Prologue | The Last Glimpse

“Actually, they’ve already made the decision.”

Anne stared at Arthur across the small table between them. For a moment, she wondered if she had misunderstood him.

“They’ve made the decision?”

Arthur shifted in his chair. “Well—not exactly. They made the offer. I made the decision.”

“You made the decision.”

It wasn’t a question this time.

“Yes.”

Anne gave a short laugh. Arthur’s flat was warm, almost too warm for a London evening, and the windows behind him had begun to mist faintly at the corners. Half an hour ago, she had arrived expecting dinner. There was still an unopened bottle of wine on the kitchen counter.

Now Arthur was sitting opposite her, trying to explain that he was leaving the country.

“My company wants me in Ireland for a while,” he said. “You know how it is. For a tech company, the environment there is better in a lot of ways. The team’s expanding, and they want someone—”

“How long?”

He hesitated. Anne caught it.

“How long, Arthur?”

“A few months. Maybe longer.”

“And when were you planning to ask me what I thought?”

His expression changed. “Anne—”

“No. I’m serious. When?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Arthur exhaled and leaned back. “Come on. It’s work.”

“Exactly. Your work. Your offer. Your decision.” Anne counted them off almost absently, one by one. “And now, apparently, my notification.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I haven’t signed anything yet.”

“But you’ve said yes.”

“Basically, yes.”

Anne looked at him. There it was.

Not cruelty. Not betrayal. Not even indifference.

Certainty.

The quiet, maddening certainty of a man who had considered every practical consequence of his decision and somehow failed to notice that one of those consequences was sitting directly across from him.

Arthur rubbed a hand over his face. “Look, nothing is changing for me if I stay in London. This is a real opportunity. I thought you’d be happy for me.”

“Happy for you?”

“Yes.”

Something in Anne snapped.

“Of course you did.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means everything in this conversation is about you. What’s good for your career. What changes your environment. What gives you better opportunities.” Her voice sharpened despite herself. “Did it occur to you, even once, that this changes my life too?”

“We’re not breaking up.”

“You don’t get to decide that by yourself either.”

Arthur stared at her. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“No, I know.” Anne stood and reached for her bag. “That’s the problem. You never mean it.”

“Anne.”

“From the beginning of this relationship, can you name one important decision where you actually put me into the equation before you made it?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” He stood too. “You want me to be reasonable? Fine. Let’s be reasonable. If my career goes nowhere, what exactly does staying in London do for us?”

Anne went still. Arthur seemed to hear the sentence only after it had left his mouth.

“That came out wrong.”

“No. I think it came out perfectly.”

“Anne—”

“Fine.”

She slung her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door.

“Fine. Go to Ireland.”

“Would you stop for one second?”

She pulled the door open.

“Changing girlfriends is probably easier than changing countries anyway.”

“Anne!”

She slammed the door behind her.

For several seconds, Arthur did not move. Then his face changed.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

His hand went instinctively to his jacket pocket. The small velvet box was still there. He pulled it out and stared at it for half a heartbeat before shoving it back into his pocket and running for the door.

By then, Anne was already gone.

She drove too fast for the first few streets. She knew she was doing it. She also knew Arthur would have pointed it out, which only made her angrier.

Go to Ireland, then.

The thought came back with childish satisfaction.

Go. Enjoy yourself.

A traffic light turned red ahead of her. Anne braked harder than necessary and sat glaring at it as though this, too, were Arthur’s fault.

The worst part was that Ireland wasn’t the problem. She knew that.

Had he come to her two weeks ago and said, They’ve offered me something. It’s good. Really good. But it means leaving London for a while. What do we do?—perhaps they would have argued. Perhaps she would have hated the idea. Perhaps, in the end, she would have told him to go.

But he had never asked.

He had constructed a future, examined it, approved it, and then presented it to her as though her only remaining role were to react appropriately.

And somehow she was supposed to be happy.

The light changed. Anne drove on.

London slid past her in fragments of evening light: shop windows, brick terraces, buses lumbering through intersections, pedestrians waiting impatiently at crossings. Familiar things. Ordinary things.

Her anger slowly lost its sharp edges. In its place came exhaustion.

At the next junction, a cluster of hydrangeas spilled over the low wall of a front garden. Anne glanced at them as she passed.

Pink.

Pretty enough.

But for no reason she could explain, they made her think of home.

Not London.

Kent.

For a moment she could see the garden of her childhood with impossible clarity—the paths front and back, the green leaves wet after rain, and great round heads of hydrangea blooming in shades of blue and violet so intense they had never seemed entirely real.

Her mother had loved them.

Anne had once thought the colours looked almost too strange against the green, as though someone had taken flowers from a dream and planted them in an ordinary English garden. Years later, whenever she saw that particular blue-violet, she still thought of home.

Her hands relaxed slightly around the steering wheel.

Maybe she should go back to Kent for a few days. It had been too long.

Maybe that was what she needed—not Arthur, not another argument, not another night spent turning the same words over and over until she had proved herself right and made herself miserable in the process.

Just home.

Somewhere that had existed before Arthur.

Somewhere she did not have to explain herself.

The thought steadied her.

By the time she turned toward Albany Road, she was no longer angry enough to rehearse the argument.

Her flat was close now. It occupied two floors of an old converted house, the sort of place London seemed to produce endlessly: narrow, imperfect, too expensive for what it was, and somehow charming enough to make you forgive all of it.

Anne had forgiven it almost immediately.

Mostly because of the flowers.

They grew behind the black iron railings in front of the house, crowded together beneath the windows in extravagant clusters of blue and violet.

Hydrangeas.

The first time she had come to view the flat, she had stood outside longer than necessary looking at them. They reminded her of Kent. They reminded her of her mother.

That had been enough.

Anne turned onto the road.

And there they were.

Blue-violet blossoms rose behind the iron railings, luminous in the fading evening light. Her mouth softened into the beginning of a smile.

Home.

A horn screamed.

Anne turned her head.

There was a bus where no bus should have been.

Too close.

Far too close.

She saw its windscreen.

The violent angle of its approach.

A face behind the glass.

Then—

Impact.

There was no time to understand it. Metal shrieked. Glass exploded. The world struck her sideways with such force that pain ceased, for one impossible instant, to have any meaning at all.

Then everything became noise.

And then almost nothing.

Anne did not know how much time passed.

A second. A minute. Perhaps none.

Something warm ran along the side of her face. She tried to breathe and could not understand why it was so difficult. Somewhere nearby, people were shouting.

A door slammed.

Footsteps.

Someone was calling her name.

“Anne!”

She knew that voice.

Or thought she did.

It sounded impossibly far away.

“Anne!”

Arthur.

She tried to turn toward him.

She couldn’t.

Her vision narrowed until there was almost nothing left of the world.