Arrival
Violet stood in front of 10 Tyrawley Road, staring at the solid dark wooden door twenty feet away. The direct flight from L.A. had been about ten hours, and her neck was killing her. So were her legs.
She rolled her eyes. She couldn’t believe she was thinking about her damn neck when she was standing in front of Michael Hawthorne’s house. A perfect fucking stranger she had met online four weeks ago.
He had a beautiful home, though. This part of London was lined with expensive older homes, beautifully restored and meticulously maintained, with manicured greenery and private gardens tucked behind brick and stone. The sun was just starting to set, and the whole damn street looked like something out of a novel.
She took a deep breath and checked her phone. The instructions were perfectly clear.
When you arrive, look for the key under the mat at the front door and let yourself in.
He had told her he would be working until midnight and that she would need to let herself in. Violet inhaled and let out a long sigh, trying to push her shoulders away from her ears. She was so fucking tense, but who wouldn’t be?
What kind of desperate or insane person flew across an ocean to meet someone she had known for only four weeks and had never even technically seen?
Violet Summers would.
And she did.
Violet was a forty-five-year-old widow whose husband had died three years earlier in a car crash. Since then, she had been a walking ghost. Living half alive. Surviving on alcohol, caffeine, and the occasional meal here and there.
What had really kept her alive, though, was her job and the simplicity and consistency it brought.
She was an information technology supervisor for the California Department of Public Health,responsible for keeping database systems across the state secure and functioning, as well as corralling the people who didn’t do their jobs well.
Her days were filled with meetings, project management, and supervising her database team. That was all she had been able to manage over the last few years. Boxes. Algorithms. Anything linear that didn’t require emotions or feelings.
Little by little, she had let go of almost all human contact. What little family she had seemed to exist only through the occasional text.
How are you?
Hang in there.
It will get better.
Friends were practically nonexistent in her world. Robert had been her only real friend. She had always been the introverted one. He had been the smart, goofy, good-looking one. Everyone wanted to be around him. Violet closed her eyes tightly at the thought of him. They had met during their senior year of college at UCLA. She had been the girl with her nose buried in a book, and he had been the popular fraternity guy. It had never made sense to outsiders.
Robert’s face appeared behind her closed eyes. Sweet and handsome, with kind eyes and thin lips. She had truly believed he was her soulmate.
It was always the stupid, ordinary memories that hit her the hardest. Robert coming home from work, kicking off his shoes wherever they happened to land, and dropping his keys in some completely random place. On the kitchen counter. Beside the couch. Once, for reasons Violet still couldn’t explain, in the bathroom.
The man had been a fucking champion at losing them.
Violet had eventually attached a tracking device to his keys so she wouldn’t have to search the entire house every time they wanted to go somewhere.
God, she would have given anything to search for those stupid keys again.
Violet opened her eyes. Michael’s home stood before her, solid and very real. Her empty house in the foothills outside Sacramento was five thousand miles away.
She was in London.
The air was different.
The smell was different.
Everything was different.
“Get a grip,” she said aloud to herself. She grabbed the handle of her rolling suitcase and walked toward the door. Violet pulled up the brown mat and found a small silver house key beneath it. Of course. Exactly where Michael had said it would be.
As she unlocked the door, she took one last look behind her. The street was quiet. No children playing. No cars rushing past. Just the occasional distant sound of London beyond the peaceful residential street.
It was about 6 p.m. local time, and the setting sun cast a beautiful golden hue across the rooftops and windows. It really did look like the beginning of a dark fairy tale. A beautiful, picturesque London street. A grand old townhouse. A woman standing on the threshold of a stranger’s home, five thousand miles away from everything she knew. No one except her knew why she was there. Or what she had come for. Violet turned back toward the open doorway. Her mind was made up. And she stepped inside.
