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Chapters (86)
  1. Title Page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. Love
  4. Before
  5. One
  6. ONE
  7. Two
  8. TWO
  9. Three
  10. THREE
  11. Four
  12. FOUR
  13. Five
  14. FIVE
  15. Six
  16. SIX
  17. Seven
  18. SEVEN
  19. Eight
  20. EIGHT
  21. Nine
  22. NINE
  23. Ten
  24. TEN
  25. Eleven
  26. ELEVEN
  27. After
  28. One
  29. ONE
  30. Two
  31. TWO
  32. Three
  33. THREE
  34. Four
  35. FOUR
  36. Five
  37. FIVE
  38. Six
  39. SIX
  40. Seven
  41. SEVEN
  42. Eight
  43. EIGHT
  44. Nine
  45. NINE
  46. Ten
  47. TEN
  48. Eleven
  49. ELEVEN
  50. Twelve
  51. TWELVE
  52. Thirteen
  53. THIRTEEN
  54. Fourteen
  55. FOURTEEN
  56. Fifteen
  57. FIFTEEN
  58. Sixteen
  59. SIXTEEN
  60. Seventeen
  61. SEVENTEEN
  62. Eighteen
  63. EIGHTEEN
  64. Nineteen
  65. NINETEEN
  66. Twenty
  67. TWENTY
  68. Twenty-One
  69. TWENTY-ONE
  70. Twenty-Two
  71. TWENTY-TWO
  72. Twenty-Three
  73. TWENTY-THREE
  74. Twenty-Four
  75. TWENTY-FOUR
  76. Twenty-Five
  77. TWENTY-FIVE
  78. Twenty-Six
  79. TWENTY-SIX
  80. Twenty-Seven
  81. TWENTY-SEVEN
  82. Twenty-Eight
  83. TWENTY-EIGHT
  84. Eleven Months Later
  85. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  86. Copyright

But Poppy doesn’t say anything, her gaze drifting to my neck. It takes me a second, but I realise that she’s staring at my necklace and I instinctively reach for it, pressing the scythe pendant between my forefinger and thumb. She copies me, pressing her St Christopher pendant between her forefinger and thumb as she lifts her chin to look at me. Our eyes meet and it’s the first time I’ve really let myself look at her, avoiding it until now in case I saw how angry she is and everything would change and I’d no longer be the person she met on that boat.

Or maybe it’s not what I’d see, it’s what I wouldn’t see.

That she wouldn’t look at me the way she used to – like I’m the only thing she can see for miles and miles.

Sometimes, when I’m lying on the sofa in the bookshop, looking up at the ceiling, I wonder if I’ve conjured her out of some heady mix of loneliness and nostalgia. If time has softened her, made her eyes bluer and her hair redder, blurred it all away until she becomes this fanciful, too-perfect thing, like a fairytale princess trapped in a castle, waiting for me to rescue her. But, looking at her now, I know I didn’t. Even with an angry scrape on her chin and mascara lines down her face, as though someone has been drawing on it with pencil, she’s beautiful. Her cheeks pink and her eyes as blue as I remember, the mascara cried away so that the moonlight catches on the curve of her eyelashes. And even though I’m scared because I know what it means – why she can see me, what’s going to happen to her – I can’t help but feel unspeakably lucky.

Lucky that she’s right there.

Lucky that I get to see her face one more time.

And she gets to see mine.

‘I knew it was you outside the Dome earlier,’ she says, at last. ‘It didn’t look like you, but, I don’t know.’ She stops, looking at my scythe necklace again. ‘That’s why I came here. Because I was thinking about you.’

I knew it.

I knew that when she saw me, she’d know it was me.

I feel a sharp shiver of hope as I remember that it’s her and it’s me and it’s us and maybe it really is that simple. Maybe she wanted to see me so much and I wanted to see her so much that the sheer force of it was enough to shift her world closer to mine, or mine closer to hers, and now we’re both here, at the same time.