Anna's POV
The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old leather.
Small mercies.
Anna settled into the backseat and pulled the door shut and the sound of the gala — the music, the laughter, the two hundred people performing their careful happiness — disappeared as completely as if it had never existed. Just like that. One door between her and all of it and suddenly there was only the quiet hum of the engine and the rain tapping its patient fingers against the windows and the city sliding past in long streaks of amber and silver.
"Rough night?" the driver asked.
He was older. Somewhere in his sixties, she guessed, with a flat cap and the particular unhurried energy of a man who had driven enough people through enough London nights to have stopped being surprised by any of them.
Anna almost laughed.
"Something like that," she said.
He nodded with the wisdom of a man who knew when not to ask follow up questions. She appreciated that about him immediately and completely.
"Whereabouts in Ellison Road?"
"Number fourteen," she said. "Just before the junction."
"Right you are."
And that was the entirety of it. He turned his eyes back to the road and she turned hers to the window and the city moved around them both in its enormous indifferent way, asking nothing, offering everything, the way London always did at night when you needed it to simply be large enough to contain whatever you were carrying.
She watched it pass.
Piccadilly first — still busy even at this hour, the restaurants and bars throwing warm light onto wet pavements, people spilling out of doorways in groups of three and four, laughing at things, leaning into each other, entirely at home in their ordinary evenings. Then the quieter streets beyond, the ones that London kept for itself — narrow and rain-darkened, the buildings pressing close on either side, centuries of history stacked in the brickwork like sediment. Street lamps throwing gold circles on black puddles. A night bus moving through an intersection like a slow red thought.
She had missed this.
That surprised her. She hadn't expected to feel anything about the city tonight beyond the desperate need to get home, but sitting in the back of this cab watching London do what London did — simply existing, magnificently and without effort — she felt something loosen very slightly in her chest. Not relief exactly. Something quieter. The particular comfort of a place that has known you long enough to require nothing from you.
She had spent the last seven years in the polished, curated version of this city. Ryan's London — the penthouses and the private members clubs and the restaurants where the tables were always ready and the streets were always clean and the people were always exactly where they were supposed to be. Beautiful and controlled and faintly suffocating in the way that very perfect things always are.
This London — the cab and the rain and the night bus and the narrow streets — this was hers.
She pressed her fingers lightly against the cold glass of the window.
I'm home, she thought, and didn't entirely know what she meant by it.
Number fourteen Ellison Road was a narrow Victorian terrace in a quiet street in Notting Hill that had never quite decided whether it was fashionable or not and had settled comfortably into the ambiguity. The building was divided into four flats and Anna's was on the second floor — up a staircase that creaked on the third and seventh steps and nowhere else, a detail she had forgotten entirely until her foot found the third step in the dark and the familiar groan rose to meet her like an old greeting.
She stopped on the landing.
Stared at her own front door.
Dark blue paint, slightly scuffed at the bottom corner where she had bumped it with her bicycle too many times. The brass number four screwed slightly crooked to the wood, the way it had been since she moved in and the way she had always meant to fix and never gotten around to. A small crack in the plaster of the door frame that she had filled once with putty and painted over and which had quietly reappeared within a month, patient and permanent.
All of it exactly as she had left it.
Five years ago.
Her hands were not entirely steady as she found her key.
The flat exhaled when she pushed the door open.
That was the only word for it — it exhaled, the way closed rooms do when they've been holding their breath, releasing the particular smell of a space that belonged specifically and entirely to her. Old books and the faint ghost of the vanilla candles she burned when she was reading and the specific quality of air that accumulates in a place where one person has lived quietly and contentedly alone.
She stood in the doorway for a long moment without moving.
The lamp on the side table was still on — she had left it on that morning, five years ago, the morning of the day she had gone to the Red Moon Gala and met the man who would become her husband and her murderer. She had left the lamp on because she always left it on when she went out at night, a habit from childhood, something about coming home to a lit room that had always felt like the difference between arriving and returning.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
The living room was small and imperfect and so completely hers that standing in it felt like stepping back into her own skin after wearing someone else's for a very long time. The bookshelf that covered the entire left wall — crammed and overflowing, books shelved horizontally on top of books shelved vertically, paperbacks wedged into every available gap, the system entirely illegible to anyone but her. The reading chair by the window with the slightly uneven leg that she had compensated for with a folded piece of cardboard she'd never replaced. The rug she had bought at a market in Portobello Road on a Sunday morning three years before Ryan, the colours faded now to something softer and better than they had originally been.
She moved through it slowly.
Trailing her fingers along the spine of the bookshelf the way you trail your hand along a wall in the dark — for the comfort of the contact as much as anything else.
She stopped at the side table beside the bookshelf.
The photographs.
