Chapters (57)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- POPULAR BOOKS FROM THE ERA
- When We Meet Again
- A Conversation with Caroline Beecham about When We Meet Again
- Discussion Guide
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
“I’d start the list with Henry James,” she said.
“What about Walt Whitman?” he asked.
“And Dorothy Parker. Who would be next?”
“Edith Wharton,” they said at the same time and laughed.
He thought then how much he would like to show her New York, and how, like him, she would be as much at home on the Upper West Side as in the West Village, or the Flatiron District, or the Lower East Side. What would she make of the soirees on rooftop terraces watching the sun set over Manhattan, or the walks in Central Park, or the colossal size of the department stores compared to their London cousins? How could she not be impressed by the skyscrapers and the boldness of New York’s architects? He smiled as he imagined taking her to the Waldorf Astoria, where they would eat off porcelain plates; then they would go up to East Fifty-ninth Street and visit Argosy, browsing the floors of the old bookstore. They would navigate the city together, and then—and then what? What was he thinking?
His father was in the hospital, and he was soon to be married to the woman he was planning on spending the rest of his life with. He needed to stop thinking like this; he needed to visit his father and then go to the office, distract himself with work. Then he would see Virginia, everything would return to normal and his life would be the same as it was before.
The driver was talking so fast that Theo couldn’t follow, his Italian accent growing stronger by the minute, just like Theo’s father with his Alsatian. They were immigrants in the American melting pot like hundreds of thousands of others, and Theo suddenly felt as though the differences between Britain and his homeland were every bit as vast as the ocean that separated them. The driver’s voice droned on, and Theo turned his hands over, tearing at the quick then biting at his fingernails. It troubled him that he was so distracted by another country and a foreign woman. It didn’t make sense—he’d planned his life, it had been following a trajectory, so why was he questioning it all now?
He wiped his hands across his face, the roughness of two-day stubble pricking at his palms. All he needed was a shave, a shower—something the English didn’t believe in—and sleep, and then he’d be himself again.
But first he needed to see his parents.
