There was a curse in those flames. There was her guilt, her pain.

There was a letter. There was burning paper.

Then there was ash.

Then nothing.

Epilogue

That night Norah slept deeply and dreamlessly and when she woke in the morning, she felt more refreshed than she’d felt for a long time. She got up, made herself an espresso and drank it standing at the window with a cigarette. Then she set to and unpacked the boxes.

Twice, tears came to her eyes when she found herself holding things Alex had given her—both times, she wiped them away, blew her nose and carried on. When she had finished, she collapsed, exhausted, on the sofa and put on the TV.

The world hadn’t improved overnight. Greed, blood, splinters of bone. Norah felt the old fury rise inside her and was reminded of something Wolfgang Balder had once said to her. I bet that if I were to take a scalpel and cut open your chest I’d find a heart that’s every bit as black as mine.

The TV showed images from a civil war zone, then cut to a devastating oil slick. Balder was right, Norah thought. However much love there was in her heart, there was also a hell of a lot of anger. Images of a killing spree flashed up onto the screen. Norah finished her coffee; it had gone cold. Maybe, she thought, it’s okay to be angry. Maybe it makes sense to be angry. Maybe I have a right to my anger.

Maybe the question isn’t what I feel, but what I do with my feelings.

She switched off the TV.

When she picked up her phone and opened her inbox, she found an email from Werner with the subject line Special Mission. At last—the information she had asked for, address and all. Norah wrote back, thanking Werner. She immediately felt quite different; now she could do something useful. She took an envelope from her desk drawer and wrote:

From a friend.

Then she got dressed and went out into the evening light.

The beauty of Vienna hit her with full force; she walked through the streets, drinking great gulps of the wintry city. The Karlskirche, the little florists, the sumptuous opera house, the horse-drawn carriages clattering past the old hotels, the cakeshop windows. And the charm, the elegance, the beauty of the people. It was as if she were seeing it all for the first time. On a sudden impulse, Norah went into a newsagent and asked for a packet of Gauloises.

‘You’re smiling like you’ve won the lottery,’ said the man who served her, a little man in an old-fashioned suit.

‘The city’s so beautiful,’ Norah replied. ‘I hadn’t noticed until now.’

‘A wise woman once wrote: We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are,’ he said, handing her the cigarettes.

Norah nodded thoughtfully. There was probably something in that.

The next cash machine was only two streets away.