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“I didn’t run !” Coralie said. “I sort of squelched.”

“Zora said it was you.” He called over to her. “Didn’t you?”

Zora, busy eating raw sugar from the bowl, didn’t reply.

“Mmm,” the man said. “Healthy!”

They both laughed and then smiled, and were silent for a second.

“She’s okay, then?”

“She’s perfectly okay! I thought she’d be traumatized for life, have a fear of ducks and water, but she’s living totally normally, taking baths willy-nilly, quacking—she’s fine! Thanks to you.” He was suddenly serious.

She waved her hand. “God, no, not really. It was fine.”

“It must have been fucking freezing.”

It had been freezing, she’d had to buy a new phone, and her good overcoat was ruined, the wool all rough and misshapen. “No, I really elegantly… plunged in, loving it, like Mr. Darcy taking a dip in his lake.”

“People often say I look like a young Colin Firth.” He angled his face to help her see it—which she could, immediately, but what was she supposed to do? Agree?

“Colin Firth is a hundred and eighty-seven centimeters tall.” ( Unlike you , she didn’t add.)

He laughed, unoffended. “Did you write his Wikipedia?”

“I might have.”

She waited for him to say she looked like Lizzy Bennet, a known fact at school, and something she’d—for a short time—loved about herself.

Instead, he was serious again. “No, really. You were so brave and acted so quickly. The knock on her head was really nasty—she could have drowned! About forty women with dogs lined up to tell me off.”

“I don’t understand how it happened. She was on one side of the fence. Suddenly she was on the other.”

“She must have done a flip against the fence, like—” He started to mime bending in half at the waist.

“Dada!” Zora shouted from her place by the window. “Stop telling the story!”

The man winced an apology. He looked at Coralie and seemed to gather himself, taking a breath to ask her—what? She had a sudden horror it would be to babysit. Hackney was full of Australian nannies pushing Bugaboo strollers and ordering babyccinos.

“Latte!” the barista called.

“Oh, that’s me.” Would she have sat with them? She thought she probably would have. But the takeaway cup was in her hand. She was walking toward the door. It was too late. Anyway, her whole mind was spread out and waiting for her in the flat. It was time to get back up.

“Come and sit with us,” the man said.

“Oh, I can’t. I have to…” She nodded toward the exit. “Sorry, thank you, so nice to see you!”

“Snow!” someone exclaimed.

“Snow, Dada! Dada! Snow!”

Coralie turned. Everyone was looking out at the street.

Snow was falling steadily; each flake seemed suspended in midair.

Snow! Coralie pushed open the door of the café.

Halfway across Broadway Market, she wished she hadn’t left.

What was she doing? It was deranged, perverse, an act of self-harm—to leave a warm conversation in a warm café with a shorter, and younger, Colin Firth!

But he was a man with a daughter, which implied the existence somewhere of a mother.

Besides, she was out of practice with cozy chats.

She must look mad now, frozen in the middle of the road, in the snow.

Was he watching? He was, giving a brief (perhaps regretful?) farewell wave.

Coralie smiled. He was smiling too. When she opened the door leading up to her flat, she turned for one last look.

The man had his arms around his daughter and his chin resting on her head.

Now Coralie was waving, and they both were waving back.

···

The “any plans for Easter?” workplace small talk was already in full swing.

She considered a little trip somewhere just for something to say.

But the weather had been so bad for so long—even English people agreed it was awful.

It wasn’t a tantalizing prospect to be trapped in a bed-and-breakfast while outside it constantly sleeted.

On the Thursday, their stern and impressive creative director, Antoinette, hadn’t come into the office.

By three thirty, Coralie and Stefan were sinking house reds in the Coach and Horses.

When she’d transferred from the Sydney office the previous September, Coralie had been informally paired with Stefan to work as a creative team.

They’d liked each other, and they’d got on, but they didn’t become close until some weeks later, when Stefan woke one morning to discover his boyfriend had moved out silently in the night.

Marcus went dark on phone and email. After a week, Stefan was so frantic he notified the police.

At that point, Marcus texted, Stefan, I am still alive .

“But I’m not,” Stefan sobbed at his desk, while Coralie searched Psychology Today for links about avoidant personalities and toxic narcissism.