They were arranged the way she had arranged them — casually, without symmetry, the way photographs look when they've accumulated naturally rather than been curated. Her parents on a beach somewhere in Cornwall, her mother laughing at something off camera, her father squinting into the sun with the specific expression of a man who has been asked to stand still for too long. Her university friends — Priya and Sophie and James — at someone's birthday in a pub somewhere, all of them slightly too loud and slightly too happy, the way you are at twenty-one when happiness still feels like a surplus rather than a resource to be managed.
And then the one she hadn't remembered was there.
Imperial College. Convocation day. Three years ago now — three years ago from this version of now, which meant it hadn't happened yet from the version of now she had woken up inside this morning, which was a thought so dizzying she set it aside immediately.
She picked it up.
The frame was simple silver, slightly tarnished at the corners. In the photograph she was standing in her graduation gown in the courtyard outside the main building, holding her degree certificate, squinting slightly in the July sun. Priya was on her left, mid-laugh about something. Sophie on her right, perfect as always even in an academic gown.
And there — two people to the right of Sophie, slightly behind the main group, caught in the frame by accident rather than intention — Ryan.
Also in his graduation gown. Also holding his certificate. Looking not at the camera but at something slightly to the left of it, his expression caught in that unguarded way that candid photographs sometimes manage — relaxed and young and entirely unaware of being observed.
She had looked at this photograph a hundred times over the years and never once registered that he was in it.
Her thumb moved very slowly across the glass over his face.
She set it back down.
She changed out of the emerald dress in the bedroom — carefully, the way you handle something that has been through a significant evening — and hung it in the wardrobe and put on the oversized university sweatshirt and the soft grey trousers that lived on the chair beside her bed because she was always meaning to put them away and never did.
She made tea.
The ritual of it helped — the kettle, the mug, the teabag, the specific number of seconds before she removed it. Small sequential tasks that the hands could perform while the mind was somewhere else entirely. She stood at the kitchen counter while the tea cooled and looked at the stack of notebooks on the shelf above the counter — her university notes, her personal journals, three years of her own handwriting documenting a life that felt simultaneously entirely familiar and impossibly distant.
She pulled one down.
Her diary from this year. This specific year, five years ago. She turned to today's date with hands that weren't quite steady and found the entry she had written that morning — that other morning, the morning before the gala, the morning before everything.
Red Moon Gala tonight. Priya says I have to go. Wearing the green dress. Probably won't know anyone. Might leave early.
Six lines. Cheerful. Completely ordinary. Written by a woman who had no idea what was waiting for her in a ballroom that evening.
Anna stared at the entry for a long time.
Then she turned to the next page — blank, because tomorrow hadn't happened yet — and picked up the pen that lived in the diary's spine.
She held it over the empty page.
And found she had absolutely nothing to write. No words adequate to the task of documenting what had happened to her. No sentence that could hold it. She sat with the pen hovering over the blank page for a long moment and then set it down and closed the diary and finished her tea standing up.
She was almost at the bedroom when she saw it.
On the bottom shelf of the bookcase, wedged between a collection of short stories Priya had given her for her birthday and an economics textbook she had never returned to the university library — a small wrapped package with a note attached in Sophie's handwriting.
For when you need reminding that you're wonderful. Don't open until you mean it. — S
She had forgotten about this entirely. Sophie had left it for her after a particularly bad week in their second year — a week Anna couldn't even fully remember now. She had put it on the shelf meaning to open it and had simply never gotten around to it.
She picked it up. Turned it over in her hands.
Set it back down.
Not tonight, she thought. Tonight I am not wonderful. Tonight I am something else entirely and I don't have a name for it yet.
She went to bed.
She didn't expect to sleep but she did — the deep sudden sleep of a body that has been through something enormous and simply shut down without asking permission, pulling her under before she had finished forming her last conscious thought.
She dreamed of nothing.
Or if she dreamed she didn't remember it, which amounted to the same thing.
The morning came grey and quiet through the gap in the curtains.
Anna opened her eyes and lay completely still for exactly three seconds — the three seconds that exist between sleep and full consciousness where the mind hasn't yet remembered what it's carrying.
Then she remembered.
She sat up slowly. Looked at the room. Her room. Her flat on Ellison Road with the creaking staircase and the crooked brass number four on the door.
Still here.
She checked the date on her phone with the mechanical steadiness of someone who already knows what they're going to find and has decided to verify it anyway.
Still five years ago.
She sat with that for a moment. Then she got up and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the window looking out at the grey Notting Hill morning — the wet rooftops, the pigeons, the man across the street walking a very small dog with enormous ears — and felt, for the first time since she had opened her eyes in that ballroom, something approaching stillness.
Not peace. Not clarity. Not anything as resolved as either of those things.
Just stillness. The eye of something very large and very slow moving.
She was still standing at the window when her phone buzzed against the counter.
She turned.
An unsaved number. A message, short and unelaborate, sitting on her screen in the grey morning light.
It was good to see you last night.
— Ryan
— End of Chapter 4 —