art of the minimal sentence, stripped of any apparent reproach, which left the accusation to be borne by whoever read it, and he had always found it the most effective form of blame in the family. He put the phone away, thought that one day he would have to reply with something other than “yes”, and didn’t know what.

LadyWhistledown — 17:26
What are you doing?

Angkor&Chill — 17:26
I’m photographing a lawn.

LadyWhistledown — 17:27
For a project?

Angkor&Chill — 17:27
For a family project. Clause 10: no details. I’ll just say that the lawn is very good, and that it looks as if it knows it’s being watched.

LadyWhistledown — 17:28
You talk to lawns?

Angkor&Chill — 17:28
I listen to them. It’s different.

She talked to him about everything and nothing, about things he would have said, if asked, were of no importance, and which became, once received on his screen, events in their own right. A photo of her bowl of cereal, taken from above, accompanied by a message that said simply state of mind. A sentence read in a book which she judged badly constructed, with a three-line commentary on the syntax that made him burst out laughing in a florist’s waiting room. A reflection on the slowness of lifts. A question, one evening, late, without any transition: what are you afraid of? — to which he had answered slow lifts, because he had been unable to answer anything else, and whose phrasing he had kept all night.

On Saturday evening, she wrote that she was watching a documentary about caves.

LadyWhistledown — 21:43
I’d like to point out that I’m eating cereal straight from the packet.

Angkor&Chill — 21:44
A documentary about caves.

LadyWhistledown — 21:44
Yes. Why that tone?

Angkor&Chill — 21:45
The night we started talking, I had a documentary about the sea floor on.

LadyWhistledown — 21:45
That’s worrying.

Angkor&Chill — 21:46
It’s downright worrying. We were both watching dark, deep things, alone, on a weeknight, before we even knew each other.

LadyWhistledown — 21:47
I’d rather not dig into what that says about us.

Angkor&Chill — 21:47
Is the pun intentional?

LadyWhistledown — 21:48
Absolutely not, but I’m claiming it retrospectively.

He put the phone down on the armrest and stayed a long while looking at the ceiling of his mother’s flat, with the vague impression of having forgotten something, without managing to say what.

He remembered Michaella’s warning, that sentence she had tossed out in passing, years earlier, in a café in Mexico City: You never fall in love with someone, Colin. You fall in love with the way they talk to you. He had found it funny. He told himself it didn’t apply here: it was a conversation, that was all, a very pleasant conversation, which he saw no reason to interrupt, and the phone vibrating again on his chest changed nothing.

He didn’t immediately understand why he chose to call.

It was the eve of the date, a Thursday evening, around eleven o’clock. They had been writing to each other for ten days without interruption, with stretches of silence that rarely lasted more than two hours, and never, at any point, had he considered suggesting anything to her other than messages — it was the tacit rule, the one that neither of them had put into words and that both respected with the diligence of model pupils. Yet he typed, with a single finger, with the impression of committing a minor offence:

Angkor&Chill — 23:04
Can I call you?

The reply took four minutes to arrive, which seemed to him to last a century.

LadyWhistledown — 23:08
Why?

Angkor&Chill — 23:08
I’d like to check whether your voice is consistent with your sentences.

LadyWhistledown — 23:09
And if it isn’t?

Angkor&Chill — 23:09
Then I’ll be disappointed and I’ll come tomorrow anyway.

LadyWhistledown — 23:11
...

LadyWhistledown — 23:11
Call.

He hadn’t anticipated the voice. He had imagined something higher, quicker, a hurried delivery that would have matched the liveliness of her sentences, and he stayed a moment without speaking when she picked up, because she said only “hello?” in a low voice, a little husky, with that particular grain of voices one doesn’t use enough during the day, and he felt something precise happen somewhere between his throat and his sternum.

“Are you there?” she asked, after three seconds.

“I’m here. I was checking.”

“And?”

“It’s consistent.”

“With what?”

“With everything.”

There was a silence, very brief, in the course of which he heard, distinctly, that she was smiling.

They talked for two hours and ten minutes. They talked about everything, and above all about nothing: about the worst haircut of their respective lives — his, at thirteen, an asymmetrical fringe he had cut himself with nail scissors, hers, later, as an adult, after a conversation with a hairdresser to whom she hadn’t dared say no —, about the animals they would have liked to have, about the most useless talent they possessed. She could recite the entire route of a bus she hadn’t taken since adolescence, in order, with the stops. He could recognise a city by ear, from the sound of its pigeons alone.

“That’s not true,” she said.

“I swear it is.”

“The pigeons of Lisbon are different from the pigeons of London?”

“They’re more laid-back. They coo as if they were on holiday.”

“You’re making it up.”

“I’m not capable of making up something so precise, which is exactly what proves it’s true.”

She laughed, and he closed his eyes in the dark, on the sofa, with a sensation he could have compared to nothing else: that of a sound which, after having existed for two weeks in the form of letters on a screen, suddenly took on a thickness, a relief, a space, as if a window had at last been opened in a room he knew by heart.

She had a laugh that always began a little before the end of her sentence, as if the anticipation of the punchline were already making her laugh herself. He had never heard it before, and he would have recognised it among a thousand.

“I have to sleep,” she said, around one in the morning. “Tomorrow I have to be presentable.”

“You’re always presentable.”

“You’ve never seen me.”

“I’ve listened to you for two hours. That’s a considerable basis to work from.”

“Are you going to hang up?”

“No, you.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You started it.”

“I didn’t start anything, I picked up politely.”

They stayed a few more minutes saying nothing, each in their own living room, each in their own dark, with that particular silence of people who have stopped talking without having stopped listening, and he thought, very clearly and briefly, that it was probably the most intimate thing he had shared with anyone in years, and that it had no name.

“Until tomorrow,” she said finally, softly.

“Until tomorrow.”

He left the phone on his chest, for a long time, after she had hung up. He hardly slept. There was an Italian restaurant, somewhere in London, with checked tablecloths, about which he knew nothing yet, and a woman whose face and name he didn’t know, and he realised, at three in the morning, that he had counted the hours separating him from the next day with the precision of a man counting the days before a release or before a sentence, and that he didn’t know, at that precise moment, which of the two he dreaded more.

Penelope spent nearly an hour in front of her wardrobe on Friday evening, sitting on the floor at one point, surrounded by clothes she had tried on and then rejected for reasons she couldn’t have justified with any precision, before remembering that she had, technically, no one to impress — a reminder she gave herself out loud, in the silence of her bedroom, without it changing much about her level of nervousness.

Group chat: The Rescue Squad 🚨

Penelope — 18:41
[photo] this one or the blue one?

Eloise — 18:42
the blue one. stop changing.

Hyacinth — 18:43
I want a full report tomorrow morning. timestamped if possible.

Penelope — 18:43
Hyacinth no

Theo — 18:45
I just want to know if he’s wearing decent shoes. that’s my only criterion.

She finally chose the navy dress, stepped out into the cool air of early evening, and walked towards the restaurant with the strange sensation of heading towards something rather than fleeing something — a sensation unusual enough, these past months, that she noticed it consciously, the way one notices the silence after a noise that has gone on too long.

The restaurant she had suggested — a little Italian place near her flat, checked tablecloths, candles stuck in empty wine bottles accumulated over the years — was nothing ostentatious, which suited her perfectly, given that she wasn’t even certain of surviving a first date emotionally, so that an intimidating setting would probably have finished her off.

She spotted him before she had even crossed the threshold, through the window misted by the warmth of the dining room — a man sitting near the back, one knee jiggling slightly under the table in a discreet nervous tic, he who had seemed, in the photos she’d seen, almost insolently at ease. She took a second, on the doorstep, simply to look at him, to give herself that brief reprieve before observation turned into interaction and she lost, along with it, half her faculties.

He was taller than she had imagined, broad-shouldered under a navy shirt whose sleeves he had rolled up to the elbows. His brown hair, longer than she had pictured it, fell slightly over his forehead, and he pushed it back with a sweep of his hand every two or three minutes, with an almost comic regularity. When he finally looked up towards the door and found her, something in his expression rearranged itself entirely — a slightly lopsided smile, more alive than in any photo.

She felt her heart quicken in a way she judged at once to be disproportionate, and which she attributed, with the convenient bad faith the circumstances required, to the brisk walk that had brought her here.

“Hi,” he said, stopping halfway between the table and her.

“Hi.”

There was that absurd moment where neither of them knew quite what to do with their bodies — him making a gesture towards her cheek before thinking better of it, no doubt reflecting that a handshake would be more appropriate for a date arranged through an app whose name already made any familiarity faintly ridiculous; her holding out her hand almost at the same instant, just as he was heading back in for the kiss on the cheek. Their two movements collided somewhere between cheek and shoulder, and they froze, a few centimetres apart, before bursting out laughing at the same moment.

“I think we’ve just invented a new form of greeting,” he observed, sitting back down. “We should patent it.”

“What do I call you tonight, for want of anything better? LadyWhistledown is a bit long to repeat every thirty seconds.”

“Lady W, then.”

“And you, Angkor, in that case. Which mostly sounds like the name of a cat.”

She laughed, louder than she had meant to for such a modest joke, and felt, in that laugh, something unclench in her that she hadn’t been able to name for a long time.

The waiter came to take their order — wine that neither of them really knew but which he chose with the quiet aplomb of someone used to improvising in contexts far more uncertain than a wine list — and the conversation, which had already proved its fluency in writing, proved still more fluent in person. His voice was deeper than she had imagined, slightly husky at the ends of sentences. She watched him, intermittently, with that discreet attention one pays to someone one doesn’t want to seem to be watching so closely — his hands, resting on the table, bearing the faint marks of a trade that exposed him to the world more than a desk would have done, a small pale scar on one thumb, a watch with a scratched face.

“Tell me something I couldn’t guess about you just by looking at you,” he said at one point, his elbows on the table.

She thought for a moment. “I learned the piano for a whole summer, when I was nine. Barely three weeks, really, but in my head it was a whole summer. I never got past the first three bars of a lullaby my mother loved.”

“Which one?”

“No idea, honestly. I never knew it.”

“That’s the sort of detail I love,” he said, with a sincere smile. “Not the story itself. The way you tell it. As if the failure were an integral part of the anecdote rather than something to hide.”

She felt something warm up inside her, quietly, without fanfare — not the slightly feverish excitement she had known with Alfred at the beginning, but something calmer, like a room you find heated after coming in from the cold.

They talked like that for more than an hour, leaping from one subject to another — her work, summed up in one careful word, “editor,” with no further detail; his, just as vaguely sketched, “I work in images, a lot of travel” — until the waiter, with a patience visibly strained, came to remind them discreetly that the kitchen was closing soon.

“I’m going to be honest,” he said at one point, turning his glass between his fingers. “I’m not very good at dates. I spend my time wondering what I should say rather than actually listening to the person across from me.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve just realised I haven’t once thought about what I should say next since we sat down.”

“We said no complications,” she reminded him, half joking, half to remind herself.

“We did say that,” he confirmed, with a smile that was in no way reassuring on that particular point.

He said this while sliding, without thinking, his hand a little closer to hers on the table — a gesture neither of them commented on, neither of them withdrew from.

They stayed well after the waiter had brought the bill, well after the candles stuck in their bottles had begun to burn dangerously low. It was only on stepping outside, into the night air that had turned cooler without either of them noticing, that time seemed to resume its normal speed.

They walked side by side, without much conversation this time, in a silence that was not in the least uncomfortable. At the door of her building, under the slightly yellow halo of a flickering streetlamp, they stopped, and a different silence settled, more charged, the kind that usually precedes a question no one dares to ask.

“Thanks for dinner, Angkor.”

“The pleasure was all mine, Lady W.”

Neither of them moved. She felt, for a second, something electric floating between them — the quiet certainty that if she said four more words, the evening would take a different direction altogether, and that he would probably ask nothing better than to follow it.

She didn’t say them.

It wasn’t caution, not exactly — or perhaps it was, but a caution whose nature she didn’t yet fully understand. It was rather that strange, almost vertiginous sensation of having spent an entire evening without thinking once of Alfred, and of not knowing what to do with that silence once she became aware of it, standing on that pavement, facing a man whose real first name she didn’t even know.

“Well,” she said at last, with a smile she hoped was steadier than it really was. “I should probably go in.”

“Probably, yes,” he replied, making no attempt to hold her back, which, she noticed, touched her almost more than if he had insisted.

He planted a brief kiss on her cheek — closer to the corner of her mouth than politeness required, without crossing that line either — and stepped back, hands in his pockets.

“Goodnight, Lady W.”

“Goodnight, Angkor.”

She went up to her flat alone that night, and sat for a long while on her bed, still in her dress, examining what she felt with the same methodical precision she usually reserved for the analysis of a manuscript. It wasn’t disappointment — not really. It was rather a form of unease, diffuse and slightly uncomfortable, the sensation of having laughed, of having been touched, of having wanted someone for the first time since the end of her marriage, and of not knowing whether she had the right to feel all that so quickly, so easily, as if the grief she was still carrying somewhere deserved more time before giving way to something else.

She went to bed without having resolved the question, and dreamed, that night, of a knee jiggling under a table she could never quite identify.

Colin had arrived twenty minutes early, which was not particularly like him, and had spent the better part of those twenty minutes changing seats three times on the banquette, looking for the angle that would make him look as natural as possible when she walked through the door — an exercise he found a little ridiculous himself, he who spent his life composing frames for other people and who proved, apparently, incapable of finding a decent one for himself.

He had chosen the restaurant she had suggested without discussion, had reread their conversations of the week at least four times in the taxi, and felt, as he waited, a nervousness that corresponded to nothing he usually knew of himself in this kind of situation. Ordinarily, first dates left him neither hot nor cold — he went into them with the lightness of someone with nothing to lose, because he had, objectively, never had anything to lose. This time his knee wouldn’t stop trembling under the table, a tic he couldn’t master and which he hoped, without much conviction, was discreet enough not to be noticed.

He saw her through the window before she came in — a silhouette that paused for a moment on the pavement, as if hesitating, before pushing the door open. He had never seen her, not really, not face on, and he had that strange, almost professional sensation of discovering a subject he would have liked to have time to photograph properly before even speaking to her: red hair that caught the dim light of the restaurant in a way no artificial lighting could have recreated, a navy dress, and that expression on her face of a person trying to seem more relaxed than she was — an exercise he recognised at once, being engaged in it himself at that very moment with equivalent success.

He stood up, a little too fast, nearly knocking over his glass of water.

“Hi,” he said, stopping halfway, suddenly unsure of the correct procedure.

What followed — that absurd collision between a kiss on the cheek and a handshake, that moment when they both stood frozen, a few centimetres apart, before bursting out laughing — put him instantly more at ease than he would have thought possible. He had always had that reflex, in his work as elsewhere: to look for the moment that defused everything, the one that made the rest possible. He had just, without looking for it, found it.

“I think we’ve just invented a new form of greeting,” he said, sitting back down. “We should patent it.”

He watched her throughout dinner with the attention he usually reserved for his photographic subjects, without ever managing to detach himself from it completely, even when the conversation itself demanded all his attention. She had a way of laughing that always began a little before she had finished her sentence, as if the anticipation of the punchline already made her laugh herself. She also had that way of recounting a failure — the piano, the three bars never got past — with an almost surgical precision, without an ounce of self-pity, which struck him more than he could have explained at the time.

He had always known what attracted him to someone, more than the rest: not a face, not a body, even though he wasn’t insensible to such things — but a well-built sentence, a retort that arrived exactly where he didn’t expect it, that rare capacity to be funny without ever trying to be. Michaella had been teasing him about it for years, with that word she’d brought back from a conversation overheard somewhere, sapiosexual, which he found a little pompous for something so simple: he fell for the mind above all, systematically, always had, and that evening, sitting across from a woman whose name and face he had not known twenty minutes earlier, he felt that old familiar weakness switch on with an intensity he hadn’t known in a long time.

“Tell me something I couldn’t guess about you just by looking at you,” he asked her, partly to get her talking more, partly because he sincerely wanted to know.

Her answer — the piano, the lullaby never identified — made him want to stay sitting at that table a good deal longer than a simple dinner required, which, he understood a little later, thinking back over the evening, was perhaps the first signal he should have taken more seriously.

“I’m going to be honest,” he said, later, turning his glass between his fingers, looking for the words with a care he didn’t generally bother to take. “I’m not very good at dates. I spend my time wondering what I should say rather than actually listening to the person across from me.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve just realised I haven’t once thought about what I should say next since we sat down.”

It was true, and he realised it the very moment he said it, with a sincere surprise that must have shown on his face, because she looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t quite decipher.

“We said rules,” she said.

“We did say that,” he confirmed.

He slid his hand a little closer to hers on the table without really thinking about it, an almost reflex gesture, and didn’t withdraw it when she didn’t withdraw hers either — which, he already knew, quietly contradicted everything they had just reaffirmed with the utmost seriousness.

Later, walking her home through the streets still lively on that Friday night, he felt a different nervousness rise in him, gentler than that of the start of the evening but just as unusual. At her door, under a streetlamp flickering faintly, he distinctly felt the temptation to stay — a temptation strong enough to surprise even him, who had always known, in this kind of situation, exactly how far he wanted to go and generally stopped at precisely that point, neither before nor after.

“Well,” she said, with a smile he guessed was a little forced. “I should probably go in.”

“Probably, yes.”

He made no attempt to hold her back. He could have — he sensed it, the possibility hovering between them with an almost tangible clarity —, but something in her expression, a hesitation she couldn’t quite conceal, made him understand that insisting would have been a mistake, and not merely a mistake of manners.

