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I n the end, it fell to Alice to be the voice of reason.

Calmed by two lunchtime glasses of wine and a pizza-induced carb coma, Emily had left her a long voice-note debriefing her on the Morningstar meeting. In less time than it took to record it – Alice listened to everything on 1.5 speed – she’d got a text back. Can’t talk right now but Q1: are you comfortable doing something like this? If no, say no. If yes then Q2: If this job was PAYING €25k, would you take it? (Because it IS. Bonus: Florida.) Crucial: totally anon by law so nothing to worry about there. Do it and be free! This was followed by the infamous picture of Nicole Kidman reportedly leaving her lawyer’s office after her divorce from Tom Cruise was finalized, and then another text that said, I’ll call later but only to say the same things out loud .

There was no need. Emily knew Alice was right.

She rang Beth to say yes just after four o’clock. Half an hour later, there were plane tickets and a detailed travel itinerary in her inbox. Ten minutes after that, there was a contract for her to sign in there too. She emailed her manager at work to say she had a family emergency that required her to go to Cork right away and stay there for maybe as long as a week, and then she started packing a bag.

Mark’s reaction to her decision was subdued. He said he understood why she was doing it and agreed it made financial sense, but that he was worried about her.

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a big deal. It’s basically a transcription job, with a bit of editing afterwards. It’ll barely be a month of my life, all in – a month that will completely neutralize the stress of the last six years . And who knows? Maybe afterwards I’ll even be able to write again.’

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I really do.’

She didn’t ask for clarification on which bit he was referring to.

Emily had lain awake all night, staring at the ceiling, waiting for all of this to start feeling real. It was happening so fast, her brain hadn’t had a chance to catch up.

By the time her second flight taxied to the terminal building late on Tuesday afternoon, Florida-time, it still hadn’t.

There was no distant cityscape out the plane’s window, just a treeline on flat land. But when the nose of the plane turned ninety degrees, Emily could see, in the middle distance, a long row of open hangars. Each had one or two planes parked neatly inside, their bodies gunmetal grey and their shape at once both strange and familiar.

No, not planes – fighter jets.

She’d only ever seen them on CNN and in action movies like the one she’d fallen asleep halfway through on her first flight. They made her think of threat and fear and trouble, and she hoped they weren’t a portent.

Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport was tiny. There were only two baggage belts. The journey to them from her seat only took five minutes, and that was with a bathroom break along the way.

While she waited for her suitcase to appear, she saw Tall Blonde Woman by the exit, talking on the phone.

Emily had first seen her back in Dublin Airport, waiting to board the same flight to D.C. She’d noticed her because she looked like Emily wished she could: fit and toned, beautiful barefaced, the kind of short, messy hair that said I don’t waste my one wild and precious life styling this . She’d seen her again waiting to board this second flight, which was weird, because Emily’s itinerary was last-minute, awkward and circuitous: Dublin to Dulles, taxi to Reagan, three hours south in the air to here.

Why would anyone else be on the exact same route?

Unless Morningstar had tapped someone from their Dublin office to be her assistant on this.

Emily didn’t want to approach her to ask, just in case the answer was no. She may not have actually read the non-disclosure agreement, but it was a safe bet that chatting to strangers in airports about Jack Smyth’s memoir would be a breach.

She wondered if they were going to share a car, but Tony, her driver, said he was only expecting one passenger.

Arrivals was just a few square feet of carpeted hallway; she spotted him right away. When he saw her looking quizzically at the sign pointing to the ‘Freedom Lounge’ and raising her eyebrows at more American flags than she’d ever seen in one place, he explained that she was on an Air Force base.

‘Largest Air Force base in the world,’ he said as he led her to the exit. ‘The airport is shared: half military, half commercial. That’s why you don’t see any private jets. Not allowed for security reasons.’

‘I see,’ Emily said, as if she’d noticed.

Tony’s car was parked right outside. The air was a hot, humid soup, solid and heavy. There was nothing much to see except the rest of the airport car park, more distant trees and road signs pointing to N ICEVILLE and D ESTIN T OLL B RIDGE . The sky was bright blue and cloudless, the sinking sun an intense, primordial glare, as if the layers of pollution that dulled it everywhere else had never gathered here.

