I pull back, undecided, but my momentum carries me forward into another human chest, female chest.

Oomph! she says, and snatches me by the arms. I lift my hands to push away. I spy a coat, a neck, a fringe of blond hair gathered into a bun.

The woman in the foyer.

“Miss Thorpe?” I gasp.

Her eyes are paler than her brother’s, but I recognize the shape, and the straight, thick eyebrows, though his are a darker gold. The same milky skin, the same freckles. She has pointed cheekbones, a wide, red mouth, a slim jaw. I’m able to drink in all these details because the world seems to have gone still, the clock seems to have stopped, and even the molecules of air, the motes of dust, have stuck in place. Only my blood moves, against the scorched skin of my right hand.

“You must be Leonora,” she says.

“Yes.”

She snatches my elbow and pulls me down the sidewalk. “Come along, quick. My flat’s just around the corner.”

And it occurs to me, as I career along in her wake, that this is just how her brother appeared in my life. Out of the blue in some foreign land, like a genie from a lamp, just when you needed a wish granted.

Lulu

June 1941

(The Bahamas)

On the magazine cover, the woman sits on a rattan sofa and the man sits on the floor at her feet, gazing not at the camera but upward, adoringly, at her. She smiles back in approval. She has a book in her lap, open to the frontispiece or maybe the table of contents—she doesn’t look as if she actually means to read it—and in her hair, a ribbon topped with a bow. (A bow, I tell you.) A pair of plump Union Jack sofa pillows flanks either side of her. A real domestic scene, a happy couple in a tasteful home. the windsor team, reads the caption, in small, discreet letters at the bottom. At the top, much larger, white type inside a block of solid red: l i f e.