He planted a kiss on her cheek, closer to the corner of her mouth than necessary, and stepped back, hands in his pockets.

“Goodnight, Lady W.”

“Goodnight, Angkor.”

He walked back to his mother’s flat, in the cool air of that late evening, and found himself thinking over the evening with an insistence that was not like him — he who ordinarily closed first dates away in a corner of his head as easily as he closed a photo folder once the sorting was done. He didn’t immediately understand why he hadn’t gone up, when the opportunity, he knew, had presented itself without ambiguity. It wasn’t caution — he had never been cautious in that department. It was rather that he had sensed, in her, something he knew a little too well not to recognise it: the fear of wanting something too quickly, too hard, after having believed, once, that wanting was enough to hold things together.

Theo came back the next day towards the end of the afternoon without having warned her, as he had done more or less forever, which probably explained why Penelope had given up, somewhere around their twenty-third birthdays, asking him to. She heard the buzzer first, then, without even having picked up, the muffled voice announcing from the ground floor that his hands were full and that she had exactly ten seconds to let him in before he dropped something sugary on the pavement, a threat he had already carried out at least twice in their shared history.

He came in without taking off his shoes, as usual, cast a circular glance over the living room — a quick, almost professional glance, that of someone assessing at a stroke the general state of the premises and, by extension, the general state of the person living in them — then nodded with an approval he made no effort to hide.

“It’s much better than last time.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not saying it’s good. I’m saying it’s better. There’s an important difference, and I want it recorded somewhere.”

He set the bag of pastries down on the coffee table with the solemnity of a man bringing evidence to a trial, settled cross-legged on the sofa in that position he had adopted at her place since adolescence and which, according to Penelope, could no longer be anatomically advisable at thirty-odd, and looked at her with undisguised expectation.

“So. Tell me everything. Eloise sent me a message last night that said simply ‘SHE HAS A DATE’, in capitals, no punctuation, no context, no usable information whatsoever. I spent an hour trying to reconstruct the situation from nothing, which, I’d like to point out, is a form of psychological torture.”

Penelope grabbed a pastry without even pretending to hesitate politely — a privilege she granted herself only with him, with Felicity, and occasionally with Eloise when she was tired enough to have abandoned all forms of social dignity — and felt, as she bit into it, that particular sensation of comfort she experienced only in his presence. Theo had known her since primary school. Since that distant, slightly blurred era when they had shared the same bench, the same snacks, and a common hatred of a maths teacher whose name neither of them could really remember any more but whose existence they still evoked, twenty years later, as that of a historic enemy. He had seen absolutely everything go by: her first disastrous loves, her university years, her moving in with Alfred, her engagement, and finally, without ever making the slightest inappropriate comment on the subject, the complete collapse of the previous weeks.

That was perhaps why, she thought, chewing slowly, she always felt physically more relaxed when he was there. With him she had never had anything to prove. He had known every version of her, including the most embarrassing, and had never seemed to consider that any of them was a problem.

“It was good,” she said at last, cautiously, with the very clear intention of leaving it there.

Theo looked at her in silence for a good three seconds, saying nothing, raising one eyebrow slightly — that tiny gesture he had mastered to perfection and which had the effect, systematically, of making her capitulate before he had even needed to press.

“‘It was good,’” he repeated slowly.

“Yes.”

“Penelope Featherington. I’ve known you for twenty years. You never say ‘it was good’ about something that was merely good. When something is merely good, you say ‘it was nice’, or ‘it was fine’, or, in really serious cases, you change the subject outright by asking me a question about my own life to divert attention. ‘It was good,’ in your vocabulary, means you’re downplaying something.”

She opened her mouth to protest, closed it again, and felt a slightly treacherous warmth climb into her cheeks, which probably finished betraying her better than any verbal confession could have done.

“Ah,” said Theo, with manifest satisfaction. “There it is. So it was very good.”

“Don’t make that face.”

“I’m not making any face. This is my normal face, you’re simply in an emotional state that’s making you paranoid.”

She threw a cushion at him, which he dodged without apparent effort, and ended up giving in — little by little, then completely, as she always gave in with him. She told him about the restaurant, the checked tablecloths, the candles in the wine bottles, the way she had spotted him through the window before going in, that knee jiggling under the table which she had noticed immediately without yet knowing what it meant. She told him about the botched greeting, the absurd collision between a handshake and a kiss on the cheek, the fit of laughter that had followed and that had, in a way, dispelled all the awkwardness of the first five minutes in one go. She told him about the conversation that had never seemed forced, the silences that had never seemed heavy, the question he had asked her about the piano and the way he had listened to her answer — really listened, without looking at his phone once, without letting his attention drift towards the room.

Theo listened without interrupting her, which he rarely did, and Penelope knew him well enough to understand that this silence said more than any comment.

“And what’s he called, this man?” he asked at last, when she had finished.

She felt the question coming two seconds before he asked it, and winced in anticipation.

“Angkor.”

“That’s not a name, Pen.”

“It’s his username. On the app.”

He stared at her, without the raised eyebrow this time, with the expression of someone patiently waiting for an explanation he already suspects will be ridiculous.

“You don’t know his real name.”

“No.”

“You spent a whole evening with a man whose name you don’t know.”

“It was his idea. Well — our idea. Both of us. We decided to keep the mystery. No real names, no looking each other up online, nothing that would let us track the other down.”

Theo looked at her for another long moment, then let himself fall back against the sofa with a theatrical sigh, arms spread wide, in the posture of someone who has just received devastating news.

“It’s ridiculous,” he announced to the ceiling.

“It’s romantic.”

“It’s ridiculous and romantic,” he corrected. “The two are not mutually exclusive. It’s in fact generally the exact definition of the worst romantic decisions ever made by humanity.”

“Thank you for this unconditional support.”

“I’m serious, Pen.”

But he wasn’t entirely, she could see that — beneath the sarcasm there was something gentler, that way he had always had of teasing her precisely on the subjects where he knew her to be most fragile, as if to prove to her, through lightness, that none of them was really serious.

He sat up slowly, took a pastry in his turn, and stayed silent for a few seconds before resuming in a different tone, lower, stripped of all theatricality.

“I’m going to tell you what I think, and then I promise we’ll talk about something else, because I have an absolutely unhinged story to tell you about my boyfriend’s brother and a barbecue that went very badly wrong. But first: I think you did well to leave it unfinished last night.”

Penelope, who had told no one, not even him, that she had in fact let the evening end at her door, felt her cheeks heat up in a way that should have sufficed, on its own, as an answer.

“How did you—“

“I didn’t know, actually,” Theo admitted, with a satisfied smile. “But now I do.”

“Theo.”

“I’m half joking. But I’m glad, sincerely. You spent six years with a man who knew absolutely everything about you — your name, your address, your family, your job, the brand of cereal you buy — and it didn’t stop him from dropping you the day before your wedding. So if, for now, you’d rather take your time with a stranger with no surname who makes you laugh in an Italian restaurant, honestly, I don’t see who could blame you.”

Penelope felt her throat tighten, without warning, in a way she hadn’t anticipated at all two minutes earlier, and had to look away towards the window for a few seconds to recover a more or less acceptable composure.

“I don’t want it to become something,” she said at last. “I’m not ready. I’m afraid, actually. I’m afraid of getting attached too fast, again, like with Alfred, and of finding myself rebuilding my whole life around someone who might decide, overnight, that it no longer suits him.”

“Nobody’s asking you to rebuild anything.”

“He’s not asking me to, that’s the strangest part. He isn’t asking for anything at all. He doesn’t want to build anything, he’s leaving in a few weeks, he told me from the start with an almost brutal honesty. It’s supposed to be exactly what I needed. But I’m still afraid.”

“Afraid of what, precisely?”

“Of starting to want something again that I shouldn’t want. Of recognising a feeling, and it turning, once more, into something I’ll regret having let grow.”

Theo nodded slowly, without minimising, without telling her that her fears had no basis — which she probably appreciated more than she could have told him. He merely moved a little closer, put an arm round her shoulders, and let the silence settle quietly between them for a long moment.

“I can’t promise you it won’t hurt,” he said at last. “Nothing can, ever. But I can tell you that the version of you who has just refused to let him come up to her flat for fear of going too fast is not the same version who spent six years downplaying her own needs so that everything would stay simple. That’s already huge, Pen. Even if you don’t see it that way yet.”

“Right,” he said finally, tapping twice with the flat of his hand on her shoulder to signal that the serious moment was officially over. “The barbecue. You’re not going to believe it. There were firemen, a hysterical neighbour, and a dog that ate every last sausage while everyone was looking the other way.”

She burst out laughing, a real laugh this time, one that hurt her ribs, and told herself, listening to him recount his catastrophe with the exaggerated gestures he had never abandoned since adolescence, that she had probably waited far too long before calling him back.

Michaella called Colin on video on Tuesday evening, from a flat in Berlin where she was shooting a video for her channel, her face half lit by a professional ring light and half plunged in the darkness of a room visibly badly insulated. She had a woolly hat on indoors, which, knowing Berlin at this time of year and above all knowing Michaella’s tendency to rent the cheapest accommodation on the market regardless of its condition, was nothing particularly surprising.

“The heating doesn’t work,” she announced before even saying hello. “I’m paying forty euros a night. I think it’s deserved.”

He laughed, wedged into the sofa of the flat his mother was lending him for the length of his stay.

“And you?” asked Michaella. “You’re in London until when, again?”

“Another month, or so. Daphne’s wedding is in less than four weeks, and she’s asked me to be there for all the preparations, I can’t leave before. My mother would never forgive me, and honestly, neither would Daphne.”

“A month is long, for you. You usually start becoming unbearable after eight days in the same place. How many are you on, now?”

He did the sum in his head, more slowly than he would have liked.

“Twenty-two days.”

“And you don’t look unbearable. You even look rather relaxed, which in itself is already an anomaly that I’m carefully noting.”

Colin opened his mouth to say something light enough to close the subject, then realised he had nothing particularly convincing to offer. He merely shrugged, a gesture which, through a badly framed phone screen, probably lost some of its effect.

“Is there someone?” asked Michaella, with that total absence of transition that was her trademark.

“Why are you asking that?”

“Because you’ve looked at your phone three times since the start of this call, and your phone, as it happens, is the object you’re talking to me on. Which means you were checking something over my face. Which means you’re waiting for a message.”

He could have denied it. He seriously considered doing so, for a fraction of a second, before remembering that Michaella had seen him lie enough times, in enough different circumstances, to recognise his avoidance mechanisms before he had even finished deploying them.

“There’s someone,” he admitted. “Well. There’s a girl on an app. We’ve met once. That’s all.”

“Once.”

“Once, yes. Friday. It’s not exactly a love story, Michaella, it’s a dinner.”

“I said nothing about a love story. You’re the one who just used those words, all by yourself, without anyone making you.”

He looked at her through the screen, irritated by the ease with which she systematically managed this, and she returned his look with a perfectly innocent smile that was anything but innocent.

“It’s just that the conversation is good,” he said finally, ceding ground without quite knowing why he was ceding so much. “She’s funny. Really funny, not ‘funny for someone you met on an app’. And she isn’t looking for anything serious either, so it’s perfectly balanced.”

“You’ve set rules, haven’t you?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you always set rules. It’s your big thing. You lay down a very clear framework at the start, you explain it to everyone with great conviction, and then you spend the following weeks violating it methodically while explaining that it doesn’t count. Mexico. You said you were staying four days. You stayed six weeks. You said it was for the photo project. The photo project was finished after nine days, Colin. I was there.”

He had, objectively, nothing to say to that, and the silence that followed must have been eloquent enough, since Michaella burst out laughing on the other side of the screen, a frank, noisy laugh that made the frame of the image tremble slightly.

“Right,” she said, once she’d calmed down. “I’m not saying it’s serious. I’m just saying I’ve known you for six years and I recognise a pattern when I see one. Enjoy yourself. Sincerely. You’re allowed.”

“It’s a dinner, Michaella.”

“It was a dinner,” she corrected. “We’ll see in three weeks.”

His phone buzzed twenty minutes after the end of the call, while he was half-heartedly looking for something to watch.

LadyWhistledown — 21:47
Absolutely urgent question.

Angkor&Chill — 21:47
I’m ready.

LadyWhistledown — 21:48
Did you really caption a photo of a roundabout “wanderlust”, or was that a joke I took at face value for the whole of Friday evening?

Angkor&Chill — 21:49
I refuse to answer without my lawyer present.

LadyWhistledown — 21:49
So it’s true.

Angkor&Chill — 21:50
It’s true. But in a very particular context that you can’t understand if you’ve never been in Bangkok at four in the morning after thirty hours without sleep.

LadyWhistledown — 21:51
I have indeed never been in Bangkok at four in the morning after thirty hours without sleep. My closest experience is a birthday party where I sent a message of alarming sincerity to a colleague I’d known for three weeks.

Angkor&Chill — 21:51
What did it say?

LadyWhistledown — 21:52
That stays between me and the HR department.

Angkor&Chill — 21:52
I respect that boundary while finding it deeply frustrating.

He put the phone down on the armrest, then picked it up again two minutes later, then put it down once more, aware that this precise behaviour would have given Michaella enough material for at least half an hour of commentary had he had the bad idea of describing it to her.

Angkor&Chill — 22:06
Another question, less urgent. What are you doing Thursday?

LadyWhistledown — 22:09
Technically, nothing.

LadyWhistledown — 22:09
No technically not either, actually. Nothing at all.

Angkor&Chill — 22:10
There’s a decent pub halfway between your place and where I’m staying. Decent in the strict sense: the seats are bad, the beer is good, nobody will ask us to leave before closing.

LadyWhistledown — 22:11
That’s the most honest description of a venue anyone has ever given me to lure me there.

Angkor&Chill — 22:11
It’s a strategy. If I lower your expectations enough, I can only surprise you pleasantly.

LadyWhistledown — 22:12
Thursday, then.

He smiled at his screen, alone in the living room of a flat that wasn’t his, and only noticed after a long moment that he had stayed there, phone in hand, without turning on the television or doing anything else, for nearly a quarter of an hour.

The pub he had chosen for Thursday turned out to be exactly as he had described it by message — bad seats, honest beer, nobody to ask them to leave before closing — and Penelope, pushing open the door, felt a nervousness different from that of the first evening, lighter, almost pleasant, as if her body had already begun to register that this story, however provisional it was supposed to remain, no longer belonged quite to the same register as the three previous catastrophes.

He was already there, a half-drunk pint in front of him, his hair still damp from a rain that must have caught him on the way, and he stood up on seeing her with a smile that had nothing left of the clumsiness of the first evening.

“It’s chucking it down out there,” he announced, by way of greeting. “I ran the last five hundred metres as if my life depended on it.”

“Was it worth it?”

“I’ve only just sat down, Lady W. Give me time to catch my breath before I answer such loaded questions.”

She sat down opposite him, ordered the same beer as his without thinking much about it, and felt the conversation resume with an ease that, six days after their first dinner, no longer surprised her as much as it had the first time — which, in itself, was a piece of data she chose not to examine too closely.

“I notice,” she said, “that it didn’t take you long to come back. Six days, barely.”

“Technically, six days and six hours have elapsed. I prefer to keep the figures exact, for the history books.”

“There’s a history now?”

“There’s perhaps the beginning of an anecdote. We’ll see what becomes of it.”

They talked for hours, about everything and nothing, until the barman began stacking chairs on the neighbouring tables with an insistence that left no room for doubt. They went out into the fine rain that hadn’t let up, sharing his jacket over their two heads for the ten-minute walk to her place, laughing at their own inefficiency at keeping both of them dry at the same time.

At her door, soaked despite the jacket, they stopped, and Penelope felt the same charged silence as the week before — except that this time, something had changed. She had had an entire week to examine that unease she’d felt after the restaurant, to turn it over in every direction, to understand that it wasn’t about betraying a grief that was still recent, but simply about being afraid, which was not the same thing.

“You’re soaked,” she said.

“So are you.”

“Do you want to come up and dry off?”

“That’s a very pragmatic proposal, phrased like that.”

“I can rephrase it if you prefer.”

“No,” he said, with a smile that was in no way cautious this time. “I think that one suits me very well.”

She would not remember, later, the exact route between the front door and her bedroom — only fragments: the key that refused to cooperate for long seconds; his sodden jacket abandoned over the back of a chair; the way he had taken her face in his hands, even before closing the door behind them, with a gentleness that was in no way hurried, as if he too had waited that whole week without quite admitting it to himself.

In the bedroom, he first stayed motionless on the threshold, hair plastered to his forehead, the drenched shirt clinging to his shoulders, and she understood that he was waiting for a sign, something that would tell him where to stand. She was seized by a tiny and very precise panic. It had been four months since she had last been touched, and it wasn’t only the time: it was that she no longer knew whether she remembered how to go about it, whether the gestures would come back to her or whether she would find herself, at the worst moment, mechanically reciting a repertoire learned for someone else.

“Can I tell you something?” she murmured.

“Anything you like.”

“I’m scared.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t say there’s no reason to be, or it’ll be fine, or any of those phrases one says to stop the other person’s fear rather than to hear it. He nodded slowly, his eyes on hers, and said only:

“Thank you for telling me. What would help?”

The question caught her off guard. No one had ever asked it of her in that form. She thought about it seriously, standing in the middle of her bedroom, arms wrapped around herself, noticing with a distant astonishment that he was genuinely waiting for the answer.