Inside the car it was mercifully cool, the air-conditioning cranked to a level that could’ve safely refrigerated meat. Tony asked if she’d any objections to early nineties power-ballads and offered her a bottle of water from a cooler. He said the drive would be about forty-five minutes if traffic was on their side.

‘You been to Sanctuary before?’ he asked.

‘No, never. This is my first time in Florida.’

Emily had Googled Jack Smyth, but it hadn’t occurred to her to look up the place where she was going to spend a week with him. She’d just assumed it was, you know, Florida . The non-Disney part. She thought Beth had said something about a hotel – but had she?

Now, she couldn’t recall exactly.

‘Sanctuary’ sounded like a resort overlooking a stretch of sugar-white sand gently kissed by crystal-clear, shimmering water. The kind that had swaying palm trees, a swim-up bar and over-the-top water features, like fountains set to music. Nearby, there might be a city strip composed of high-rise hotels, Art Deco facades the colour of ice-cream flavours, Versace prints and oily, muscular men in tiny—

Miami , Emily realized. She’d been picturing Miami, the only place in Florida she’d seen anything of, and that had been on a TV screen.

But here was definitely not there.

They were on a highway, ramrod-straight and smooth, cutting through a sprawl of strip malls, empty lots and busy intersections. The scenery appeared to be on a loop. There’d be a sign for a Dollar Tree, then a Wendy’s, then a Regions Bank. Cue a billboard shouting something like CALL-850-HURT and then bam, it was the Dollar Tree again.

There was no sign of any coastline or anything taller than one storey high.

This went on for about forty minutes or until Michael Bolton was crooning about having said he loved you but lied for the third time. Then Tony took a right turn onto a two-lane road cutting straight through dense woodland. The trees had oddly flat tops, as if someone had taken to them horizontally with a hedge trimmer, and every so often they’d stop to make room for a stretch of swampy marshland or a lake with homes on stilts clustered together on its far shore. Occasional signs warned D ANGER ! D O N OT F EED OR M OLEST ! beneath pictures of annoyed-looking alligators and, perplexingly, N O G OLF C ARTS .

‘Almost there,’ he said.

And then, suddenly, there were houses.

They had appeared abruptly, in a blink: enormous homes, facing the road, that looked like they belonged on the covers of aspirational magazines called things like Coastal Living or Ocean Home . The kind that had wine fridges and TVs the size of dining tables and sectional sofas bigger than Emily’s apartment, and driftwood signs demanding that you L IVE , L AUGH , L OVE or insisting that L IFE I S B ETTER AT THE B EACH .

Residential streets stretched away from them with smaller versions of these homes sat in neat rows on either side. They were clad in white clapboard siding, trimmed in sherbet pastels and not far behind a white picket fence. Although no two looked exactly alike, they all looked different in exactly the same way. Cohesion but not conformity. Quirky design features abounded: towers, widow’s walks, porthole windows under the point of gabled roofs. The architecture was oddly timeless, somehow both futuristic and old-fashioned, like spaceships in a movie from the sixties. It could pass for a village of dolls’ houses blown up to life-size, or something the Disney Imagineers would build in one of the theme parks, or the set of The Truman Show .

Emily was thinking there were worse places to spend a week when Tony drove on, out of the town, leaving the dolls’ houses behind.

‘That was Seaside,’ he said. ‘Sanctuary is the next town along.’

Town?

‘Or it will be,’ Tony added, confusing her more.

The roadside became a smattering of single homes and standalone businesses – a diner, a surf shop, an estate agent’s – until eventually they thinned out and then completely disappeared.

Then it was just trees.

Then it was a long stretch of highway, its tarmac newly resurfaced, with nothing to see but sand dunes to the right and marshland to the left.

Emily spotted two objects in the distance, one on either side of the road. They were gleaming white, tall as houses and shimmering in the rising heat. There were in the shape of – she couldn’t think of anything else except – giant traffic cones?

‘ This is Sanctuary,’ Tony announced.

‘What are those?’ she asked, pointing.

‘They call them the butteries.’

