Piotr had arrived in London with absolutely no money whatsoever, nothing more than the bus fare to Victoria station. He had spent the first six months, when he couldn’t afford even to eke out a beer, at the Polish Centre and walking around and around the huge, terrifying, expensive city, walking for miles along unfamiliar sidewalks with foreign signs and extraordinary monuments and strange things. So he was taking Kim-Ange to somewhere he really liked, because you could be a tourist for only so long before you started getting deeper and deeper into what was around you, and one of his endless drizzly Sunday walks had taken him to this enchanted spot.

Piotr wasn’t 100 percent up on the difference between South Korean and Japanese but thought she might like it, and he was right, she did.

Buried deep in Holland Park, well off the main thoroughfares and hard to find unless you already knew it was there, was Kyoto Garden, its colors burnished and bright in the West London evening, full of exotic plants and knotted trees and streams with little bridges. There was nobody there, but a pair of cranes nested at the water’s edge, just below the waterfall. It was breathtakingly lovely.

Piotr opened the rucksack he had been clunking all the way from the tube station, and he pulled out one large bottle of brown beer, one smaller one of vodka, a bag of dumplings one of his substitute aunties at the Polish club had rustled up for him, a box of sushi just in case, and a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk. Kim-Ange grinned widely and grabbed the vodka and the chocolate.

“Normally I hate picnics,” she said, looking around at the tranquil site, the water trickling through the curves of the beautifully made little streams with wooden bridges, smooth rocks, and carp. “But I might make an exception for you.”

And some time later, Piotr was sitting giving bits of dumpling to the fish until Kim-Ange made him stop and they found their two hands together, and their heads even closer, and suddenly, as the fish bubbled in the water and the waterfall tinkled overhead and there was a faint rustling of perfectly manicured fronds, but nobody else at all, they kissed, and even if there was a whole London, a whole eight million people, around them, they were not aware of another soul.

STROLLING BACK TO the tube station, giggly, tripping over their feet, clutching hands, Kim-Ange whispered something into his ear. Piotr shook his head.

“To me, you are only yourself,” he said stoutly, for his diminutive figure, his narrow hips and short height, belied a man with the heart of a lion. “Only yourself.”

Chapter 54

Lissa supposed people liked fairground rides for the same reason they liked scary films: the freedom of knowing that you felt a little frightened but you were actually incredibly safe.