Lucy told the flight attendant that she wouldn’t need any breakfast but would love a Bloody Mary. She was impatient to get airborne so that she could try to get some sleep. As she buckled her seat belt she felt a weird spasm clutching at the muscles of her right leg, like the cramps that sometimes attack the arch of a foot but spread over a much larger area and more spasmodic. She sat up slightly in her seat and gripped the armrests until the sensation subsided. This had happened twice before in the last few weeks and she had taken the view that it was a panic attack. It was certainly frightening but hardly surprising that some kind of symptom had emerged from what was probably the most stressful and sleep-deprived month of her adult life. After her visa renewal had been unexpectedly rejected, Strategy had offered to transfer her to London, but she had decided to accept Hunter’s offer instead, leaving her not only homeless and switching continents but also starting a new job. And then there was Nathan.

During the last four years in New York she had been living with Nathan, her rich and handsome American boyfriend, whose close-knit family had grown to treat her as one of their own. Nathan’s parents, with their waterfront compound on Long Island and their large brownstone in the West Village, and their three grown children all living in charming apartments in the same neighbourhood, had given Lucy, through their warmth and inclusiveness, free from the stresses of poverty and mental illness, a radically different experience of family life from the one she had been brought up with. When she discovered that she had to leave the States, Nathan had said that the obvious solution was for them to get married. She would acquire American citizenship and become further integrated into his splendid family. Their relationship had gone on for so long, and Lucy was so well liked, that there was a collective assumption in Nathan’s family that the two of them would end up together anyway, so why not now, when it was useful as well as romantic. For Lucy, Nathan’s proposal had made her realise that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him, or indeed any more time at all. The sudden pressure had forced her to recognise that their relationship had long depended on the trance of habit and the fear of loss. At first, he argued against her rejection by invoking his passion and the depth of their history, but when she persisted in refusing him, it became clear that he found it impossible to imagine a woman from such a fragile background turning down such an advantageous offer.