‘What’s a buttery?’

He shrugged a shoulder. ‘Those things, I guess.’

As the car passed between them, Emily saw S ANCTUARY etched into each one in letters three-foot high. Beyond them, a group of white stone buildings clustered together on the right-hand side of the road. In the distance was another set of butteries, presumably marking the development’s other end.

Tony turned onto a cobbled street whose stones were so clean they might have been freshly laid. The white buildings were homes, she saw now, densely built but neatly arranged in short, stubby blocks. Their architecture seemed vaguely Spanish in style, with smooth masonry and curved lines, but Emily also glimpsed horseshoe arches and a courtyard with a fountain in it that made her think of Marrakech.

As it had been back in Seaside, each house’s design seemed unique but with strict limits on the scope of the differences, so in a way they all looked the same.

Although here, everything was white.

Not just the walls of the houses, but their doors and window frames too. The roof tiles: white. The footpaths, completely smooth and unblemished: white. The street lights, which had been designed to look like old-fashioned gas lamps: white. The street signs , pointing to places with names like B UTTERFLY Lane and Turtle Drive : white with pale grey lettering which, in the glare of the sun, made them challenging to read.

There was so much white that when you looked up and saw the blue of the sky or glimpsed a patch of lush green grass on a street corner, the colours registered as a shock.

Sanctuary was also completely deserted.

There were no pedestrians. No other cars. No noise. No anything . Just rows of stark white buildings, perfect and pristine, silent and waiting.

And then, as Tony took another turn, a massive building site.

Now, there were pristine homes on one side of the car and a messy effort to, presumably, make more of them on the other. Emily could see the sunken holes of foundations and timber frames, skeletons of homes to come. There were diggers and cement mixers and flatbed trucks. Piles of materials were stacked neatly under plastic tarps. The ground was bald and dusty and surrounded by chain-link fence. Numerous signs affixed to it warned in both English and Spanish about safety and shouted to K EEP O UT! Everything on the site was completely still and, like the streets she’d seen so far, entirely devoid of people.

Tony pulled up to the kerb and killed the engine, outside a house that seemed to have no windows on its ground floor. There was just a garage door and a small white marble plaque etched with the words B EACH R EAD .

‘You here on vacation?’ he asked, twisting around in his seat. ‘I didn’t think they were renting out anything yet.’

‘I’m, ah, visiting friends.’

‘You’ll have a bit of noise during the day, but once the crews go home, you’ll practically have the place to yourself. Like now. No sleeping-in, though. They start pretty early around here, to try and avoid the heat.’

‘But people are already living here?’

‘No one lives here,’ Tony said. ‘These are all third and fourth homes, and investment properties.’ He winked at her. ‘Your friends must be doing pretty well for themselves.’

When they got out of the car, they were met with an eerie silence. There was no sound at all that they weren’t making, not even distant traffic noise.

Tony lifted her suitcase onto the footpath and gave her a small key on a ring alongside a white plastic fob. He pointed at the garage door. When she pressed the fob to its keypad, there was a low mechanical whine and the door began to shudder and rise, revealing a space big enough for two cars, empty and clinically clean.

‘It’s through there,’ he said, gesturing at an archway in the rear. ‘Have a good one, OK? I’ll see you on Monday.’

She thanked him, waved him off and walked through the opening with her suitcase rumbling loudly on the cement floor.

And into another world.

A lush courtyard, tiled in multicoloured mosaics and overfilled with leafy things planted in clay pots. At its centre was a small plunge pool, shimmering turquoise, with a cascading water feature that was making a soothing tinkling sound. There were armchairs, sun loungers, a hammock strung between two marble columns – and beyond them, huge floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a tease of the luxury waiting inside the house itself.

But the scene had an uncanny quality to it. This wasn’t a lived-in oasis that had been designed and built and grown organically over time. It was all too perfect, too clean, too new – literally new; one of the chairs had a price tag hanging from its underside. It felt like a purpose-built set, or an upscale home staged for sale.

And where was everyone? Where was she supposed to go?

‘You’re in the lock-off,’ a voice said from behind her.

Emily turned around to find herself face-to-face with Jack Smyth.