“If you... were slow,” she said at last.

“I can be very slow.”

“And if you told me if I do something wrong.”

“I’ll tell you. And you’ll tell me too.”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

“Then we’ll learn,” he said, with a small smile, and stepped forward.

He began by taking off her shoes, which she hadn’t expected at all, kneeling before her on the parquet with an almost comic diligence, undoing the sodden laces that refused to give, muttering affectionate insults at the rain, and that tiny, absurd, disarming gesture loosened something in her chest before he had even touched her anywhere else. She began to laugh. He looked up, questioning, a lace between his fingers.

“You’re laughing.”

“You’re taking my shoes off as if you were repairing a watch.”

“It’s precision work.”

“You’re on your knees in a puddle.”

“I’m committing to the project,” he said, and she laughed harder, and it was in that laugh, in that unforeseen lightness, that the fear let go.

She drew him towards her. She found the first button of his wet shirt, which resisted, then the second, and their noses collided, and the clinging fabric made them wrestle each other for long seconds, him caught in a sleeve that wouldn’t come off, her bent double, unable to help him she was laughing so much, until he finally got rid of the garment with an exasperated gesture that sent it against the wall, and they found themselves face to face, breathless, eyes shining, with the impression of having already been through something more intimate than what was to follow.

Then he stopped laughing. He raised a hand, slowly, and traced with his fingertips the line of her jaw, then the curve of her neck, then the hollow of her collarbone, with an attention that had nothing of haste or routine about it, the attention of a cartographer discovering a territory of which he wants to omit nothing. She closed her eyes. She felt her skin respond beneath his fingers, step by step, like a surface being woken, and she discovered with surprise that her body knew, that nothing she had dreaded had disappeared, that the gestures were there, intact, and that they had never belonged to anyone but her.

He asked her, at one point — she never knew which, in the soft disorder of what followed — whether she wanted him to go on. He asked it very low, against her temple, without the slightest pressure, the way one asks a question whose answer one would accept whatever it was. She said yes. He asked there. She said yes. He asked like that, and she gave a small choked laugh, and he waited, patient, for the laugh to pass, and she said, low, something she had never said to anyone — something precise, tiny, a wish she had kept for years deep inside her the way one keeps a letter one has never dared to post.

He made no comment. He didn’t laugh, showed no surprise, didn’t say are you sure. He said “all right”, simply, in a slightly husky voice, and he did it.

She was unable, afterwards, to describe what she felt. It wasn’t only pleasure, though it was pleasure, of an intensity that surprised her, slow, rising, of a kind she hadn’t remembered could exist; it was the sensation of being followed rather than led, of not having to show anyone the way, of being looked at with an entire curiosity that judged none of her movements. She felt something rise in her, very high, slowly, with a patience that wasn’t hers, until everything gave way at once, without pain, in a long silent wave that tore her name from her, or rather the nickname she had chosen to bring along, which she murmured into the hollow of his shoulder as one speaks a word in a foreign language.

He stayed against her for a long while, short of breath, his forehead resting against hers, with that irregular breathing of men who still have, somewhere, the awareness of not being finished marvelling. She felt his heart beating through his chest, fast, disordered, and she found it infinitely reassuring: he wasn’t as calm as he looked.

They began again later, in the dark, with that greedy slowness of those who have understood that there is no urgency, and what she retained of that second time, which was longer and more playful, was that he stopped every time she laughed, and that he waited for the end of the laugh before resuming, the way one waits for a song to finish being sung.

What would remain, on the other hand, engraved with an almost troubling sharpness, was the sensation of being seen — not just looked at, but truly seen, in a closeness she hadn’t known for a long time, without that permanent calculation which had ended up governing her every movement with Alfred.

Later, in the darkness of her bedroom where only the orange glow of a streetlamp filtered through the curtains, she lay awake a while, her head against the shoulder of this man of whom she knew, at bottom, only the name he had chosen to give her, and found herself thinking, without dread this time, that she hadn’t thought once of Alfred all evening.

Not once.

She closed her eyelids, smiled in the dark, and decided, for that night at least, not to try to understand what it meant.

The next morning, however, she did try to understand — with an insistence that surprised even her, waking before him, in the grey light of a rainy Friday, his arm still lying across her waist.

She slipped out gently, without waking him, and went to make coffee in the kitchen with an agitation she recognised, observing it, as a form of flight disguised as domestic efficiency. She put away two cups that didn’t need putting away. She wiped a worktop that was already clean. She caught herself, at one point, almost hoping that he would wake late, that she would have time to compose a face neutral enough before having to confront the silent question that the previous night had, unintentionally, opened between them.

When he appeared in the doorway, hair in disorder, she found herself answering his question about the coffee with an almost professional precision — about the beans, the roast, details that interested absolutely no one — and saw him, for a second, raise one eyebrow slightly, as if registering something without commenting on it straight away.

“Is everything all right?” he asked finally, leaning against the door frame.

“Very well. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No idea. You’ve just explained the geographical origin of coffee to me for four minutes without breathing.”

She felt her cheeks heat up, caught red-handed in a strategy she hadn’t even been aware of deploying so plainly.

“I’m just... I need a bit of air,” she said finally, with an honesty that cost her more than she would have thought. “Not from you. From the situation. It went fast, last night. Well — not fast in the literal sense, but fast for me, for what I thought I wanted right now.”

He didn’t seem hurt by the remark — which she noted, with a relief she hadn’t allowed herself to hope for.

“All right,” he said softly, without irony this time. “If you need air, take air. I’m not here to force your hand on anything.”

“That’s not what I—“

“I know, Lady W. I know.”

He left an hour later, with a kiss on the forehead that unsettled her more than she could have admitted, and she spent the rest of the day wondering why she had been, precisely, so frightened of an ordinary morning.
The Rescue Squad 🚨

Penelope — 21:47
right. I have something to tell you and I’d like nobody to react

Hyacinth — 21:47
I’M REACTING

Penelope — 21:48
I slept with Angkor&Chill

Hyacinth — 21:48
WAIT. WAIT. WAIT

Felicity — 21:48
I’m not surprised but I’m delighted

Edwina — 21:49
For the record, I was in favour, in principle.

Hyacinth — 21:49
DETAILS

Edwina — 21:49
Hyacinth, give her time to formulate.

Hyacinth — 21:49
I WANT THE DETAILS WITH A FORMULATION PERIOD

Penelope — 21:52
right. I’m not going to give a medical report. but let’s say he does something no one had ever done with me: he asks

Felicity — 21:52
asks what

Penelope — 21:53
everything. “do you want me to keep going?” “there?” “like that?” and he WAITS FOR THE ANSWER. he really waits. I didn’t know that existed

Eloise — 21:53
I’m very moved and just a tiny bit embarrassed

Hyacinth — 21:54
what do you mean, he waits for the answer

Penelope — 21:55
I mean at one point I said something I’d never said to anyone, very quietly, something I’d been keeping for years. and he said “all right”. without laughing. without comment. and he did it. just like that. as if it were the most normal thing in the world

Edwina — 21:55
I note that this is a statistically rare element.

Theo — 21:56
I’m reading this in my pyjamas on my sofa and Mathis is asking me why I look moved

Penelope — 21:56
don’t tell him anything

Theo — 21:56
I’ve told him everything. he’s delighted. he’s asking if “Angkor&Chill” is a stage name

Penelope — 21:57
there was a moment where I laughed, right in the middle. he was stuck in his wet shirt. and he laughed too. and it didn’t kill the mood. it... improved it?

Hyacinth — 21:58
that’s the sexiest sentence I’ve ever read in my life and I don’t know why

Eloise — 21:58
me neither

Penelope — 21:59
three times. I nearly couldn’t walk to the kitchen this morning. I’d like to point out that I still managed to give him a four-minute lecture on the geographical origin of coffee because I panicked

Felicity — 22:00
pen. why did you panic?

Penelope — 22:03
because it was going too well

Theo — 22:03
that’s the most classic reason for panic in the world and it means absolutely nothing

Eloise — 22:04
you’re allowed to have it go well

Penelope — 22:04
I’m working on it

Hyacinth — 22:05
anyway I’ll repeat my question: what was he like, apart from the questions

Penelope — 22:05
Hyacinth

Hyacinth — 22:05
I’m asking in the interest of science

Penelope — 22:07
attentive. generous. a bit mad. he laughs when he shouldn’t and stops at the right moment. he has incredible hands and doesn’t know it. there. that’s all you’re getting

Hyacinth — 22:07
that’s A LOT

Edwina — 22:08
It’s even enough for a preliminary report.

The Sunday dinner at Violet’s brought together, that day, a number of Bridgertons high enough that Colin, pushing open the door, felt that slightly overwhelming rush of affection he experienced whenever he found himself exposed to his entire family after a long absence — a mixture of sincere pleasure and an almost immediate urge to check the time of the last train. It had now been a little under a month since he’d come back to London, and he had seen LadyWhistledown twice since the restaurant with the checked tablecloths, one of those a whole night — a figure he had confided to no one in that house, and which he had, shall we say, no particular intention of sharing that evening either. Anthony had put off the conversation he had promised him from the moment he landed two Sundays running, with a calculated patience that was not like him, and Colin had ended up wondering which of the two of them was keener to avoid it.

Anthony greeted him first, in the hall, with a brief embrace and a look that already contained, Colin felt it at once, a remark in preparation.

“How long did you stay, this time, before disappearing again?”

“I’m here for at least seven weeks more, Anthony. Daphne asked me to stay for the preparations, not just the day itself — she wants me there for the fittings, to help with the photos, for everything else. I’m going nowhere before the wedding.”

“We’ll see.”

Colin chose not to pick it up, mainly because he knew exactly where that conversation would lead him if he kept it going, and because he had, objectively, more trouble defending his position on that precise ground than on any other. Anthony had never formulated the reproach directly — it wasn’t his style, he preferred the dry remark distilled over the course of an evening to head-on confrontation —, but Colin knew he still thought, four years after the event, of that missed flight which had prevented him from attending his own wedding.

It wasn’t really his fault. He had been stuck in Nairobi for six days because of a cancelled connection and an airport on strike, had tried everything, including a fourteen-hour car journey to a neighbouring airport which had proved, in the end, just as useless as the first. He had arrived the day after the ceremony, had missed the vows, the first dance, and Benedict’s speech which had been described to him so many times since that he felt as if he had attended it himself without ever having set foot there.

“I’ve seen the photos,” said Anthony, later in the evening, as they cleared the table together, in a tone that was meant to be light and was only half so. “Kate was magnificent.”

“I know. I’ve seen the photos too, Anthony.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not the same.”

There was a silence, short, not hostile, but loaded with something neither of them bothered to name fully, before Anthony resumed, more gently this time.

“I’m not saying it to make you feel guilty. Well, a bit. But mostly I’m saying it because Daphne is getting married in a few weeks, and I’d rather not have to tell the same story a second time in ten years.”

“I’ll be there, Anthony.”

“I know you’ll try.”

“I’ll be there.”

Anthony looked at him for a moment, as if weighing the sincerity of the promise, then nodded and dropped the subject — which, in him, amounted to a form of acceptance as close as possible to genuine forgiveness.

It was his mother, later in the evening, when the table was gradually emptying and Gregory was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Hyacinth to help him clear up, who broached the subject Colin always dreaded most, with that formidable lightness she could wield better than anyone else in the family.

“I’ve been thinking of someone, for you,” said Violet, sitting down beside him with a cup of tea she manifestly had no intention of drinking just yet.

“Mum.”

“I’m not saying anything bad. I’m just saying I’ve been thinking of someone.”

“I’m not here for long.”

“You’ve been here almost a month and you seem in a particularly light mood, lately, if you’ll allow me the remark,” replied Violet, with that tranquil smile that never boded anything good for the rest of the conversation. “Three weeks is more than enough for a coffee.”

Colin felt the familiar irritation rise in him, that precise irritation, faintly tinged with shame, that he felt every time his mother broached this subject — not because she was wrong to worry, but because she had, most of the time, an almost supernatural way of guessing what was going on beneath the surface before he himself had fully admitted it, and he wondered, for one uncomfortable moment, what exactly she had noticed to make a remark like that.

“Who?” he asked, all the same, more to close the conversation quickly than out of real interest.

“Penelope Featherington. You’ve never met her, I think — she’s always gone when you’re here, or you when she’s here, it’s terribly badly orchestrated on our part. She’s Eloise’s best friend. An absolutely charming young woman, very intelligent, very funny. She works in publishing.”

“Mum, I don’t have time for matchmakers,” he said, with that slightly too quick lightness he used whenever he wanted to close a subject before it took hold. “I already have someone in my life, if you like, and it’s precisely not the sort of situation you organise over a cup of tea.”

Violet raised an eyebrow, with that immediate interest she never really tried to hide.

“‘Someone in your life.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard you use that expression without wincing as you say it.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“It’s a very precise figure of speech, for someone who claims it isn’t worth the bother.”

Colin sensed that he had just, without meaning to, opened a door he would far rather have left shut, and chose the most dignified retreat on offer — pouring himself more tea, with a sudden and wholly disproportionate concentration for such a simple act.

“Penelope Featherington,” he resumed, after a silence, partly to create a diversion, partly because the name, now that he was saying it himself, seemed vaguely familiar without his knowing why. “That name rings a bell.”

“I doubt it,” said Violet. “I’m telling you again, you’ve never crossed paths. But if you change your mind before you leave—“

“I’m not going to change my mind, Mum.”

“People say that.”

Colin nodded, with the firm intention of closing the subject for good, and the name slid over him, for a few seconds only, like so many other names mentioned over family dinners about people he had never met — before coming back, without warning, to catch somewhere at the back of his mind, like an object one thought one recognised in a shop window without being able to remember where one had first seen it.

“She’s just been through something difficult,” Violet added, more gently, without remarking on his confusion. “A break-up. I don’t want to introduce her to anyone who wouldn’t be serious about it.”

“Then perhaps I’m not the one you need,” said Colin, with a smile he meant to be disarming.

“That’s just what I thought too,” Violet admitted, with a frankness that made him laugh in spite of himself. “But you can’t blame me for trying.”

From the other side of the table, Gregory, who had clearly followed the end of the conversation while pretending to see to the plates, looked up with sudden interest.

“Penelope? Who are you talking about?”

“No one who concerns you, Gregory,” replied Violet, with a patience visibly honed by years of practice.

“Penelope Featherington is the love of my life,” Gregory announced, very seriously, to the table at large.

“You were sixteen,” Benedict pointed out, without looking up from his phone.

“Age takes nothing away from the sincerity of the feeling.”

“You gave her an Arsenal shirt.”

“A romantic gesture she still remembers, I’m sure.”

Colin observed this exchange with the distant amusement of someone who had, on this particular subject, absolutely no background information, and helped himself to another slice of tart while letting the conversation drift elsewhere. The name, however, did not quite leave him: it accompanied him to the door, with that mute insistence of words one has heard without listening to them.

He thought of other things that evening, walking back to his mother’s flat in the cool air of early night, with that total absence of curiosity which generally characterises information one doesn’t yet know one should have retained. He thought of Anthony, of that missed flight which continued, four years on, to weigh silently on each of their conversations. He thought of his mother, and of that capacity she had for guessing things he himself had not yet formulated.

Above all he thought, without much surprise this time, of the evening he had planned for the next day, and smiled to himself in an empty street, with no one there to see him.

Angkor didn’t write for nearly three days, and that was, of all the things he could have done, the most destabilising.

Penelope had expected anything but that. She had said, in her kitchen, on a Friday morning, that she needed air, and he had answered take some air with a simplicity so perfect that it had taken her several hours to understand he meant it. He had kept his word. Not a message on Friday, nor Saturday, nor Sunday, not a photograph of a moss-covered wall or an existential question about croissants — nothing but a clean, crisp, respectful silence, which left her all the space she had asked for and which she spent hating with a diligence she hadn’t suspected in herself. She took the air. She took whole lungfuls of it, walking on Sunday afternoon in the park where she had learned to go back alone, telling herself that this was exactly what she wanted, that it was healthy, that it was reasonable, that any well-adjusted person would be delighted to be treated with such tact. She checked her phone seventeen times between lunch and dinner. She counted them.

She had slept badly on Friday night, and worse still on Saturday: a broken sleep, full of sudden wakings, unlike anything she had known since she had started living again.

It had come back without warning, by the narrowest path: a phone silence. She was used to silences, though. She had made an art of them, for six years, with a man who could go a whole evening without answering a message, then write in a meeting at midnight with perfect naturalness. She had learned not to worry. She had learned not to monitor. She had learned, above all, to convert every absence into a reasonable explanation: he’s busy, he’s tired, he forgot, it doesn’t matter. She had thought she had unlearned all that. She discovered that those reflexes were sleeping somewhere, intact, ready to start up again at the slightest jolt, like a machine that has never been completely switched off.

On Saturday night, around three o’clock, she had dreamed of a dress.

It was hers, the white one, the one that still hung in her wardrobe. She was wearing it. She was standing in the living room of her flat, in front of a window open onto a clear morning, and she knew, with the logical certainty of dreams, that she was expected somewhere, that she was late, that there were people sitting on chairs, an aisle strewn with petals, a priest. Alfred came in through the door. He wasn’t wearing his suit. He had a coat, a travel bag, and that expression she had seen on him the night before, that drained, foreign face, looking somewhere above her head. He said: “I need to be alone.” He said it softly, with perfect courtesy, the way one apologises for having taken someone’s seat. She wanted to reply. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of her throat but the smell of lavender.

