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Cam opens her eyes and London plays out around her exactly as it was. Another bus passes loudly nearby. A busker down the road plays ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. And all the while, a courtyard with no one in it, only her, alone, the way it always is.

She stares at her feet and waits, doing nothing more than that. It’s ten past nine. It’s twenty past nine. It’s twenty-five past, and nobody is coming. Her heart begins a slow and sad descent down her chest, disappointment made worse by its tessellation with shame. Was it him, and he didn’t show? Or was it never him, just spam? Or someone else? Someone who knows something? And if it was him … was she going to just forgive him for a notorious double murder and seven years’ abandonment?

She wanders out of the courtyard, past a locked door that seems to lead to a small basement office, down the alleyway and out on to another quintessentially London street: Amazon lockers, rows of electric bikes for hire, a Tesco Express. Things are different these days and yet the same.

Cam shivers in the June twilight. In the autumn, as soon as the sun slides lower and the light fades to amber, something in Cam relaxes. But here, walking in the musky heat, it’s as if no time has passed at all since that summer seven years ago.

Nine thirty, nine forty, and Cam hurries now, leaving the scene. She walks back down the high street and gets the Tube. She’ll tell Libby, if she asks, that Charlie bailed early on her, and then, later, she will get into bed and hide under the duvet, alone. She won’t admit she was out, alone on a street, waiting for a ghost from the past, like always.

Of course. Of course he let her down and didn’t come. Like always, she thinks angrily, while the Underground puffs and shakes its way around London.

It probably wasn’t even him, but, nevertheless, Cam’s anger at her estranged husband flares back up.

She was always a reader but, these days, she buries herself in books and work. The cocktails and the anti-publishing chat with Charlie are not real. This is true Cam: she represents wide-ranging fiction, but her taste could be described easily in one word: escapism. There’s a German word for this, too, Weltschmerz . Translated as world-grief. To Cam, it is perfect.

She goes through her submissions, tracking the ones she wants to request in her dedicated notebook. She looks at what’s at the top of the Kindle store, and finally opens a manuscript she requested yesterday.

Marrakech, 2022

The call to prayer wakes me. A singular man’s voice, shortly thereafter joined by a second, then a whole chorus. Pearlescent, early skies, amber at their edges, pink at the top. Flat-roofed, pale-stone buildings. I shouldn’t be here. And I don’t know it now, but life is about to change for ever.

Cam reads and reads. She’s in Morocco, she’s a male, middle-aged ex-spy called Alfie. She’s not separated from Luke; she’s not following coordinates. She’s not abandoned Charlie to finish a goat’s cheese tart alone. She’s someone else. Someplace else.

She reads the whole way home, feeling safely ensconced in another world. She barely feels the hot and stale Tube air around her, doesn’t see the flickering lights and doesn’t feel the jarring carriage.

But as she climbs the steps at Putney, she feels it. Something intangible. A shivering creeping at the back of her neck, like an ice cube touched just lightly to hot skin.

She turns around on the spot. Just beyond the Tube exit are a street artist and two market researchers holding clipboards, hoping to engage pedestrians. Nothing else. She presses her debit card to the barrier, trying to forget. Maybe he’s nowhere. Maybe he is dead.

Funny. She was so sure it was him, she never considered that it might be somebody else. Somebody sinister. Somebody dangerous. Her back shudders as she thinks it, and she makes her way home, alone, like she always does. She tells herself she’s used to it now. The solo bedtimes and books and television shows she watches by herself and the lone mug she washes up before bed.

But it had been nice to think it might have an end in sight.