She’d posted the letter, then spent two hours beginning to recreate her composition from the scraps of what she remembered. Despite the difficulty of the task, she eventually concluded that it had been a good thing to throw it out and start again. She had feared that her tricksy muse had gone, that the spirit of diabolus in musica had grown bored waiting and left her, but as soon as she started to hum the main theme, it returned, along with her passion. The piece crackled with an urgency that it had lacked in its previous incarnation. In her head she could hear an orchestra playing it; she could even picture herself performing the solo, an image so clear that she could see the exact blue of the dress she would wear, the curve of the stage and the lighting. She could envisage the rapt faces of the audience members, shivers traveling through them and right back to Ruby, on stage. And the applause, washing over her, endless waves of it.

Time was sucked away, and soon the night was almost over. It was just before dawn when she took her makeup off, and Ruby was fizzing with possibility, with positive thoughts of change. She made a pact with herself to start going to bed earlier, to train herself back into normality before she returned to teaching in a few weeks’ time. Perhaps she didn’t need to stay away so long; she felt so much better. She would ring Barbara and ask to return to work. And she would stop trying to spy on Gregor (she rolled the new name around in her head, relishing the roundness of the vowels, the soft consonants) because that was not normal behavior, was it? Even as she thought this, she went through to the kitchen and found herself looking over at Gregor’s apartment building, hoping to see him there, softly lit by a side lamp, tackling a tricky inversion.

The big window was dark, though this time the blinds were open. She turned the lights off and stood, imagining herself on the other side of the drop, standing in his living room, looking over here. The fantasy was so vivid that she could actually see the outline of herself in his window. She pressed a palm to her own window and gazed at the image of her future self, so content to be inside Gregor’s apartment, waiting perhaps to start the yoga routine that they would perform together now. He would teach her; she would be a good student, and the lessons would calm her anxious mind.

Then, she froze, fear chilling her, running up her spine. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The outline she had just imagined had taken shape, become solid, a dark figure forming in front of her eyes as she stared: there really was someone there, standing in the shadowed room, looking out. Not Gregor; it was a woman.