Her first day in Sydney, the summer light slowly growing out of noon: with the curtains drawn in their recessed track, the dim light in the Darlinghurst hotel room was orange and abject. From the desk, Emily picked up the menu, sticky with fingerprints, and cleared away the tent cards that offered instructions about room service and the minibar. She plugged in her laptop and sat on the bed, removing her clothes while the computer started.

An email from Michael:

Em,

I don’t know how to explain what’s happened in my life. Not being able to express myself is the best expression of how I feel about Therese. Is that a cop-out? She came as a surprise to me, too.

I’ll move out before you get back to London. This month’s rent is all sorted. And good luck, I know this article will turn out well.

Michael

Emily presumed that when Michael wrote, I know this article will turn out well, what he really meant was: Your ideas are mediocre and that mediocrity is one of the reasons I fell in love with someone else. Perhaps he felt galvanised by the end of their marriage. He was already deep in a long retreat from their relationship, the stupid bastard, while she was left to feel—something else. She deleted his email and picked up her blouse, a thirty-sixth birthday gift from Michael, throwing it into the bin. How much of her life would he and Therese spoil? It felt as though the hotel room door was wide open and the two lovers (Emily hated that word) could storm in and take whatever they wanted.

On their first date, Emily and Michael shared dinner and went to a pub, where he told her about his elder brother, whose body he found one afternoon at the family house in Coventry. This catastrophe—this meteorite on the family—occurred after the brother had been through drug rehabilitation and moved home and found a job cleaning the windows of shop fronts in the centre of town. Michael came in from school and found his brother dead of an overdose in the bathroom. And Emily told him about her father, whose suicide she witnessed as a girl. She had a sense of these stories joining, of their histories clicking into place. They had seen the same things. They knew the same sorrows. That night in the pub on St Giles High Street, Emily felt certain that she and Michael would fall in love; that they were already together in grief, and now they would build a happy life together.