His mother booked him flight after flight back to Nuremberg.

He refused to leave the flat on weekends in case Marcus changed his mind.

He became so thin someone offered him their seat on the Tube to work.

He was so weak with shock and grief that he took it.

Analyzing “the Marcus thing” from every angle was the foundation of Coralie and Stefan’s friendship.

Then, just as suddenly, and again without explanation, Marcus asked to move back in.

Stefan was happier, and Coralie was glad for him, but she struggled a little with the speed of her friend’s reversal and—more selfishly—with the sudden end of the crisis that had gripped them.

Now, even as they talked about TV shows and laughed about their colleagues, she could feel his magnetic pull toward Marcus, who’d soon be finishing up work for the day at a rival brand agency in Soho.

Stefan leaned forward: gregarious, coy, heartbroken no longer, the dark circles gone from under his eyes, his blonde hair bright once more. “Anyway, is it true—about the Sydney boss? About Richard?”

She thought she’d escaped all that. “There’s so much about him.” Dread flooded her. “Which bit do you mean?”

“His surname, Pickard—but nobody called him Dick Pic?”

“No!” She laughed with surprise and relief. “At least, not to his face.”

“Seems like a missed opportunity.”

“It does,” Coralie said. “Though, actually…”

But Stefan’s phone screen lit up and the moment to confide was gone.

She turned down his invitation to join him and Marcus for dinner and drinks.

As she walked home from Clerkenwell, her body was in London, but her mind was back where she came from, revisiting her past, her failures, her exile, her disgrace, all scattered around her flat in the form of notes and drafts and questions.

Her work was taking shape. She rushed to get back to the page.

But when she reached Broadway Market, she saw the pub next door was having a late one.

People spilled out onto the street, falling into one another’s arms and shouting.

Inside, the music pounded away, ignored by everybody, enjoyed by nobody, ruining Coralie’s mental health, sleep, and life!

The mood she’d created, the head of steam she’d built up, her drive to make herself clear and known—it turned gray and drifted away like a cloud of secondhand smoke.

She liked the city, and her life in it, which she knew was only just beginning and which she was sure would become deeper, more rich.

But she could just as easily (and she felt it very strongly at that moment, standing there in her tiny flat, listening to other people’s songs) disappear right then—simply evaporate! And no one would really care.

···

When she woke late the next day, the connection to her writing remained dead.

She made a lentil soup to take in for work lunches.

She sprinkled the kitchen sink with bicarb soda and scrubbed until it was spotless.

She took down the fan grille in her windowless bathroom and vacuumed it.

She straightened her papers into piles. By midafternoon she was exhausted, famished, and overwhelmed by a critical internal voice telling her, not incorrectly, she’d wasted her entire day.

She slid her journal into a tote bag, walked down the length of the market, and ordered fish and chips at the Dove.

Wine in hand, she ducked away from the crowded main dining room to the smaller, more private tables at the side. At one of them, newspapers open and spread messily around him, sat the man.

Amid the hustle and crowding in the pub she felt safe, standing there, studying him for a bit.

By the lake, she’d been startled by the directness of his gaze.

At Climpsons, or—more accurately—afterward, in the privacy of her flat, in the form of an email to Elspeth, she’d considered his brown eyes, his brown hair, his smile.

As he looked down, studying the papers, she was able to study his profile.

He had a big nose and a nice square chin.

Wasn’t that what had driven Sylvia Plath so wild she’d bitten Ted Hughes’s cheek?

Her glass wobbled in her hand. She stepped back around the wall.

Down in the depths of the pub near the toilets, it was too cramped and dark to take out her notebook and write.

From the bench next to her, a small Italian greyhound stared mournfully at her plate.

“Can dogs eat fish and chips,” she typed into her phone.

“By feeding your dog human food such as fish and chips, they could miss out on the forty-one essential nutrients required for optimal canine health.” Forty-one?

She admired, from a professional standpoint, how using an unsourced fact added extra weight to this vague advisory from a manufacturer of pet food.

“I’m sorry, I can’t. Don’t hate me,” she told the Italian greyhound.

He turned his back on her and placed his tiny head in his owner’s lap.

“Breaking a dog’s heart now,” a man said. It was the man. “Is that really true about Colin Firth being two meters tall?”