The man behind the counter greeted Lindsay with a nod as she sat at a small table by the door, and busied himself with the espresso machine. He brought her usual cappuccino over to the table, exchanged a few pleasantries about the New Year, and left her to her paper. Lindsay tore open the wrapper and unfolded the paper. Before she could take in the headlines, her eye was caught by a box on the side of the page trailing the attractions in the rest of the paper. “Cordelia Brown: Booker Prize this time?”

Lindsay’s stomach churned and she reached instinctively for a cigarette. She hardly smoked at all these days, but this wasn’t something she could face nicotine-free. With trembling fingers, she turned to the review section. The whole of the front page was devoted to an interview with her . . . how should she describe Cordelia these days? Her lover? Her former lover? Her lover-in-abeyance?

At first, Lindsay had been too busy covering her tracks and establishing a safe routine to miss Cordelia. Because their relationship had hit a rough patch before Lindsay left, she’d stopped noticing all the ways in which she had relied on Cordelia. Now she was alone in a foreign country, she had begun to realize how much she had depended on her lover. The problems they’d had had all been external—the unpredictable pressures of Lindsay’s job as a national newspaper journalist, the paralyzing writer’s block that had gripped Cordelia. Deep down, Lindsay had slowly come to understand, their relationship had been founded on solid ground. Knowing she had walked away from that because of her stubborn adherence to principle was the hardest thing Lindsay had had to deal with since her arrival in Italy.

But now she’d decided to go home, she also began to see how they could start to rebuild their life together. There was no way she wanted to go back into national newspaper journalism, even supposing anyone would have her. Whatever else she chose to do would provide a more straightforward life. No more shift working, late nights, and unpredictable overnight stays away from home. And, judging by this article that she was deliberately postponing reading, Cordelia had cured her writer’s block.

Lindsay gulped a mouthful of hot coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the words. “Eighteen months ago, Cordelia Brown feared she’d never write another novel,” she read. Too true, Lindsay remembered with a sweet sadness. She had been the one caged in that beautiful London house with Cordelia while she paced the floor restlessly, ranting about her vanished talent. In vain, Lindsay had tried to reassure her, pointing to her successes as a television scriptwriter. “Pap and crap,” Cordelia had spat back at her before storming out of the room to spend yet more hours motionless in front of the blank screen of her word processor.