“Do you think you will ever fall in love again, Katie?” asked Hugo.

“I doubt it. Why should I?”

“Why should you indeed?”

“I’ve done all that. Once or twice too often, in fact.” “You could try loving me,” said Hugo.

“But I do love you. I adore you.”

“Of course.”

“This,” said Kate, “is turning into a terrible conversation.”

“But we both like terrible conversations.”

“No, I think this is just a little bit too terrible, even for me.”

“Nothing is too terrible,” said Hugo.

And they both fell silent, and looked at one another. A lot of past time filled up the space between them, solid but transparent, as thin and clear as water. Unlived lives, roads not taken, roads blocked, children not born, ghosts and shadows.

“It’s a pity,” said Hugo, “that we have only one life. In another life, things could have been so different.”

“I sometimes think,” said Kate, looking at Hugo, so close and so remote, so familiar and yet so incomprehensibly obscure, “that that’s not even true, that we are all of us living other lives, kind of just out of sight, just round the corner from our conscious lives, that if you were to roll it all up together, your life and mine, the lived and the unlived, it would be something quite different, a whole life, not a half-life, many whole lives, the shadows of our own as they roll along, and perhaps this one, you and me sitting here, is just the shadow of what we are doing elsewhere, in some other world, in some other part of our being. I can’t believe that this is all. Us at this table. How can it be all?”

“Two minutes ago,” said Hugo, staring at her intently as she paused, breathless, after this little flight, “you said you were resigned.”

“Yes,” said Kate. “Yes. It is because I am resigned that I am obliged to invent all this stuff about other worlds.”

And she smiled at him with an air of slightly crazed triumph, of logic, of conquest, her head lifted, her bright blue eyes meeting his cold grey eyes with a challenge, for all those things to which they, perforce, had resigned themselves.

“Kate,” said Hugo. “You are wonderful. In fact, you are sublime.”