She woke with a start, sitting up in bed, a hand on her chest, breathless, her nightdress stuck to her back with cold sweat.

She didn’t understand at once where she was. She looked at the room, the ceiling, the unlit lamp, and it took her a few seconds to recognise her flat, her bed, her window, the silent street below. Her heart was pounding hard enough to hurt. She put both feet on the floor, she got up, she went into the kitchen feeling her way, without turning on the light, and she sat on the floor, her back against the cupboard, her knees against her chest, in the dark, with the very distinct feeling that she was living through something she had no right to live through.

She was ashamed. That was it, first of all: shame. Nothing had happened. A man she had known for two weeks hadn’t written for fifteen hours. It was what he had announced, what she herself had asked for — I need air —, and she had obtained, with remarkable punctuality, the precise thing she had asked for. She had no reason to be hurting. She was hurting. She felt it in her stomach, in her hands, in her throat, with that physical sharpness that had no connection with logic, and that no reasoning was capable of dissolving.

She picked up her phone. There were fifteen hours of silence. She knew them by heart.

She dialled a number.

“Pen?” said Theo, in a thick voice, on the fourth ring. “It’s three in the morning.”

“I know.”

“Who’s dead?”

“No one.”

“Then why—“

“I’m having a panic attack in my kitchen,” she said, very fast, in a very calm voice, “because a man I barely know hasn’t written for fifteen hours.”

There was a silence. She heard a rustle of sheets, a whisper — it’s Penelope, go back to sleep —, the sound of a door, the click of a switch. She heard Theo breathing, for a few seconds, with that absolute attention he had when the conversation turned serious.

“You’re sitting on the floor,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Your voice is forty centimetres off the ground. I know you.”

“I’m ridiculous.”

“You’re reliving something,” said Theo, gently. “That’s not the same as being ridiculous.”

“I’m not in love with him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I don’t know him. I don’t even know his name. I have no reason—“

“Pen,” he said. “You’re not afraid of losing him. You’re afraid of being left without warning. It has nothing to do with him. He had the bad luck to be standing on the road to the wall.”

“What wall?”

“The one you walked straight into four months ago. He hasn’t left. He’s just... at the place where it hurt.”

She closed her eyes. She felt something ease in her chest, slightly, like a stitch giving way.

“I don’t want to be that woman,” she murmured. “The one who watches her phone. Who counts the hours. Who wonders what she did wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I asked him for air, and he’s giving it to me. That’s the stupidest part.”

“It’s not stupid,” said Theo. “It’s accurate. What’s stupid is thinking you should react as if it hadn’t happened. You were left the day before your wedding, Pen. Your body registered it. Your body hasn’t read the app’s terms and conditions, it doesn’t know this is different. It only knows that when someone goes quiet, they’re in the process of leaving.”

“And what do I do?”

“You breathe. You drink a glass of water. You go back to bed. And tomorrow you do what you’ve always known how to do: you look at the facts, instead of the fear.”

“The facts.”

“He said he’d respect your air. He’s respecting it. There’s a fact.”

“There’s a fact,” she repeated.

“And you don’t have to decide tonight whether it’s a catastrophe.”

She didn’t answer. She stayed sitting on the floor, the phone against her ear, listening to the breathing of her best friend who, for twenty years, had always known when her voice dropped too low. She found nothing to say for a long while.

“Thank you,” she said at last.

“It’s the after-sales service,” said Theo. “I’m not here for you to thank me.”

“What are you here for?”

“To be here.”

She drank a glass of water, standing in front of the sink, in the dark, and went back to bed. She slept three hours, a heavy sleep without dreams. The next day, opening her eyes, she was surprised to feel no shame, but a sort of gratitude towards that small voice which, the night before, had told her to look at the facts.

She looked at the facts.

The message arrived at twelve minutes past eleven, on Sunday evening, at the precise moment when she was persuading herself that it would not come.

Angkor&Chill — 23:12
I respected the air. I’m starting to wonder whether I did too good a job.

LadyWhistledown — 23:12
You did very well.

Angkor&Chill — 23:13
So I’m allowed to come back and breathe in your direction?

LadyWhistledown — 23:14
You’re allowed.

Angkor&Chill — 23:14
Tomorrow night. I propose to make amends by cooking. I can cook.

LadyWhistledown — 23:15
You said “I can cook” with an aplomb that does not reassure me in the slightest.

Angkor&Chill — 23:15
A vegetable curry, recipe learned in the kitchen of a Rajasthani family who put me up for six weeks and never mentioned any contraindications.

LadyWhistledown — 23:16
I’m warning my insurers.

He arrived the next day at seven o’clock, laden with two paper bags from which sprigs of coriander stuck out, a small wooden spice mill which he held the way one holds a musical instrument, and the look of someone who hadn’t slept enough but didn’t care. She had thought there would be awkwardness. She had even prepared, during the afternoon, three opening lines designed to dispel it, none of which was needed: he looked at her, smiled, set his bags down on the worktop saying simply “evening,” and the tension she had been lugging around all day like a furled umbrella came undone at once, without ceremony, like a knot one had thought final and which was only waiting for a touch.

“I’m not asking you what happened on Friday morning,” he said, unpacking an aubergine with the solemnity of a surgeon. “I won’t question you about it. Clause 13: I don’t explain myself.”

“Clause 13 says it’s whoever says ‘no complications’ who has to explain.”

“Then I won’t say ‘no complications’ all evening, it’s the best way never to have to explain myself.”

“That’s bad faith.”

“It’s strategy. Give me a knife that cuts.”

She gave him one, with the apprehension one feels on entrusting a dangerous object to a self-assured stranger, and settled on a stool to watch him cook, which he had insisted on, on the pretext that he couldn’t concentrate while being watched and wouldn’t concentrate at all if he weren’t. He chopped fast and badly, with that mixture of virtuosity and disorder she was beginning to recognise as his trademark: onions in uneven pieces, a tomato crushed more than sliced, sweeping gestures that served no purpose and accompanied, like choreography, the story he was telling, that of an old woman in Rajasthan who had taught him to judge the freshness of cumin by ear.

“By ear?”

“You rub it between your fingers. It should crackle like fine sandpaper. When it doesn’t make that noise, it’s dead.”

“You’re making it up.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that to me and the second time I’ve been right.”

She understood, a little before it happened, that something was wrong. It was a smell, first — not strong, just too forthright, with a bitter edge that belonged to no spice —, and she saw, from the way he kept talking, his hands still busy on the other side of the worktop, that he hadn’t noticed that the pan he had put on the heat a few minutes earlier, while he was describing in detail the role of cumin in Indian civilisation, had for some time stopped making the noise of a pan that is cooking.

“Angkor.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a smell.”

“That’s the cumin.”

“It’s not the cumin.”

“It’s the cumin, it has a strong personality.”

“Angkor, there are flames.”

He turned round. She would never forget the expression on his face at that precise moment: a succession of three perfectly legible moods — incomprehension, lucidity, then the wounded dignity of someone who has just been proved wrong in front of a witness — while behind him an orange flame of an entirely respectable height was licking, with application, the underside of the cupboard.

“They’re very small,” he said.

“There’s no minimum size for a flame!”

“Technically, it’s no more than thirty centimetres.”

“THIRTY CENTIMETRES!”

He seized the tea towel with a promptness she wouldn’t have suspected in him, plunged it under the tap, threw it over the pan with a sweeping, matador’s gesture, and that was precisely the moment the smoke detector chose to go off, with a shrillness that seemed to make the glasses tremble in the cupboard.

The next two minutes were a chaos of a kind she had never had the opportunity to observe from the inside: him on a chair, flapping another tea towel under the detector as one fans a fainted child; her opening the windows one after the other, laughing so hard she had to lean on the frame to keep from falling; a neighbour across the way, on her balcony, a glass of wine in her hand, watching the scene with the placidity of a spectator accustomed to local performances.

“Everything’s fine!” he shouted to the neighbour, in a perfectly sincere tone. “It’s a very well-controlled fire!”

The neighbour raised her glass, elegantly, and went back inside.

The silence that followed was of an extraordinary quality. They found themselves sitting on the kitchen floor, backs against the cupboards, amid the open windows and the cold evening air, in front of a definitively sacrificed pan and a greyish cloud slowly dissipating towards the ceiling, and they looked at each other for three seconds before bursting out laughing at the same moment, a laugh that was no longer in the least polite, that came from the belly, that folded Penelope in two against the shoulder of the man sitting beside her without her thinking for a second of moving away.

“We said no complications,” she hiccuped, when she was able to speak.

“Clause 13,” he replied, his voice strangled with laughter. “I have to explain myself.”

“Then explain yourself.”

“A fire is a complication. But it’s under control, so it counts as half.”

“There’s a half-complication in your kitchen.”

“In your kitchen.”

“You set fire to my kitchen, you claim it.”

“I claim it,” he said, with a gravity that set her off again.

They ended up ordering takeaway, as she had planned all along without saying so — a yellow curry, naans, a lemon rice which they ate straight from the cardboard boxes, sitting on the floor, backs against the scorched cupboard, because neither of them had the strength to get up. She caught herself, between mouthfuls, thinking that she had just spent the most pleasant evening of the past months, far ahead of all the impeccable, silent, well-behaved dinners she had shared for six years with a man who hated things stepping outside their frame. She was surprised not to feel any awkwardness about it. She was more surprised to find that this thought, which should have pained her, brought only a sort of calm, like a muscle relaxing.

“You’re looking at me strangely,” he said.

“I’m looking at you the way one looks at someone who nearly burned down a building.”

“No, you’re looking at me like someone with something at the back of her mind.”

“I don’t have anything at the back of my mind.”

“Liar.”

She didn’t answer. She simply laid her head against his shoulder, for a moment, without thinking, and felt his arm shift to welcome her with a naturalness that shook her more than any declaration. They stayed like that, in the smell of burning and curry, until the windows, now useless, had let in enough cold that they had to be closed again.

On Tuesday, he brought a Scrabble set.

Colin had bought it from a junk dealer on Portobello Road the day before, for £2, because the seller had assured him with reassuring conviction that it was missing “hardly any letters”, which had proved, on opening the box, to be strictly and literally accurate: nine were missing, replaced by beer bottle tops on which someone had written, in a feverish hand, approximate letters in felt-tip. He showed the board to Lady W with the pride of someone presenting a work of art, and she contemplated it for several seconds without saying anything.

“Is that an X?” she asked, picking up a bottle top.

“It’s an X that has lived.”

“It looks like a K.”

“It has lived intensely.”

She agreed to play, with that mixture of wariness and curiosity he had seen in her faced with just about everything he suggested, and he understood, around the tenth minute, that he had made a considerable miscalculation: he had imagined a relaxed evening, founded on the pleasure of not winning. He discovered that his opponent played Scrabble the way others play chess, with total seriousness, a memory of the letters already drawn that bordered on the indecent, and a little movement of the tongue between the teeth when she was searching for a word, which he spent part of the evening watching rather than playing.

“You’re looking at me instead of thinking,” she remarked, without raising her eyes from her letters.

“I think while looking at you.”

“You’re losing, Angkor.”

“I’m losing with elegance.”

“You’re losing by eighty-seven points.”

It took him two turns, a sip of wine and a sidelong glance to conceive what he judged, with hindsight, to be the worst idea of his evening. He laid down, on a triple word square, with magnificent aplomb, the letters G, L, O, R, B, I, T.

“Glorbit,” he announced.

“Sorry?”

“Glorbit. A small mammal from the Amazon. I photographed one once. It has enormous ears.”

She put down her letters and looked at him at length, with the expression of an editor discovering a gross error on the last page of a chapter supposedly already proofread.

“That word doesn’t exist.”

“It does. It’s just very rare.”

“Spell it.”

“G-L-O-R-B-I-T.”

“You have a dictionary open on your phone, under the table.”

“That’s a defamatory lie.”

“You turned it off too late, I saw the light on your knee.”

“That light was a reflection from the lamp.”

“Angkor.”

“All right,” he said, setting the phone down on the table with the dignity of an accused man abandoning his defence. “I wanted to check whether it was a real word. I’m very convinced it’s a real word. The dictionary is wrong.”

“The dictionary is never wrong. I know, it’s my job.”

“Then your job is very badly done.”

She laughed, her head thrown back, and he understood at that precise moment that he would gladly have lost every board game in the world to hear that laugh one more time. The game ended in a crushing victory for his opponent, snatched on a nine-letter word she laid down with a small restrained smile and whose definition she categorically refused to explain, which irritated him beyond reason. He asked for a rematch. She pretended to think about it. She accepted.

He only realised on the way home, at one in the morning, on foot, through the empty streets of a Tuesday, that he had spent four hours playing at something he cared nothing whatever about, without once consulting his watch, and that this detail, more than any other, ought to have frightened him. He told himself so, in fact. He told himself clearly, twice, turning the corner of his street. Then he smiled, unable to help it, thinking of the beer bottle top doing duty as an X, and of the way she had picked it up between two fingers, with a perfectly cultivated suspicion.

He took out his phone at the corner of his street to check the time and found three messages he hadn’t seen, arrived between ten o’clock and midnight.

Anthony — 22:14
Sunday, are you coming?

Anthony — 22:51
Mum is asking whether you’ll be at Daphne’s fitting.

Anthony — 23:48
Are you still in London?

He reread them in the yellow light of a streetlamp. There was nothing discourteous in those three lines, nothing he could have complained about, and yet he felt them weigh on his chest the way one feels, through a coat, an object too heavy in a pocket. Are you still in London. Anthony was checking. He always checked, with the patience of an accountant expecting a discrepancy in the till. Colin switched off the screen. He told himself he would reply tomorrow. He also told himself, without knowing why, that it was strange to find so painful a message whose only cruelty was to be worried.

She found the toothbrush on Wednesday morning, at ten past seven, groping for the bathroom tumbler.

It was a tiny object, of a perfectly ordinary blue, planted in the glass beside hers, head in the air, its new bristles never having known water. She looked at it for a considerable time. Her mouth was still full of sleep, her hair a mess, her face creased by the pillow, and she understood, in that white bathroom light, that something had just been deposited in her home without her having been warned. On the edge of the basin there was a small note folded in two. She unfolded it with the tips of her fingers, the way one opens a document likely to contain a summons.

Clause 5: no mixing of lives. This toothbrush is not a life, it is an instrument. I am leaving it on deposit, without commitment. If it bothers you, throw it away. I won’t notice. (I’ll notice.) — A.

She didn’t move. She felt her chest tighten, in a way she couldn’t classify: neither quite pleasure, nor quite fear, something that was a bit of both, like those April days when one can’t tell whether it’s going to rain or turn fine.

She remembered, without having looked for it, the day Alfred had moved in. There had been a box, carefully labelled, bathroom, and in that box a stainless-steel tumbler he had bought himself, three weeks earlier, “so as not to clutter yours”, and an electric toothbrush with its charger, which he had placed, both of them, to the right of the mirror, exactly twenty centimetres from Penelope’s things, aligning the handles with a surveyor’s precision. She had found that very serious. She had found it reassuring. It had taken her three months to understand that it was the first time anyone had presented a space to her as a border.

She looked at the little blue brush. It had neither charger, nor reserved tumbler, nor label. It had been put there, slightly askew, against hers, like a child huddling against another in a bed too narrow.

She picked up her phone. She typed, standing in front of the basin, with a slightly trembling thumb:

LadyWhistledown — 07:14
I’ve found a suspicious object in my bathroom.

Angkor&Chill — 07:14
You’re awake.

LadyWhistledown — 07:15
I’m querying the jurisdiction.

Angkor&Chill — 07:15
I plead forgetfulness.

LadyWhistledown — 07:15
The note says “on deposit, without commitment”. That sounds like a forgetting drafted in advance.

Angkor&Chill — 07:16
It’s a very structured forgetting.

LadyWhistledown — 07:16
Clause 5.

Angkor&Chill — 07:16
I cited it. I respected it. I simply gave myself the right to think about it.

LadyWhistledown — 07:17
You didn’t think, you bought a toothbrush on a Tuesday at eleven at night.

Angkor&Chill — 07:17
It was on offer.

She burst out laughing in her empty bathroom. She leaned her forehead against the mirror, for a moment, a hand over her mouth, with that senseless lightness that came over her when she hadn’t yet decided what she was going to do with her emotions.

LadyWhistledown — 07:19
I’m not throwing it away.

Angkor&Chill — 07:19
You don’t have to tell me.

LadyWhistledown — 07:19
I’m telling you anyway.

Angkor&Chill — 07:20
I’m very moved by a toothbrush. I’m in the street, outside a bakery, gazing at a baguette with the tenderness of a saint.

She didn’t reply. She brushed her teeth, with her own, in front of the mirror, looking at the little blue one in the glass, and she couldn’t help thinking, for an instant, that the idea of having an instrument on deposit at someone’s place could, at a pinch, pass for proof of trust. She also thought that she had just been frightened, twice in ten minutes, and that it resembled neither of the two fears she knew: that of a man who leaves, and that of a man who stays.

She looked for the name of the third. She couldn’t find it.

She had gone back to work full time several weeks ago already, and Mrs Danforth’s manuscript — that historical romance full of duels and misunderstandings which she had once adored with a slightly embarrassing enthusiasm — had begun its second reading, more painstaking, the one where you stop looking for the flaw and take an interest in what the text really has to say.

