There was a Brody Smith who was a researcher at Stanford.

A travel writer based in New Zealand who spent six months of the year sailing around the South Pacific on his boat.

An up-and-coming sixteen-year-old actor, who already had a legion of besotted teenage girls following his every move on social media.

Anna looked through them all but nothing matched. Her curiosity had been fanned fully into flame at that point, so she switched to Google. It was much the same story there. So many Brody Smiths! And that didn’t even include the ones who also had middle names. There was a Brody Michael Smith, a Brody Alexander Smith, even a Brody Zephaniah Smith.

She clicked on Brody Zephaniah Smith, just because it was an unusual name, and discovered he’d been a fire and brimstone preacher from the 1920s, now sadly deceased. After that, she decided to switch to a search page of images for the same name rather than text because then she could filter out the sepia and black-and-white photos that were part of people’s family history records, or Brodys who were too old or too young to match the one she was searching for.

She looked at the top row of results and clicked on the first colour thumbnail she saw, but it turned out to be a website for a children’s author called Brody Alexander (no Smith attached at the end – Google must have glitched). Had she heard of him? She clicked on ‘About’ on the author’s website and had a read. Nope. He lived in London and he was married.

Before she closed the page down, she glanced at the black-and-white photo beside the biography. Not bad. Dark hair. A bit rougher around the edges than you’d expect a children’s author to look. Younger than she was looking for, possibly the same as her, early thirties, so that was all wrong, too. He was looking into the camera and not exactly smiling, but there was a hint of it in his eyes. Anna looked more closely. There was something there, something that made her stomach flip a little. Could it be…?

She studied the photograph for a good ten seconds, all the while feeling slightly breathless, but then she clicked the ‘x’ at the corner of the webpage to make it disappear.

No. It wasn’t right. His expression had been too… youthful, too fresh and unsullied by the darkness that life could bring. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t her Brody.

Because her Brody had a secret.

She was more certain of it every time they spoke. It was something to do with his wife, she was sure, something about his grief and loss. She’d tried probing a few times, but as she’d already discovered, he was very adept at conversational sleight-of-hand. She supposed she could try harder, but when it came down to it, she discovered she didn’t want to. If it was too painful to talk about, she should let him be. If anyone understood that it was her.