Then she remembers: she’s in London. Yeats’s house with its blue enamel plaque by the door. It’s hers—her new home in the city. She’s out of the rural purgatory of Devon, the red muck and bawling animals and isolation of her crumbling ancient farmhouse, home now in a poet’s flat that seemed fated for her. All hers—she didn’t have to share credit with anyone. But there he is, inevitably: Ted.

He’d met her at the train station the day she’d come house-hunting last month, an inscrutable shadow shambling along behind through three dank, unacceptable maisonettes. Though it was later, after he’d escaped their latest failure into the tiled entrance of the Chalk Farm tube, his black back hunched in his coat and descending into dark as she watched him leave, another step, the ring of his boot on the stair, so quickly it was over—

It was later, on her own, when she’d seen the sign on her way to her London doctor’s office, her infected thumb oozy and pink, rotting apple swollen, pulsing out its distress on her hand. Hurrying over the footbridge and down the Georgian arcade of Gloucester Avenue, her thumb in its bandages aloft and signalling her defeat, then around the corner and suddenly FLATS TO LET next to the blue sign. Address: 23 Fitzroy Road.