She paused for a long while, on Wednesday morning, over a passage in the second act where the heroine, a young widow freshly freed from an unhappy marriage, fell head over heels in love with a stranger met at a masked ball, in the space of barely three chapters. Penelope reread the passage twice, red pen in hand, before writing in the margin, in that cramped handwriting she reserved for her most honest comments: The pace is too fast here. She falls in love to flee her own trauma, not because she has actually met someone. Needs to slow down — otherwise the reader will never believe she made a real choice rather than a flight disguised as a love story.

She stayed a long moment with the pen suspended above the page, rereading her own annotation with a strange, almost vertiginous sensation, before closing the manuscript with a slightly too abrupt gesture and getting up to make herself a coffee she didn’t, in fact, particularly want. She told no one — not even Theo, who would have drawn the connection at once with undisguised pleasure. She merely wondered, stirring her coffee, whether she was making a real choice or had simply found a more agreeable way of fleeing.

Charlotte came into the reading room at eleven with a file which she set down on the desk without ceremony, with the gesture of someone apologising in advance.

“Tobias Finch,” she said. “First novel. A young woman returns to the town of her childhood on her mother’s death. It’s lovely, it’s precise, it’s even very good up to page two hundred and thirty, and then it collapses. I don’t know why. Agatha doesn’t know why. We need it by Friday.”

“Friday.”

“I know.”

“That’s in two days.”

“I know, Penelope. I wouldn’t have asked you if it hadn’t been you.”

She read the entire novel in the afternoon, with that relentless concentration she had rediscovered, and she didn’t understand. It was a good novel. There was a voice, an atmosphere, a way of describing the light of a provincial town that would have moved her in other circumstances. And at page two hundred and thirty, something broke without her managing to locate the crack: the heroine made a decision nothing justified, and the book suddenly ceased to belong to her.

She reread the last third three times. By six o’clock she had been staring at the same page for forty minutes, pen motionless, in that state of soft, paralysed panic she hadn’t known since the month of the collapse, and it was, in a way, that déjà vu that made her write.

LadyWhistledown — 18:12
horrible day. I’m not good company tonight, I think.

Angkor&Chill — 18:13
What kind of horrible?

LadyWhistledown — 18:13
the professional kind. clause 10, I can’t go into detail.

Angkor&Chill — 18:14
I’m not asking you to go into detail. I’m asking if I should bring Thai.

LadyWhistledown — 18:14
I’ve just told you I’m not good company.

Angkor&Chill — 18:15
I heard. I’m coming anyway. I’m getting green curry, very spicy, because I suspect you need it.

She didn’t reply. She stayed with the phone in her hand, in the deserted office, with the distinct certainty that a weight had just been lifted from her whose importance she hadn’t measured, and she felt, to her great surprise, her eyes mist slightly, not with sadness, but with that slightly embarrassing gratitude she still didn’t know how to handle. She switched off the computer at seven and went home ahead of her own rhythm.

He arrived at eight with two bags of food and said nothing about her bad mood, which was exactly the right way of not discussing it. He settled on the sofa, unpacked the boxes, handed her a fork, and it was she who, between mouthfuls, without having decided to, began to tell — not the name of the book, not that of the author, nothing that might infringe the clause they had laid down together, simply the story of a woman who returns to the town of her childhood, of a book that stands up very well up to a certain point and which, past that point, starts to limp for no reason.

“What does she do at the end?” he asked, his mouth full, with the air of a man listening to a story by the fireside.

“She leaves with the man she left at the beginning. The one who’d dropped her.”

“Does she still love him?”

“That’s what the book says.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know why I don’t believe it.”

“Why does she go back to him, if at page two hundred she’s understood everything?”

She looked at him. He was eating his rice with perfectly innocent application, with not the slightest idea of what he had just said, and she felt something turn over, like a key turning in a lock and suddenly finding its notch.

“Say that again,” she said.

“Why does she go back, if she’s understood everything?”

“She hasn’t understood everything,” she murmured, already elsewhere. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. The author makes her understand at page two hundred — he makes her leave, he makes her let go of everything, he gives her that moment where she stands in her mother’s kitchen and she knows. And then he gets frightened. He’s afraid of leaving her alone. He sends her back to the other one because he doesn’t dare end the book with a woman who needs no one.”

She put down her box. She took the laptop, opened the file, typed three lines in one go, then five, then ten, completely forgetting the man sitting beside her, who said not a word, who made not a sound, who simply went on eating his curry with the discretion of an extra, and when she finally looked up, forty minutes later, her fingers numb, her heart pounding, she saw that he had watched her the whole time, without a shadow of impatience.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’ve found it.”

“So I gathered.”

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You asked a stupid question.”

“I asked a stupid question,” he confirmed, with perfectly satisfied modesty. “It’s my speciality.”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“Then it was a question of genius.”

“It wasn’t a genius one either. It was... the right question at the right moment.”

“That’s exactly what I meant,” he replied, and she burst out laughing, and he leaned in and kissed her, very gently, at the corner of her mouth, as if to close the exchange.

What she retained of that evening, long after he had gone, was not that he had helped her. He hadn’t helped her. He had known nothing of her trade, or of the book, or of the structure of a narrative, or of anything at all. It was that he had asked his question with a curiosity that had nothing at stake, that he had listened to her answer the way one listens to a piece of music, and that he had let her find, alone, what she had had in her from the start. She had not been rescued. She had been accompanied. She found the distinction very fine, and she understood, falling asleep, that she cared about it enormously.

There were people, Colin thought, who stopped in the street to watch a woman run for a bus. He had been one of them all his life, and he had learned not to apologise for the habit, which had earned him more or less his entire career. He had never felt any embarrassment at observing. What he did feel, this Thursday at midday, sitting on a bench in Russell Square with two sandwiches on his lap, was a quite specific embarrassment at watching someone approach whom he already knew he would look at for too long.

She had told him: I’m not telling you where I work, Clause 10, but I have thirty-eight minutes and I know where we can eat. He had understood at once that she had not chosen it at random, this bench, this square, this hour, and that she had in some sense built a space halfway between her office and him, close enough for her to walk to, far enough that he couldn’t guess where from. He had been both amused and touched. It wasn’t mistrust. It was a form of care, a peculiar one, of a person who took the rule seriously because she took everything else seriously too.

He saw her coming from a long way off, down the central path, with that quick, slightly forward-leaning stride he would have recognised among a thousand and had already learned by heart, without ever having set out to: a dark coat, a scarf knotted crookedly, a lock of hair escaping from a hurried bun. She was holding a folder she hadn’t thought to leave at the office, and she was looking at her feet, faintly, as if counting the paving stones, until she looked up, saw him, and something in her face rearranged itself all at once — a smile that began before she had noticed it herself.

He took the photograph. He hadn’t planned to. He had done it without thinking, with the discretion of a gesture learned over ten years, the camera held low, the click muffled by his coat, and he regretted it at once, because the image now existed and he didn’t know which folder to file it in.

“You look like you’ve done something illegal,” she said, sitting down beside him.

“I’ve done something perfectly legal. I bought sandwiches.”

“You look guilty.”

“I was born with this face. It has no bearing on my actions.”

She was laughing already, unwrapping the paper, and he noticed, watching her, a smudge of blue ink on the tip of her right index finger, which was anything but accidental: an old mark, ingrained, of the kind left by people who write a great deal and never learned to hold a pen properly. He could have asked her about it. He held back. He was beginning to understand that restraint, with her, produced markedly better results than curiosity.

They ate watching people go by. It was one of their games now, barely a game, more a shared way of killing time that wasn’t really time to kill: she would watch someone crossing the square and tell him their life story, with relentless precision and a slightly cruel tenderness — that one’s late for an interview, he lied on his CV, he has a twin brother he can’t stand. He would watch the same person and see only the light on their coat, the posture, the way their shoulders spoke of tiredness. She invented stories. He framed silhouettes. They should have been, he understood, formidable adversaries. They complemented each other with an ease that should have worried him more than it did.

“You’re checking the time,” she said, after a while.

“I’m not checking the time.”

“You’ve looked at your watch three times.”

“I’m making sure it works.”

“It works.”

“I’m reassured.”

He was lying to himself, and he knew it. He was counting. He was counting, with a regularity that had escaped him until now, the lunches that remained to them, the evenings, the days he would still spend in London before his sister’s wedding, before he left again, and the calculation struck him as so absurd, so out of keeping with the way he had always inhabited time, that he hurried to forget it, by offering to go and fetch two coffees.

“No sugar,” she said.

“I know.”

He walked off towards the kiosk wondering since when he had known that.

When he came back, she had already put her folder away in her bag, her eyes fixed on the railings of the square, with the expression of people who are about to leave and don’t want to, and they stayed a few more minutes drinking their coffee in silence, neither of them suggesting fixing the next time.

“Thirty-eight minutes,” she said, standing up. “I’m never late.”

“You’ll be on time.”

“I’ll be on time.”

She brushed his cheek, very briefly, awkwardly, the gesture of a person unused to letting herself go in public, then strode away, her scarf still crooked, and he stayed there on the bench, with an empty cup and a camera in which slept a shot he would show to no one, watching a woman whose name he didn’t know disappear into the crowd of an ordinary Thursday and wondering how long a thirty-eight-minute journey had been leaving him in such a state.

On Thursday evening, he suggested an exhibition.

Angkor&Chill — 20:41
An idea for saturday. there’s an exhibition that’s just opened in Bloomsbury. Flemish painting, portraits, seventeenth-century stuff. I read an article on the plane, it looked good.

Penelope stayed a long moment with the phone in her hand, unable to reply straight away, for a reason that had nothing to do with her usual flutter of nerves. It wasn’t the same exhibition — the one she had seen alone, a few weeks earlier, had ended since, and this one seemed to be a different touring show, come from another European museum. But the coincidence, the second within a matter of weeks, struck her as unsettling enough that she had to close her eyes for a moment before answering.

LadyWhistledown — 20:44
Works for me. Very well, actually.

She didn’t explain why, and he didn’t ask. She had noticed this about him over the past few days, this way of letting silences pass without ever filling them, the way one leaves a door ajar without pushing it.

They met outside the gallery on Saturday afternoon, under a uniformly grey sky that threatened rain without ever quite making up its mind, and she felt, crossing the threshold at his side, something profoundly different from the quiet solitude she had known the first time. It wasn’t worse. It was something else: a shared experience rather than a solitary reconquest, and she realised, watching him stop for a long while in front of a portrait of a woman with a slightly averted gaze, that she didn’t need to choose between the two.

“Do you always look at paintings for this long?” she asked, joining him in the third room, where he had been rooted for several long minutes in front of a Flemish market scene teeming with detail.

“Occupational hazard. I’m always looking for the point where the eye is supposed to land first. That one,” he said, pointing to a minuscule detail in a corner of the painting — a woman, barely visible, laughing alone at a window — “that’s where I look first. Not the centre. The small detail nobody bothered to put in the spotlight.”

She looked at him for a moment, with an intensity she made no effort to hide, feeling something tighten gently in her chest, not sadness, but something adjacent to it, an emotion she couldn’t yet name.

“Alfred hated exhibitions,” she said, without really having meant to say it, the words coming out of their own accord before she had time to hold them back.

She didn’t know why she had just spoken that name in front of him. They had never talked about it, except in passing, one evening, under the neutral formula “my ex”. She felt her throat tighten.

“A year ago, there was a Flemish retrospective, a different one from this, and I wanted so badly to go. He said it tired him. That I should go with a friend. I never went. Not alone, not with anyone.”

He didn’t say anything immediately. He didn’t try to play it down, didn’t explain to her that Alfred had been wrong, didn’t turn the moment into a speech about what she deserved. He simply slipped his hand into hers, gently, and stayed silent, his gaze still on the painting, leaving her all the space she needed to go on or to stop there.

“I did go back, actually,” she added, more softly. “To another exhibition, a few weeks ago. On my own. And it was good. But this,” she said, indicating the room around them with a vague gesture, “this is different too.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know yet. Better, maybe. Or just different.”

He said nothing, but she felt his hand tighten slightly around hers, and she knew, without his needing to put it into words, that he had understood — not the whole story, not yet, but enough not to spoil the moment by trying to fill it with words.

She only understood, on the way out, under a fine rain that had finally made up its mind, what had just happened. He hadn’t brought her there to repair anything. He knew nothing about the retrospective she had missed, about the voice that had told her it tired him, about the way she had learned not to insist. He had simply wanted to go, and he had thought of her, and he had suggested it without any ulterior motive, the way one suggests something simple to someone one rather likes. And that simplicity, whose significance he had no idea of, had given her, without his knowing, what she had been denied for years.

She didn’t tell him. She slid her arm under his to share the umbrella, and they walked to the Tube without speaking, the rain drumming on the canvas, in a complicity so perfect it almost frightened her.

The night market occupied a whole row of brick arches, beneath a railway line whose trains passed every seven minutes with a dull rumble that made the cardboard cups tremble, and Colin arrived there with her on Saturday evening, still damp from the afternoon’s rain, in that mild state of euphoria that places where people eat standing up always left him in. He had chosen the spot with care. There were plumes of smoke rising in columns beneath the yellow lamps, stallholders shouting their prices in six different languages, people clustered in front of cast-iron griddles where marinated meats sizzled, and everywhere that magnificent, perfectly organised disorder which gave crowds a light no studio could ever reproduce.

“I don’t eat spicy food,” she announced, stopping at the entrance, with the firmness of someone reciting a constitution.

“Everyone eats spicy food.”

“I don’t. It’s a philosophical position.”

“It’s not a philosophical position. It’s a phobia.”

“It’s a philosophical position that went wrong at the age of ten, after an incident with a harissa sauce that I never speak about.”

He laughed, and naturally he bought her a dish of ghost-chilli noodles, on the grounds that “the best way to get past a phobia is to smile it in the face”, and he spent the next two minutes watching her, with an attention he hadn’t planned, take a first mouthful with the wariness of a bomb disposal expert, pause, turn very red, swallow, lift towards him eyes that were visibly watering, and say in a strangled voice:

“I hate you.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s appalling,” she said, taking another mouthful with the tragic dignity of a woman who does not abandon her principles halfway through. “It’s wonderful. I’m going to die.”

“Do you want some water?”

“I want never to have met you.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

She drank a litre of water in four minutes. He watched the steam rising from the dish, the yellow light sliding over her flushed cheeks, the way she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in perfect indignation, and he didn’t even think of lifting the camera. He already knew that this moment couldn’t be photographed. There were things he knew how to capture and others, more and more numerous lately, that he preferred to keep whole, unframed, without proper light, without title or destination, as if the image he might have drawn from them were, by definition, less true than the memory he would keep.

They ate standing up, between two stalls, pressed against each other by the crowd, watching people go by. She had resumed the game he now knew, the one where she watched someone cross the space and invented a complete life for them in three sentences — she’s just quit her job and doesn’t dare tell her mother; he lied about his age on a date and has forgotten about it —, but she did it that evening with less relentlessness, more absently, with the slow gentleness of people who have eaten too much chilli and have no energy left for spite. He let himself be lulled. He was beginning to get used to the idea that evenings could be this simple.

“You write,” he said.

He hadn’t planned to say it. He had been thinking it all day, since the moment, in front of the woman with the averted gaze in the Flemish painting, when she had spoken of what she wanted with a sudden precision that had gone right through him.

“I’m an editor,” she answered, carefully. “I read.”

“Your bio says ‘writer’.”

“My bio was written by my entourage. They have very fixed ideas.”

“So you don’t write.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She took a sip of water, a long one, with the application of someone choosing her words, and he noticed that she had slipped a lock of hair behind her left ear, a gesture he had already seen three times and was beginning to file in that discreet collection, in that invisible folder he kept without having officially opened it: what she does when she isn’t telling everything.

“I used to write,” she said at last. “Before. A lot. In the evenings, after work, for years. Short stories, mostly. I never showed anything to anyone. And then I stopped.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t decide to stop. It’s just that... at some point, there was no room left. For that. For the sentences that go a little too far. I started writing more sensibly, and then not at all.”

“I don’t understand what it means, writing more sensibly.”

“There’s nothing to understand. It’s when you correct your sentences before you’ve written them.”

He fell silent. A train passed overhead, in a long rumble, and for a few seconds the whole market vibrated, the cups trembled on the tables, a woman shouted something at a stallholder, and he saw cross his neighbour’s face an expression he had never seen: a sort of old, almost modest embarrassment, that of someone showing a thing she has kept too long in a box.

“Tell me a sentence,” he said.

“What?”

“A sentence of yours. Just one. Any one.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Liar.”

She opened her mouth to protest, and he saw her give it up, and begin really searching, her eyes slightly raised, the lock still behind her ear.

“‘The day Marguerite stopped lying, no one noticed, except the cat,’” she said, in an almost low voice.

He was unable to answer for a few seconds. It wasn’t the most beautiful sentence in the world. It was a simple sentence, ironic, a little cruel, of an almost too obvious construction, and yet it said something he would have liked to be able to say himself for years: that the only witness to a real change is sometimes the animal that was never fooled.

“Is it the first sentence of a story?”

“It’s the first sentence of a story I wrote when I was twenty-three.”

“And the rest?”

“I don’t remember it any more.”

“Liar,” he said, gently.

She smiled. She didn’t deny it.

“I want to read it,” he said.

“Not yet.”

“All right.”

“You’re not going to insist?”

“I might insist in two weeks,” he said. “For now, I’m making a note of the date.”

He only understood, watching her laugh, walking towards the market exit between the smoke and the stalls gradually folding away into the night, the exact nature of what he had just felt. It wasn’t desire. Or not only. He had felt desire before, for women he liked and whose sequel he had no wish to know. This was something else, something more awkward and more precise: the plain wish to know how a story ended when he had read only its first sentence. And that wish, he understood with sudden clarity, presupposed a tomorrow. It presupposed that he would be there to read. He would have left by then. He tried to tell himself so, calmly, on the wet pavement, with a certain firmness. It didn’t have the usual effect.

She woke before him, on Sunday morning, in the soft grey light of a morning with no plans, and lay motionless for a long while, not daring to move for fear of breaking something. He was asleep on his front, one arm thrown across her waist, his face buried in the pillow, with that slow, slightly noisy breathing of people who have never learned to sleep discreetly, and she watched him with the attention she normally reserved for sentences whose flaw she was hunting.

She found nothing. It was a strange sensation, almost vexing: that of having nothing to correct.

Above his right eyebrow there was a scar she had never noticed, thin and old, a white barely paler than the skin. She raised her hand, without asking herself whether she had the right, and traced it with the tip of a finger, lightly.

“I know you’re awake,” she said.

“Absolutely not. I’m fast asleep.”

“You just answered me.”

“It’s a rare talent. I can talk in my sleep. Some people see it as a handicap; I see an under-exploited skill.”

She laughed, and he opened one eye, then the other, with that little air of a boy caught red-handed that took ten years off him.

“What’s this?” she asked, brushing the scar again.

“That,” he said, with a pride wholly out of proportion to what looked like a childhood scratch, “is the irrefutable proof that I fell out of a tree at eight while trying to impress my older brother.”

“Did it work?”

“Not at all. He was completely terrified, then hysterical, then he told me I looked like a vegetable that had fallen off a lorry. I spent the following three weeks wanting to kill him.”

“A classic brother.”

“In our family, every story ends either in fits of laughter or in a scar. Sometimes both at once, which is generally the best version.”

She let her hand rest against his cheek for a moment, with that mixture of lightness and gravity she couldn’t manage to analyse. She didn’t say that she had always envied families who knew how to tell the stories of their scars. She told him instead, with an air of great dignity, how she had once convinced her little sister, at six, that a monster lived under their shared bed and fed exclusively on uneaten broccoli.

“You didn’t do that.”

“I did.”

“To a six-year-old.”

“She hated broccoli. I acted for the good of the family.”

“And?”

“She became, overnight, the biggest consumer of broccoli in the neighbourhood. She ate it till she felt sick, for fear the monster would come out. My mother nearly called a doctor. Even now, she can’t see a piece of broccoli without an expression of sacred dread.”

He was laughing, his head sunk in the pillow, his shoulders shaking, with that laugh that always set off slightly crooked, and she felt something relax inside her like a thread that had been stretched too tight for weeks and was suddenly let go.

They stayed like that for nearly two hours, without getting up, without even seriously considering it, trading childhood anecdotes that grew more and more absurd, while avoiding — it was a rule they had never stated but both observed — names, places, anything that might have turned these stories into clues. She told him about her mother, her sisters, the house of her childhood where there was always noise; he told her about his enormous, noisy family, about Sunday dinners that he described with that slightly exasperated tenderness reserved for things one never entirely tires of. She asked no questions. She was learning, with him, not to ask them.

It was nevertheless she who, in passing, told him what she had never told anyone outside the strict circle of those who already knew: that her best friend and her best male friend had spent four years conducting together a relationship whose name they stubbornly refused to utter, made of disappearances, reunions, quarrels without cause and nights they swore afterwards had never happened, before ending it one day, by mutual consent, with a sobriety so perfect that she had almost been offended by it.

“They’ve never told anyone,” she added. “Not even his family, which is enormous and very nosy. They think no one knows. We all know.”

“And they’re still friends?”

“They’ve been trading barbs for four years every time they’re in the same room. It’s their way of loving each other.”

He laughed, his head sunk in the pillow, and told her in exchange, with the same gravity, that his twenty-year-old little sister knew every dating app in London and claimed to use them only “for sociological research”, which his family had decided, by common consent, never to look into.

His phone buzzed on the bedside table. She turned her head and saw displayed, on the upturned screen, two letters, Ma, and the rest hidden by a glare.

“My mother,” he said, without moving.

“Answer it.”

“It’s Sunday. She wants to know if I’m coming to dinner. She knows I’m coming to dinner. She rings so that I’ll say I’m coming to dinner.”

“Answer it. Mothers always ring for a reason.”

“The reason is that she’s bored.”

“Answer it, Angkor.”

He rolled onto his side, grabbed the phone with a theatrical sigh, and went out into the corridor, bare to the waist, the phone pressed to his ear, with the shuffling little step of a man obeying without conviction. She heard him, through the half-open door, his voice grown softer, more patient, with an inflection she didn’t know in him: Yes, Mum. Yes. I know. No, I haven’t forgotten. I’m coming, I’m coming. No, no flowers, you know that... All right. I’ll bring wine. She lowered her eyelids. She didn’t know why that voice, that gentleness, tightened her throat.

He came back, put the phone down on the bedside table, slid under the duvet.

“I have to bring wine,” he said, in a tone of grave resignation.

“Will you go?”

“I’ll go.”

“Tonight?”

“In eight hours, yes.”

“Then we have eight hours,” she said.

“We have eight hours,” he confirmed, drawing her against him.

She laughed, and closed her eyes, and thought, quite clearly, in the few seconds before the kiss, that she had just said we without having needed to ask herself whether she had the right.

On Sunday afternoon, he took her to a launderette.

She had thought at first that it was a joke. He had turned up at her place at two o’clock, a large canvas bag over his shoulder, a tie that was too short around his neck by way of a headband, with the air of a man on a mission, and had announced that they had “laundry to do”. She had replied that she had a machine. He had said that home machines were an invention of people who had never talked to anyone, and that a city’s real conversations took place in launderettes. She had asked who said so. He had answered: “Me, six years ago, in Oaxaca, in a launderette where I spent four hours listening to a man explain his divorce to me.”

She had picked up her laundry bag. She had followed him.

The launderette in Camden occupied a former record shop, on the corner of a brick street, with a blue neon sign and a row of twenty white machines lined up along two walls. There was a wooden bench, a folding table, an old coffee machine that didn’t give change, a smell of hot detergent, of steam, of clean fabric. At that slack hour there was no one there, except an elderly lady in a purple wool coat, sitting on the bench in front of a turning porthole, knitting on her lap, who watched them come in with the imperial slowness of someone who had held her post for several decades.

“Afternoon, madam,” he said.

“Afternoon,” said the lady.

“Can we use number twelve?”

“It makes a noise but it washes.”

“Perfect. We like machines with character.”

“So I see,” said the lady, looking at them both with a lopsided smile.

Penelope felt her cheeks grow warm. She didn’t know why. There was nothing in that sentence to justify the slightest embarrassment, except the extreme plausibility of the picture they presented: a man and a woman, with two bags of laundry, on a Sunday afternoon, in a launderette. She discovered, with an astonishment tinged with panic, that she wanted it. Not the laundry. The picture. She wanted, for ten seconds, to be what that lady saw.

He found everything very amusing. He found it amusing that she sorted her clothes into two piles, lights and darks, with the rigour of an archivist. He found it amusing that he himself had a single pile, made up of seven shirts, which he stuffed into the machine with a sweeping gesture, saying “that’ll do”. He found it amusing that she was horrified. She pulled a pale blue shirt out of the machine, held it between two fingers at arm’s length, and looked at it with the incredulity of a scientist discovering mould.

“It’s gone grey.”

“It was already a bit grey.”

“It was white.”

“It was on its way to greyness,” he said, with dignity. “All I did was speed up a natural process.”

“You put navy and white together.”

“I’m colour-blind to white.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“It’s a rare syndrome,” he said. “I’m having it patented.”

The lady, on her bench, made a small muffled noise that sounded like a laugh. Penelope turned to her, indignant.

“You think that’s funny?”

“I think it’s very nice,” said the lady, without raising her eyes from her knitting. “My husband did the same. Forty-two years. He mixed everything up. In the end I washed things separately and let him believe it was him.”

“Is that advice?”

“It’s a method,” said the lady. “Are you married?”

There was a silence, brief, very distinct. Penelope opened her mouth. She looked at him. He had stopped smiling. He didn’t seem embarrassed, or even surprised: he looked like someone being asked a question whose answer he had never considered, and who discovers it as he pronounces it.

“Not yet,” he said.

She thought she had misheard. She turned to him, slowly, both hands clenched on the grey shirt.

“Sorry?”

“I mean: no,” he said, very fast, a little red. “I mean: we’re friends. Friends who do laundry. It isn’t always done, but it’s possible.”

“Friends,” said the lady, with a gentleness that admitted no reply. “That’s always nice.”

She went back to her knitting. Penelope folded the shirt in four, with slightly stiff movements, and laid it on the table, straight, like an official document. She felt her heart beating in her ears. She told herself it was a phrase that had slipped out, a polite reflex, a failed joke, that it wasn’t what she had heard. She told herself all this with the diligence of a corpse.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said, very low, leaning towards her.

“You said ‘not yet’.”

“It just came out.”

“Things rarely come out of nowhere.”

“I know,” he said, sincerely at a loss. “I don’t understand. I meant to say something funny. It was the first thing that came to me.”

“It’s very revealing, the first thing that comes to you.”

“Don’t take it badly.”

“I’m not taking it badly. I’m taking it... under advisement.”

She folded a pillowcase. He took the other end. Without conferring, they performed that ancient gesture of two people folding a sheet: each stepping back a pace, pulling, coming closer, joining the corners, taking hold again, starting over. He had begun talking to her about something else, about a launderette in Lima where the women sang as they folded, about a boy in Hanoi who had taught him to fold a shirt in six seconds. She listened to him, her eyes on the white fabric folding itself between their hands. After a while she realised she was smiling. She realised too that she had stopped wondering what he had meant. She had preferred, quite simply, to fold the sheet.

He took a camera out of his bag when she was getting the laundry out of the dryer. She didn’t hear him coming. She was crouching in front of the porthole, her hand stretched towards a sock that had stuck against the drum, her face lit by the round, warm light of the dryer, when she heard the click.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You photographed me.”

“I was documenting launderette life.”

“I’m on all fours in front of a tumble dryer.”

“That’s the charm of it,” he said. “The porthole light on your face. It’s perfect. Warm, round, with a reflection in the left eye. I can’t refuse myself that.”

“You’re not publishing it.”

“I never publish it.”

“You say that every time.”

“I mean it every time,” he said, putting the camera away. “Some pictures you take in order to lose them.”

“To lose them?”

“To know what they look like before they exist anywhere other than in the eyes,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it. I keep them in my head with a precision I wouldn’t get any other way.”

She didn’t answer. She pulled the sock out of the drum, a pearl-grey sock with a little hole in the heel, and brandished it like a trophy.

“It’s yours,” she said.

“It’s yours.”

“It’s a man’s sock.”

“It’s your sock. You nicked it from me last Sunday.”

“I didn’t nick anything from you.”

“You wore it all night,” he said. “Remember? Your feet were cold. You said: ‘give it to me, I’ll give it back tomorrow’. That was seven days ago.”

“I’d forgotten it.”

“It was in your drawer.”

“You opened my drawer?”

“I saw it,” he said. “While I was looking for a screwdriver.”

“What for?”

“To fix your tap,” he said, without a shadow of embarrassment. “It’s been dripping for three weeks. It keeps me awake.”

She looked at him. She looked at his shoulders, bent slightly under the bag, his crooked smile, the sock he was holding out to her like evidence. She wanted to say something very simple to him, couldn’t find it, and took the sock. She slipped it into her pocket.

“Thank you,” she said.

“What for?”

“For the tap.”

“That doesn’t count. I haven’t fixed it yet.”

“It counts,” she said. “You tried.”

The lady, on her bench, looked up from her knitting. She looked at them for a long time, one and then the other, with an expression that mingled tenderness and suspicion.

“You’re very good friends,” she said.

“Thank you, madam,” he said.

“Mind the navy.”

They left the launderette around six, laden with clean bags, warm, smelling of detergent and dry linen. She carried hers on her shoulder. He carried the other two. They walked along the street, in the orange light of the evening, without speaking, with the happy tiredness of people who have accomplished a useful task, and at one point she felt her hand in his without having decided to give it to him. She didn’t take it back.

She didn’t try to find out why, that evening, watching their two shadows lengthen on the pavement, she had thought: that is exactly what that lady saw.

The second-hand bookshop was tucked away at the end of a narrow passage near Charing Cross, between an antique map shop and a record dealer, and they went in on Monday afternoon to escape a downpour that Colin had seen coming and hadn’t bothered to mention, because he had good reason to think it would hold up better under cover.

It was one of those places he had known in some twenty cities, where books rose in piles to the ceiling, where the smell of old paper mingled with that of dust and of a kettle heating somewhere behind a counter, where an old man in a woollen waistcoat, a grey cat occupying his knee, barely raised his eyes from his newspaper to grumble a “good afternoon” that Colin immediately identified as a particularly accomplished form of British tenderness.

He watched her disappear between the shelves with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. She moved through the bookshop as through familiar territory, without hesitating, without getting lost, running her hand along the spines with that absent caress one reserves for animals one knows, stopping now before a cover that made her grimace, now before another that made her smile, pulling out a volume, opening it at the first page, reading three lines under her breath, putting it back with a silent or sometimes audible verdict.

“This one,” she said, handing him a novel with a garish cover, “‘a whirlwind of passion, betrayal and secrets’. First paragraph: ‘It was raining that night, as it always rains when destinies are fulfilled.’”

“For or against?”

“Against. Firmly. You don’t write ‘as it always rains when’ without having something to hide.”

“And that one?”

“That one’s a masterpiece,” she said, picking up a small volume with a worn cover. “I’ve read it four times. It begins: ‘We never knew why the postman had stopped coming.’”

“Is it good?”

“It’s the most beautiful opening line I know, because it doesn’t say what it promises. It promises a mystery, and it offers you something else, something calmer, sadder. It takes courage to begin like that.”

He listened to her, leaning against a shelf, a book he wasn’t reading in his hands, and realised he wasn’t looking at the sentences she was reading but at the way she read them: that way of lowering her voice slightly on the last syllables, of narrowing her eyes as if words had a smell she was trying to identify, of straightening up suddenly when a phrase pleased her. There was no pose in her at all. He understood that he could have stayed there for hours, doing nothing else, and not been bored.

She found, in a corner, an atlas from the fifties, its maps faded, which she leafed through with fond application.

“Look,” she said. “They drew countries that don’t exist any more. You can see the borders as if they were eternal.”

“That’s the most touching thing about a map. It doesn’t know it’s already wrong.”

She raised her eyes to him, and he wondered for a moment whether he hadn’t said something more honest than he had meant to.

“I have an idea,” she said, closing the atlas.

“I don’t trust it.”

“We write a story.”

“Sorry?”

“Four hands. Every day, by message. One sentence each, without rereading, without correcting, without being allowed to go back. We see where it takes us.”

“That’s against Clause 9.”

“Clause 9 was about pointless messages. This one isn’t pointless, it’s literary.”

“That isn’t a valid legal distinction.”

“Do you want to play or do you want to plead?”

He realised that he had already said yes, somewhere, before opening his mouth. They chose the first subject at random, at the paperback stall, leaving it to him to open. He thought for a few seconds, took out his phone, and typed, under the attentive gaze of the grey cat:

Angkor&Chill — 15:42
As for the pigeon, he had understood everything.

The reply arrived before he had even had time to put the phone back in his pocket.

LadyWhistledown — 15:42
But he wouldn’t tell anyone, out of politeness.

He laughed out loud. The old man raised his nose from his newspaper, looked at him with distinguished disapproval, and plunged back into it.

He bought the postman book, which she had put back with regret. She chose for him, without consulting him, a small notebook with a cloth cover, a plain model, blank, the kind one buys to write things one hasn’t yet decided to show, and she held it out to him at the counter with the gravely detached air of someone making an innocuous remark.

“For your lists,” she said.

“What lists?”

“You look like someone who makes lists. Lists of light, of cities, of things you don’t say.”

He took the notebook. He said nothing. He didn’t know how to explain to her that he had, in a bag, at the bottom of a cardboard folder, a single object that someone had once given him in this way, for no reason, with the same exact attention to who he was, and that this notebook was going to be added, in spite of himself, to that tiny collection.

The bookseller, watching them leave, asked him without the slightest preamble whether he intended to come back. Colin answered that he had no idea. The old man nodded.

“Those who don’t know nearly always come back,” he said.

Colin smiled politely, without comment, and went out into the rain that had stopped, with the strange feeling that everyone, lately, had agreed among themselves to tell him exactly the same thing.

His phone buzzed on the pavement. It was Daphne.

Daphne — 16:20
Anthony wants to know if you’re still planning to be there on the day. I told him you’d said yes.

Daphne — 16:21
He replied: “He said yes in Nairobi too.”

Daphne — 16:21
I’m passing it on without comment. I’m neutral. I’m Switzerland.

Colin — 16:24
tell him I have a suit. tell him I’ve had it pressed.

Daphne — 16:24
I won’t tell him that, he’ll ask you to show him.

Colin — 16:25
tell him I’ll show him.

Daphne — 16:26
Colin. Actually show him.

He stayed a moment on the pavement, under the rain that had stopped, in front of a wet wall, with the sharp feeling that his own reflection had been handed back to him through someone else’s voice. There was something deeply unjust in being suspected of an offence one hadn’t yet committed, and something more unjust still in the idea that the offence had already taken place once, and that the suspicion was nothing other than memory.

The pub on Monday evening was packed, and she almost didn’t see the woman advancing towards them through the crowd, with a wide gesture and a joyful cry — “Well, look who it is! The vagabond!” — that made half the room turn round.

She observed him before looking at the woman, as she always observed: he had made a small movement backwards, almost imperceptible, not embarrassment, rather that slight surprise one feels before a memory that has aged too well. Then he smiled, opened his arms, and the woman threw herself into them with an enthusiasm she made no attempt to contain. She was tall, dark-haired, dressed in a deep red coat that suited her with perfect insolence, with that ease in her body that Penelope had always envied in people who had never needed to wonder where to put their hands. She was laughing. She had one hand on the arm of the man in front of her, and that hand — Penelope noticed it with a clinical and slightly sickening precision — stayed there a second too long.

“Camille! What are you doing in London?”

“I edit a magazine you’ve never heard of. And you, Hanoi, you stood me up without warning, and I still haven’t forgiven you.”

“That was because of a passport.”

“It was because of you.”

She was laughing. He was laughing. They spoke to each other with that elastic complicity of people who have shared a story whose every nook and cranny they know without having to speak of it, and Penelope, planted two paces away, glass in hand, realised, with disagreeable lucidity, that she had just become a piece of the scenery.

She repeated to herself, in silence, Clause 11. No jealousy. She repeated it with the same application she would have put into reciting a poem, trying to understand why she felt a very precise heat rising from her stomach towards her throat, like a wave, and why she was observing, with a naturalist’s exactitude, the way that Camille’s hand had moved from his arm to his shoulder. She told herself it was absurd. She told herself she had no right. She told herself she had known this man for a month, that they had established rules precisely for this, that someone reasonable, measured, would smile politely and finish her drink.

“And you are?” asked Camille, turning at last to her, with a sincere smile that made the thing even more unbearable.

“A friend,” he said.

The word fell into the noise of the pub like a coin into a well. She smiled. She shook the hand held out to her, said something pleasant that she didn’t remember afterwards, watched the woman in the red coat walk away waving at the man who didn’t take his eyes off her, and then stood motionless, for a long while, staring into the bottom of her glass with the concentration of a person reading a difficult page.

A friend. It was accurate. It was even irreproachably honest, it was what they had decided, it was what she would have said herself, word for word, had she been asked. She didn’t understand why it felt as if she had been slapped, very politely.

“You’ve got a face on,” he said.

“I haven’t got a face on.”

“You’ve completely got a face on. It’s actually very cute, that face.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Clause 11.”

“I never said you were. But since you insist on clarifying what I haven’t said, you have absolutely no reason to be.”

“I’m not jealous,” she repeated, with the dignity of bad faith.

“All right.”

“A bit, maybe,” she admitted at last, after ten seconds.

He didn’t laugh, which was his first good decision of the evening. He slid an arm round her shoulders, drew her against him, and said, in a low voice, in her ear, with a seriousness she had never heard from him:

“Camille has hated me since Hanoi. There was a passport, a taxi, a hotel, and a bloke who took me for his best friend for three days. I won’t tell you more because I’m not proud of it. But I want you to know one thing: I came here with you. It’s with you that I’ll drink this drink. And no one has ever waited for me in the corner of a pub with the face you had just now, which is, much to my surprise, the nicest thing anyone has done for me in a long time.”

She laughed, in spite of herself, her head against his shoulder, with that delicious shame of people who have been caught in the act and have nothing left to defend.

The Rescue Squad 🚨

Penelope — 23:12
I think I’ve just been jealous for the first time since Alfred

Eloise — 23:13
how do you feel

Penelope — 23:15
ridiculous. and a bit alive, actually. both at once.

Hyacinth — 23:15
that’s the most worrying symptom of this whole business, and yet you told us about a fire

Hyacinth — 23:16
speaking of which, one of my brothers has been in a light mood for three weeks, we don’t understand it, the whole family is suspicious

Eloise — 23:16
hyacinth, pen doesn’t need a weather report on your family

Hyacinth — 23:17
I’m just saying it’s worrying. nobody’s ever in a light mood in our house

Theo — 23:17
I’d like to point out that clause 11 has been there from the start and you signed it

Penelope — 23:17
I didn’t sign. I raised my hand.

Theo — 23:18
it’s the same thing with more style

Felicity — 23:20
I’m happy for you pen. truly. you know what jealousy means? that you want something again.

Penelope — 23:21
I know. I’m trying not to think about it.

The sentence of the day had arrived at ten past nine, as it had every morning since the bookshop, and he had read it on the Tube, standing, hanging from a rail, with a smile that an elderly lady had taken for the onset of a funny turn.

Angkor&Chill — 09:10
He had been watching, from the fourth-floor gutter, a woman crossing the square counting the paving stones.

LadyWhistledown — 09:14
She counted so as not to think about what she wasn’t looking for.

He had reread the reply three times between two stations. He had told himself it was a good rhythm, a good fall, that an editor would find it to her taste, and he hadn’t thought to wonder why the sentence stayed with him until evening.

He had asked her to choose a film.

It was a Tuesday evening, at her place, in the soft dusk of the sitting room, one of those evenings with no plans where you are content simply to exist next to someone, and she had handed him her phone saying she couldn’t decide, that he could look, that she trusted his taste, even though she had serious reasons to doubt it after the Scrabble. He had taken the device with the nonchalance of someone who cannot imagine a phone containing anything but apps. He hadn’t opened anything indiscreet. He hadn’t scrolled through a single photo.

It was the phone that did it for him. A notification, discreet, slid across the top of the screen — Memories: three years ago — with a small preview thumbnail, and he hadn’t touched it, he hadn’t done anything, but the picture had opened, by itself, full screen, thanks to a finger resting too close.

It was a photograph taken in a restaurant. She was sitting at a table, in a plum-coloured dress, a glass in her hand, and she was laughing, leaning slightly, half turned towards the man beside her. He, one arm along the back of her chair, was looking at the lens with that satisfied, slightly closed smile of people used to being photographed who know exactly which profile suits them. He was blond, well groomed, flawlessly elegant, with something extremely polite in his gaze — the kind of man Colin had crossed paths with a hundred times in departure lounges, sure of his place, sure of his card, sure that he had always been invited.

He understood at once who it was. He didn’t need to be told.

“Oh,” he said, simply, with no judgement in his voice, handing her the phone. “I suppose that’s him.”

He saw her face change. He could have photographed that transformation, he would have known perfectly the framing, the light, the exact point where the eye was meant to land: something was withdrawing from her features like the colour from a fabric washed too hard, and her hands, which held the device, began to tremble in a way she can’t have foreseen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, very fast. “I’ll delete it, I don’t even know why it’s still—“

“Don’t delete it.”

“I—“

“You don’t have to apologise for having a photo on your phone. It doesn’t matter.”

“I know. I know it doesn’t matter, it’s just—“

She stopped, unable to finish the sentence, and he saw her lower her head, and he understood, before she did herself, that she was crying. She cried without a sound, without display, with that ashamed restraint of people who are used to not disturbing anyone, and it was that discretion, more than the tears themselves, that took his breath away.

He said nothing. He thought of saying something, of course. He thought of ten possible sentences, none of them bad, and each of which would have been, he felt with a physical certainty, a polite way of leaving the room. He knew the mechanism too well. He had spent twelve years of his life telling people what had to be said in order to earn the right to leave afterwards. He put the phone down on the table, turned the screen over, sat down beside her, put an arm round her shoulders, and waited.

It was a long time. He didn’t move. He looked, over her head, at a spot on the opposite wall, a patch of orange light that the street lamp threw on the white paint, and he realised he was holding his breath, and let it go slowly.

“I thought I was getting better,” she said at last, her voice still trembling. “I am getting better. It’s just that sometimes it comes back all at once, without warning, and I never know if it’s still him I’m crying for, or the life I’d planned that will never exist.”

He stayed silent a few seconds. He knew that question better than she could imagine.

“I think it’s probably both,” he said, softly, without trying to decide for her.

“I shouldn’t be putting you through this,” she murmured. “We said no complications, and here I am crying on your shoulder over a man who went off to Antarctica.”

He blinked.

“He went where?”

“Antarctica. On a photographic expedition.”

“A photographic expedition.”

“Yes.”

“He left a woman like you to go and look at penguins.”

She hiccuped. It was a strange sound, between a sob and a laugh, that took her by surprise, and she raised to him a drenched face that no longer quite knew what it was expressing.

“I feel very much in competition with the polar fauna,” he said, gravely. “I hadn’t foreseen that category of adversary.”

Another photographer, he thought, with an irony he kept to himself.

“You’re not my adversary.”

“I’m your Scrabble adversary. It’s an official status.”

She laughed for real, this time, in a sob that turned into a hiccup, her head pressed against his shoulder, and he stayed there, his hand in her hair, looking at the orange patch on the wall, with the sense that he had just received, without having earned it, a trust one doesn’t hand back.

“I think we passed, a while ago, the stage where those rules still meant anything,” he said, after a long silence.

She didn’t answer. She only tightened her grip on his shirt.

He didn’t tell her, that evening, what was going through him while she cried. He didn’t tell her that he had understood, in the light of that photograph, that she had just been left by a man who had announced his departure with a ticket already booked, and that between that man and himself there was only a difference of degree, not of kind. He didn’t tell her that he was holding in his arms someone who had already learned to stop believing in the announced departures of men like him, and that he himself carried, somewhere, in a mental calendar he refused to consult, a date after which he would leave again.

He stayed. It was the only thing he knew how to do at that precise moment. He stayed until she fell asleep, against him, on the sofa, with the film never chosen playing silently on the black screen, and he thought, clearly, with a calm that frightened him more than any panic, that it was perhaps the first time in his life he wasn’t looking for the exit.

He had warned her the day before: he would be gone all of Wednesday, from six in the morning until very late at night, for a job he couldn’t talk about, Clause 10, and which wouldn’t leave him a minute to write. Don’t be cross with me, he had added, with an exclamation mark she had never seen in his messages. She had replied I’m not cross, in the lightest tone she could find, and had gone to bed thinking that the next day would be the most ordinary in the world.

She woke at five fifty-eight, two minutes before the time he had said he would leave, and lay a long while looking at the ceiling, not moving, with the unpleasant sensation of having something to check.

At seven, the phone buzzed.

Angkor&Chill — 07:02
The pigeon merely watched people go by, nodding his head like an art critic.

She smiled before she had even read the end of the sentence. It was their rule since Monday: one sentence a day at the very least, never reread, never corrected, at the risk of ending up with an absurd story that made neither head nor tail, which they had promised never to read aloud. She typed, her thumb a little quicker than usual:

LadyWhistledown — 07:04
And now and then, out of pure kindness of heart, he let something fall on the hat of a gentleman who was too sure of himself.

He didn’t reply. He had said he wouldn’t. She took her shower without taking the phone into the bathroom, which seemed to her, in the circumstances, a victory of rare proportions, and picked it up again on coming out, purely as a precaution, to check that it was working.

The morning went in reading. She had handed Charlotte, the previous Friday, the fifty pages of Tobias Finch’s new epilogue, with a six-line letter she had rewritten five times, and the reply had come on Monday in the form of a single message from the author: I haven’t slept for three days. Thank you. She had kept it. She caught herself, that Wednesday, rereading it at eleven, with the quiet contentment of people who have done something good without having sought to, and thinking, in the same breath, that she would have liked to show it to someone.

She knew precisely whom.

“You’re looking at your phone,” said Agatha, from the doorway.

She hadn’t heard her come. It was a talent Agatha had cultivated over thirty years of career: that of appearing in offices like a rumour, a cup of tea in her hand and a pencil stuck behind her ear, to deliver in a low voice the remark that left everyone feeling they had been caught red-handed.

“I’m checking the time.”

“You’ve been checking the time for half an hour. It’s the habit of a hardened delinquent.”

“I’m very punctual.”

“You look like someone waiting for a message,” said Agatha, and she came into the room, set her cup down on Penelope’s desk with a precise gesture, leant against the shelf. “I’m not asking from whom. I’m only telling you that I waited for messages for ten years, in another century, and it ended up producing a marriage and a divorce, in that order. I regret neither. But I do regret the number of manuscripts I reread three times because of a telephone that didn’t ring.”

“It’s not that.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“It’s really not that.”

“Penelope,” said Agatha, with that dry gentleness that was in her the most accomplished form of affection. “I’m not judging you. I’m observing. When you came back, a month and a half ago, you had the face of someone crossing a room looking at it very hard so as not to miss it. Now you have the face of someone crossing a room thinking about something else. It’s a notable improvement. Don’t spoil it by denying it.”

She left without waiting for the answer, as she always left, leaving behind a smell of bergamot and a silence that had something of a benediction about it. Penelope stayed a moment motionless, the lukewarm cup between her hands, with a heat rising to her face that she made no attempt to contain.

She missed him.

The discovery was almost physical. It wasn’t a thought, not one of those reasonings she was in the habit of weighing and turning over for hours before giving them a name. It was a precise sensation, located somewhere beneath the breastbone, like the absence of an object always put in the same place: an empty place. She looked at the phone. She wrote I miss you, three times, with a quick movement of the thumb, then deleted it, three times, as quickly, and the last deletion left in her throat a small taste of shame that resembled nothing she had known for a long time.

She hadn’t had that sensation for Alfred. Or rather she had, but it wasn’t the same: with Alfred, absence had always been a worry — knowing where he was, whether he would be home on time, what he thought of the evening, what state he would be in when he arrived. She had learned to watch his absence the way one watches a fire. With him, with this man whose first name she didn’t know and whose exact face in the light of an office at noon she didn’t know either, absence demanded no vigilance. It was simply there, gentle, very calm, distinct, like the shape of a piece of furniture moved in a room where one has grown used to seeing it.

She counted, without having decided to, the weeks they had spent together. She didn’t know how to count those that remained to them. He had told her from the first evening that he would be leaving again, that he didn’t know when, that it would depend on a job, a family, a date he never specified, and she had found that honest. She still found it honest. She merely noted that this honesty had, within a few weeks, changed weight, like a sentence one rereads after learning the rest of the story.

Evening came without her noticing. She dined alone, on a leftover curry she had kept on purpose, in front of a programme she didn’t follow, and stayed in the sitting room until ten o’clock, her eyes on the phone lying face down on the arm of the sofa.

Angkor&Chill — 22:04
I’m back.

She stared at the screen. She held back a sigh she hadn’t realised she was holding.

LadyWhistledown — 22:05
You announce your return the way one notifies a lighthouse?

Angkor&Chill — 22:06
I don’t know why I’m writing it to you. I just wanted you to know.

LadyWhistledown — 22:06
I know.

Angkor&Chill — 22:07
Good.

LadyWhistledown — 22:07
Have you eaten?

Angkor&Chill — 22:08
No. I’m looking at a wall.

LadyWhistledown — 22:08
Which wall?

Angkor&Chill — 22:09
[photo]

It was a brick wall, very old, covered with moss right down to the joints, with a street-lamp light casting an almost golden gleam on the green surface. She looked at it for a long time.

Angkor&Chill — 22:10
It was green at noon. It’s greener at ten. I’m almost certain walls keep growing when nobody’s looking. It made me think of you.

LadyWhistledown — 22:11
It made you think of me because I’m damp and covered in lichen?

Angkor&Chill — 22:11
Because you keep going when nobody’s looking.

She stayed a long moment without replying. She felt her throat tighten gently, as before a sentence one hasn’t written oneself and wishes one had found.

LadyWhistledown — 22:14
Clause 9.

Angkor&Chill — 22:14
This message isn’t pointless. It’s mural.

LadyWhistledown — 22:15
That isn’t a recognised legal category.

Angkor&Chill — 22:15
I’ll plead it.

LadyWhistledown — 22:16
Eat something.

Angkor&Chill — 22:16
I’ll eat a wall.

LadyWhistledown — 22:16
Good night, Angkor.

Angkor&Chill — 22:17
Good night, Lady W.

She fell asleep an hour later, the photo of the wall open on the screen, without anyone having obliged her to do anything, with the quiet, frightening certainty that she had just received something much bigger than what she believed she had asked of him.

The sentence on Thursday morning had been the most serious of all, and he still didn’t know why he had written it.

Angkor&Chill — 08:41
But that evening it was raining, and he realised that the man opposite, instead of leaving, was staying.

LadyWhistledown — 08:52
The pigeon was greatly troubled: staying did not figure in his vocabulary.

He had looked at the man’s sentence on his screen for the whole of a bus ride. He had told himself it was fiction, that a pigeon had nothing to do with him, that the rain had been a narrative detail chosen for atmosphere, and he had slipped the phone into his pocket with the certainty of having revealed nothing.

He took her up on a roof on Thursday evening.

Colin hadn’t made up his mind all at once. He had been thinking about it for several days, with that wary slowness he brought to considering anything that risked becoming a gesture, and he had ended up ringing Hamid, a former assistant who had become, through a series of circumstances neither of them thought it useful to detail, caretaker of a building in Bloomsbury whose terrace had been closed to the public since some old business with the guttering. Hamid had said: For you, half an hour, no more, and if anyone asks you never saw me. Colin had promised. He had always promised in such cases, without ever knowing whether he kept his promises.

She climbed up behind him by a service staircase that smelt of paint and damp washing, holding her jacket in one hand, laughing under her breath every time a step creaked, and he understood, pushing open the last door, what he had been looking for all those weeks without knowing it: the expression she would have on stepping out into the night.

London spread out beneath them, immense, wet, glittering, with its red cranes, its slate roofs wrapped in mist, its distant trains cutting the city like lines of stitching. There was light everywhere and nobody there, a strange silence of high places where noises rose without jostling, muffled, filtered, distant enough to resemble the murmur of the sea. He had laid a blanket on the concrete, a bottle between them, a single glass that they passed back and forth, and she had sat cross-legged with that grave, slightly childlike air of people being shown a secret place.

“It’s true,” she said, after a long silence. “It really is beautiful.”

He hadn’t taken the camera out of its case. He had kept it, all evening, at the bottom of his bag, out of a modesty whose origin he didn’t quite understand. He had taken, in recent weeks, a great many photographs of her — stolen images, chance framings, silhouettes from behind — and he hadn’t shown them to anyone, or even looked at them again. This time, he took out the camera, without premeditation, when the wind blew a lock of hair across her face and she tucked it behind her left ear with a gesture he knew by heart.

He took the shot. The click made her turn round.

“Hey.”

“Sorry. Professional reflex. The view was very good, but you were distinctly better.”

“How are you going to caption that one? Another improbable roundabout?”

“That one I’m not publishing,” he answered, with a seriousness that surprised even himself. “That one I’m keeping for myself.”

“Why?”

He thought. He searched, sincerely, with a slowness he rarely knew in himself, for the right wording.

“Do you know what made me match with you? It wasn’t your bio. It was the duck.”

“The duck?”

“In your profile picture. The one by the lake. A careful photographer would have cropped it out, it completely wrecks the composition. But it was still there. Which means someone looked at that image and decided the duck stayed.”

“My friend insisted.”

“That doesn’t change what it did to me,” he said, with a slightly lopsided smile. “I spend my life looking for the perfect framing. I spent ten years removing what sticks out, what disturbs, what wasn’t planned. And you turn up with a badly placed duck in your only photo, and it’s the first thing that made me smile in weeks.”

She didn’t answer. She moved closer to him on the blanket, her head against his shoulder, and he felt the weight of her temple against his collarbone, that slight shifting of the world that always follows an unforeseen gesture.

“I show everything I take,” he murmured, after a moment, without quite knowing whom he was speaking to. “That’s how I work. I’ve always believed that what isn’t shown doesn’t really exist.”

“And that one?”

“That one exists,” he said. “That’s what’s awkward.”

He didn’t tell her that he had, at the bottom of a bag, in a cardboard folder he never opened, a single photograph he had never shown to anyone: that of a man laughing, blurred, in the light of a July Saturday. Nor did he tell her that, putting the camera back in its case, he had just promised himself to do nothing more with the image he had just taken — no print, no enlargement, no file — but to let it sleep on the memory card like a secret one hasn’t yet decided to declare. He didn’t ask himself why. He told himself it was a matter of composition: an image too intimate, that was all, which had no place in a professional folder.

They stayed an hour, well beyond Hamid’s thirty minutes, under a coppery-grey sky where the wind blew in gusts, sharing the one glass, speaking in low voices as in a church. When they came back down, by the same service staircase, she was holding his hand without either of them seeming to have decided it. Hamid was waiting for them at the foot of the last flight of steps, arms folded, with an expression of affectionate reproach.

“Forty-seven minutes,” he said.

“I know.”

“I told you thirty.”

“I know.”

“She’s nice,” said Hamid, to Colin, looking at Lady W with approval. “You shouldn’t let her go.”

“We’re not together,” said Colin.

“No, obviously,” said Hamid. “That’s why I’m telling you not to let her go.”

She laughed, in the stairwell, and he felt her hand tighten on his.

In the taxi home, around one in the morning, he wrote her his sentence, beside her, on the back seat, and felt her phone vibrate in her coat pocket at the instant he pressed “send”.

Angkor&Chill — 01:04
There was, above the city, a roof one did not climb; the man and the woman climbed it, and the pigeon, the first of his line, learned what the word discretion means.

LadyWhistledown — 01:06
He kept it to himself, the way one keeps a secret, or a crumb.

She showed him the screen, with a little air of triumph, laughing softly. He looked at her without a word, in the red glare of a passing light, and wondered why he found it so necessary that the pigeon should know how to keep quiet.

On Friday afternoon, they walked along the Thames with no precise aim, under a clear sky, in that low, golden light of late autumn that makes everything more legible: the moored barges, the gulls on the parapets, the silhouettes of joggers passing at regular intervals, puffing like locomotives. She had taken half a day off, for the first time in months, after telling Charlotte that she had an appointment, without specifying which, and Charlotte, without raising her eyes from her screen, had replied that’s exactly what I wanted to hear you say.

She didn’t know at what moment he had begun to speak.

He walked beside her, hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the grey water of the river, and she had understood, from the way he chose his words, with a slowness that wasn’t like him, that what he was about to say hadn’t been planned.

“My father died when I was nine,” he said.

She didn’t stop walking. She understood instinctively that she mustn’t.

“A summer Saturday. He said ‘that’s odd’ and he sat down. He told me to go and fetch my mother. When we came back, he wasn’t speaking any more. Nobody saw it coming. He was in perfect health. He’d been laughing all morning.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s not why I’m telling you.”

The silence settled. A gull let out a sharp cry above them.

“I think that’s where it all began, this business of never staying anywhere too long. If something can stop so brutally, without warning, between two sentences, what’s the point of attaching yourself to a place, to a person, to anything that might cease to exist overnight? I built my whole life on that. It’s worked rather well for me, as it happens. It’s made me someone rather free, rather happy, rather cheerful. Someone who has never had to mourn a place.”

“And now?”

“Now,” he said, and he stopped, and she stopped with him, and he looked at her at last, with a face she had never seen, stripped of everything that usually served as a façade, “now that logic is becoming difficult to maintain. I don’t know why. Well, yes, I probably do. But I’m not ready to say it yet.”

She understood. She understood everything he wasn’t saying, with that chilling and gentle clarity she had always had for other people’s sentences, the one that allowed her to grasp beneath a chapter what the author dared not write. She understood that this man who had told her from the first evening that he would be leaving again had just told her, in his own way, with the only words at his disposal, that this departure now cost him something. And she understood, in the same breath, that if she said anything at that precise moment, he would immediately make a joke again, he would turn the conversation aside, and everything he had just built would close like a carefully oiled door.

She said nothing. She took his hand.

They resumed their walk, in silence, without his letting go of her fingers, and she felt, in the light pressure of that palm against hers, the exact weight of what they had sworn, from the first day, never to do: cling.

“My mother cried in a bath the night before her wedding,” she said, after a long while.

She didn’t know why she had just said that. She hadn’t decided to. But something in the exchange called for a reciprocity she hadn’t thought to measure.

“She told me a few weeks ago, for the first time. She said that, looking back, she’d almost have preferred my father to leave her the night before the wedding. As happened to me. She added that the only thing she didn’t regret was the four of us. Her daughters. That if she’d been left at the altar, we wouldn’t exist.”

He turned his head towards her, with an expression she couldn’t read.

“She said that?”

“She said it looking at her plate, because she didn’t dare look at me. And I understood, at that moment, that my mother had always loved me very much, in a slightly clumsy way, slightly late, slightly noisy. And that I’d taken years to notice because I was looking for it in another form.”

“What form?”

“A silent form,” she said. “Like in books.”

He didn’t laugh. He simply squeezed her hand, a little harder, and they walked on like that until the low sun touched the water, adding nothing, with the strange feeling of having exchanged two secrets that were not, in reality, far from each other.

That gesture, that hand taken without either of them having decided it, carried a weight she couldn’t yet explain to herself. They had refused every form of attachment from the first day, and they were walking beside a river, hand in hand, like two people who had never heard of rules.

By the bridge, he took out his phone, with a notary’s solemnity, and typed a few words with one thumb. She felt hers vibrate in her pocket. She took it out in her turn. He was walking thirty centimetres from her.

Angkor&Chill — 17:12
By the river, the woman and the man walked a long time without a word, and the pigeon admitted it was the finest conversation he had ever overheard.

LadyWhistledown — 17:13
They weren’t talking about pigeons, which proved they were serious.

“You’re writing to me from thirty centimetres away,” she said.

“It’s the rule of the story. Every day, one sentence. Whatever the distance.”

“We could just say it to each other.”

“Out loud, it loses in literature,” he said.

It was Colin who had the idea of the bar, and he would have been hard put to justify it: they had been walking for two hours after dinner, in a district he didn’t know, when a pink neon sign, twisted and half extinguished, gave them from the other side of an alley a badly adjusted wink. The Melancholy Parrot — Karaoke every night. Below it, a smaller notice, typed on a typewriter: Here we sing to live.

“No,” she said.

“I haven’t suggested anything.”

“You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“The look of someone already thinking about his repertoire.”

There was indeed a thin music escaping from the door, a wheezing synthesiser playing an introduction that he recognised with the delighted shiver of men who didn’t spend their adolescence in the eighties but have learned to love them out of loyalty to someone else. He took her hand. She resisted for two seconds, on principle. She followed him.

The bar was tiny, filled with a motley humanity: a table of fifty-somethings in suits, come to celebrate a birthday; two female students bawling the words of a French song with heartbreaking conviction; a man alone, at the back, who looked as if he had been rehearsing the same number since the start of his life. A moustached host, in a dinner jacket, was adjusting the microphone with an expert hand, with the authority of a ship’s captain.

“Will you sing?” he asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“You write your own sentences, and you wouldn’t sing?”

“Writing and singing have nothing to do with each other.”

“Then I’ll sing for two.”

He put his name down on a crumpled sheet of paper, with a gesture that Michaella would have described, had she been there, as a definitive bad decision. He was not a singer. He had known it since adolescence, when a school tour had ended in a flurry of apologetic gestures towards the choir. He sang out of tune only on the notes he knew. He chose a ballad from 1983, of the kind that hold an entire room breathless by the sheer force of their excess, and climbed onto the stage with the quiet assurance of one who has, in any case, nothing to prove.

It was dreadful. He began a key too low, went up half a tone too high at the first chorus, recovered with a howl he judged entirely appropriate, shut his eyes for the second verse, held out a hand to an imaginary audience in the last, with a seriousness only a family inheritance can explain. The room began to laugh, at first discreetly, then openly, then with that enthusiastic benevolence reserved for people who make their mistake wholeheartedly. The fifty-somethings in suits stood up. The two students took up the chorus together. A man at the back applauded in time, loudly, with the gravity of an old soldier.

He reopened his eyes on the last chord, breathless, drained, radiant. She was standing in front of the stage, in the front row, both hands pressed to her face, shaken by a silent laugh that drew tears.

“That was atrocious,” she said, when he came down.

“It was magnificent. There’s a difference.”

“There’s no difference in your particular case.”

“You’re just jealous of my stage presence.”

“I’d rather have my total lack of stage presence if the alternative is that.”

“Liar,” he said.

She laughed, and he understood that he no longer wanted to do anything else with his life than make her laugh like that, between an audience of strangers and the light of a pink neon, his heart pounding as after a race. He took her face between his hands, in front of everyone, without thinking, and kissed her.

It wasn’t a kiss like the others. He understood it at once, before even thinking about it. In the first ones his mouth had given hers, these last weeks, there had been a caution he hadn’t identified as such: something attentive, measured, slightly held back, like one advancing on ice of unknown thickness. This one no longer had that precaution. There was in this kiss a quiet, almost insolent certainty, an abandon neither of them had prepared, as if something in them had ceased, at that precise moment, to pretend. The room applauded. The fifty-somethings in suits whistled. The host, at the microphone, announced in a drawling accent and with the seriousness of a sports commentator: “And there, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a finale.”

She laughed against his lips. He laughed too. Neither of them remembered that they had once planned not to touch in public, and he thought, with a lucidity that passed through him painlessly, that he had just violated, before witnesses, a clause he had himself defended with enthusiasm.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, as they were leaving the bar. He glanced at it out of reflex.

Michaella — 23:51
are you singing ??? I felt a disturbance in the force. tell me someone’s filming

Colin — 23:52
nobody’s filming. I’m an artist. my performances are ephemeral.

Michaella — 23:52
colin bridgerton singing in public. I’ve just had a mystical revelation

Colin — 23:53
I never told you I was happy

Michaella — 23:53
you just did

He put the phone away without answering, and looked, in the neon-lit alley, at the woman waiting for him, her scarf crooked, her cheeks still red from laughing, telling himself that, for the first time in a very long while, he had not the slightest desire to calculate the distance that separated him from the next exit.

They said almost nothing in the taxi.

She had slipped her hand into his as soon as the door closed, without looking at him, and he had felt her fingers interlace with his the way one closes a latch. The city slid past the window in long yellow streaks. The driver had put on a radio playing songs from her adolescence, tracks of which he knew only the choruses, and he caught himself noticing that his neighbour’s thumb was keeping time on the back of his hand, slowly, with the regularity of a metronome, without her being aware of it. He had never felt so much desire for so small a gesture.

On the stairs of her building, she stopped at the second landing, turned, and kissed him against the wall, without preamble, with an urgency he didn’t yet know in her. There was something resolute in her kiss, almost joyfully fierce, as if the weeks of caution, the jacket shared in the rain, the sentences weighed before being sent, had all at once been set down somewhere, and she was discovering she no longer needed to carry them. He returned her kiss with a relief that resembled fear. She laughed against his mouth. He felt her hands slide up under his jacket, her cold fingers against his back, and he wondered, with amused lucidity, how they would ever manage to climb the two remaining floors.

They managed it in four minutes, which constituted, in both their opinions, an athletic feat.

The door had barely closed when he pressed her gently against the wood. No light was switched on. There was only the orange halo of a street lamp crossing the sitting room through the curtainless window and drawing long pale rectangles on the floorboards. He looked at her, in that dirty, soft clarity, her hair undone, her cheeks red from laughing, her lips parted, and he told himself that if he had been asked, at that precise moment, to justify his life up to then, he couldn’t have found a single argument worth what he had before his eyes.

“You’re looking at me,” she said.

“I’m looking.”

“You’re looking at me as if you wanted to photograph me.”

“I left the camera at the pub. I’ll have to engrave it some other way.”

He undid the buttons of her coat one by one, slowly, taking the time for each, without taking his eyes off her, and he saw her breathing change as he went, grow shorter, more irregular. The coat fell. The crooked scarf followed. He slid his hands under her jumper, against the warm skin of her waist, and felt her shiver, from the nape to the knees, a small tremor he could have recognised among a thousand.

“Tell me what you want,” he murmured.

She laughed, against his neck.

“You always ask me that.”

“I’ll go on asking.”

“I want you to stop asking,” she said, and he stilled, for a second, before understanding, from the way she bit her lower lip, that it wasn’t a reproach. “I want you to... know. A little. Now.”

“I’m not sure I know everything.”

“Then guess.”

He guessed. He discovered, in the minutes that followed, that he knew far more than he would have believed, that he had learned, without realising it, to listen to her with his hands: the breath that stopped when he followed the curve of a shoulder, the small strangled sound in the hollow of her neck, the way her fingers clenched in his hair at the precise instant when he had to slow down. He carried her to the bedroom, which he hadn’t planned, with remarkable inelegance, banging his elbow against the door frame, and she was still laughing when he laid her on the bed, a laugh that gradually turned into something else, lower, huskier, as he began to descend along her skin.

He thought it was the effect of the karaoke, of the laughter, of the night, of that unaccustomed ease he had at being comfortable somewhere. He thought it was pleasant — the word struck him as exact, and sufficient. He liked this way she had of hiding nothing from him: the unreserved abandon, the frank joy, the impatience, the burst of laughter in the middle of what should have been grave; he liked her guiding him, telling him there in a cracked voice, again, with that quiet authority of people who have decided to stop apologising for their desires. He filed it under the category of tastes: one had one’s preferences, as one prefers a certain kind of light, and there was nothing in it resembling a commitment. He thought, for a moment, that she must have spent years in hands that hadn’t known how to listen to her, and he felt a brief, strange irritation pass through him, which he put down to a very general sense of justice.

She arched against him, one hand clamped over her mouth to stifle a cry that didn’t want to be stifled, and he saw her face come undone, slowly, under the light of the street lamp, with an expression he would keep within him long after it had ceased to be a secret. He would have liked to photograph it. He understood, in the same instant, that it was the only image in the world he would never want to show to anyone, and that it would lose nothing by existing nowhere other than in his memory.

After that, for a long time, there were only breaths, and the voice of the neighbour’s radio through the wall, and the sensation of a hand passed through his hair. She had laid her head on his chest. He felt her breath against his skin, slow, warm, calming with each exhalation, and he stayed motionless, for fear of breaking something.

“Lady W,” he said, very low, after a long while.

“Hmm?”

He had wanted to say something else. He had wanted, for the first time, to pronounce a first name, any name, to invent one if need be, to call her in a way that would let her know that what he had just lived had no pseudonym. He stayed silent. The three syllables of that nickname she had chosen for herself one evening of wine with her friends suddenly seemed narrow to him, too small, like a coat worn too long.

“Nothing,” he said. “Sleep.”

“You were going to say something.”

“I was saying you’re very good.”

“That sounds like a line from an airport novel.”

“I’m very bad at novels.”

She laughed against his skin. She said no more. He felt her body relax, by degrees, until her breathing became that of people who sleep, and he stayed awake, his eyes fixed on the ceiling striped with orange light, thinking that in a few weeks he would have somewhere a plane ticket, a date, a time zone, and that he couldn’t manage to imagine anyone other than himself watching this woman sleep.