Anna's POV
It was good to see you last night. — Ryan
She read it again.
Eleven words. Completely ordinary. The kind of text a person sends to an old classmate they've run into at a party — polite, warm, undemanding, leaving the door open without pushing through it. The kind of text that in any other life, any other version of this morning, would have made her smile and reach for her phone immediately.
She looked at it again. The screen had locked. She pressed her thumb against it and the message reappeared, sitting there in its little grey bubble, patient and unbothered and completely ignorant of everything it represented.
She set it face down again.
Breakfast first. She needed to eat something. Her body had been through the most impossible night in the history of impossible nights and the least she could do was give it toast.
She moved around the small kitchen with the mechanical efficiency of someone performing tasks to avoid thinking — bread in the toaster, butter from the fridge, the small jar of marmalade on the second shelf that she had always kept stocked because her father had introduced her to marmalade on toast at age six and some habits simply never left. The toaster clicked. She buttered methodically. She ate standing at the counter because sitting felt like a commitment she wasn't ready for.
Outside the grey morning continued its quiet business.
She was halfway through the second piece of toast when someone knocked on the door.
Three knocks. Quick, confident, completely uninterested in whether the timing was convenient.
Anna closed her eyes briefly.
She knew that knock.
Priya Sharma stood in the hallway in an oversized yellow raincoat with two paper cups of coffee from the café on the corner and an expression that said she had already decided this was not a social call.
She was beautiful in the effortless way of someone who genuinely didn't think about it — dark eyes quick and sharp behind thick-framed glasses she'd worn since university, her black hair pulled up in the kind of knot that looked accidental and had taken considerable effort, the yellow raincoat several sizes too large and completely magnificent.
She looked Anna up and down once.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Good morning Priya," Anna said.
"It's eleven thirty." She held out one of the coffees. "You didn't come home last night until very late because I heard your staircase at — honestly it must have been past midnight — and then you didn't text me which means either the gala was so spectacular you forgot I existed or something happened." She paused. "You have the face of someone something happened to."
Anna took the coffee.
Stepped aside to let her in.
Priya moved through the flat the way she always moved through it — immediately and completely at home, dropping onto the reading chair by the window, tucking her feet beneath her, wrapping both hands around her cup. She had been coming to this flat since their first year at Imperial and she inhabited it with the easy familiarity of someone who had long since stopped being a guest.
"So," Priya said. "What happened."
"Nothing happened," Anna said, settling onto the small sofa across from her. "I just didn't sleep well."
Priya looked at her over the rim of her coffee cup with the expression of someone who had known her for years and found this answer deeply insufficient.
"Anna."
"Priya."
"You have the specific face," Priya said, "that you had in second year when you failed that economics module and didn't tell anyone for three weeks. The face of someone quietly catastrophising while pretending to be completely fine."
Anna said nothing.
Which was, she was aware, its own kind of answer.
Priya set her coffee down on the side table. Leaned forward slightly. When she spoke again her voice had dropped the brisk efficiency and become something softer and more careful.
"Did something happen at the gala?"
Anna looked at her — at this woman who had been her closest friend for years, who had sat with her through exam failures and family difficulties and the small accumulated griefs of an ordinary life, who would sit with her through this too if Anna gave her the chance — and felt the overwhelming, almost physical urge to simply tell her everything.
I died last night Priya. I died and then I woke up five years in the past and I saw Ryan Bennett across a ballroom and he was alive and young and I could barely breathe and now he's texted me and I don't know what I am supposed to do with any of it.
She opened her mouth.
"I ran into someone," she said. "From university. It just — threw me a bit."
Priya's eyes sharpened immediately. "Who?"
"Ryan Bennett."
A beat of silence.
"Bennett." Priya said it the way you repeat a word you need a moment to locate in your memory. Then — "Tall? Grey eyes? Did that thing where he won every single argument without ever raising his voice?"
"That's him."
"Hm." Priya picked up her coffee again. Considered. "I always thought he was interesting. In a slightly unnerving way." She looked at Anna carefully. "And seeing him threw you."
"It was just unexpected."
"Right." Priya's tone was the particular tone of someone who believed approximately forty percent of what they were being told and was choosing, for now, not to push on the remaining sixty. "And how was he?"
"Fine," Anna said. "He seemed fine."
He seemed exactly like the man I spent seven years loving and one night watching become something monstrous. "We barely spoke. He said hello. I left."
Priya nodded slowly. The sharp eyes moved over Anna's face with the quiet thoroughness of someone reading a document for the thing it wasn't saying.
Then her phone rang.
She glanced at it and made a face. "It's my mother. I have to — give me two minutes." She stood, already moving toward the hallway, the yellow raincoat swishing. "Don't move. And drink that coffee, you look like you need it intravenously."
She disappeared into the hallway and Anna heard her voice shift immediately into the particular register reserved for mothers — patient and slightly louder than necessary.
Anna looked down at her coffee.
Then at the phone on the counter.
Still face down.
She got up slowly and crossed to the counter and picked it up and looked at the message one more time. Eleven words. Grey bubble. Patient and unbothered.
She thought about not replying. She had been thinking about not replying for the last hour and a half and the thinking had gotten her precisely nowhere because the part of her brain that was slowly, cautiously switching back on — the part that had graduated top of her year from Imperial and understood strategy and leverage and the particular power of controlling the terms of an engagement — that part kept arriving at the same conclusion.
Silence was a wasted move.
She knew things about Ryan Bennett that nobody in this version of London knew. She knew his business trajectory, his connections, the precise timeline of every major decision he would make over the next five years. She knew where the bodies were buried — metaphorically and, she suspected, otherwise. That knowledge was the most valuable thing she possessed and it was absolutely worthless if she cut off access to him before she knew how to use it.
Proximity, something cold and clear said inside her. Proximity is the only weapon that matters right now.
She blinked.
Looked up from the phone.
Caught her own reflection in the dark surface of the kitchen window — and stopped.
It was just a fraction of a second. Less than that. A splinter of a moment so brief she couldn't be entirely certain it had happened at all.
But the face looking back at her from the dark glass was not quite her face.
The features were hers — same jaw, same dark eyes, same hair falling the same way. But the expression. The expression belonged to someone else entirely. Calm in a way that had nothing to do with peace. Precise. Faintly predatory. The expression of something that had been waiting quietly in a dark room for a very long time and had just heard a door open.
Anna's breath stopped.
She blinked.
Her own face looked back at her. Just her face. Tired and pale and entirely ordinary in the grey morning light.
She stood very still for a moment.
Then she looked back down at the phone.
Her thumbs moved before she fully decided to let them.
It was a surprise. London has a way of doing that.
— Anna
She read it back once. Thought about deleting it. Didn't. Pressed send and set the phone down and stepped away from the counter as though creating physical distance from the message she had just sent.
From the hallway Priya's voice rose slightly — "Mum, I know, but I said I would call her back on Tuesday not—"
Anna stood in the middle of her kitchen in her university sweatshirt and her grey trousers and her cold feet on the old tile floor and looked at the space where her reflection had just been.
What was that.
The question sat in her chest, quiet and slightly frightening, with no answer immediately available to attach to it.
She was still looking at the window when her phone lit up on the counter.
A reply. Immediate. As though he had been holding his phone.
She crossed to it slowly.
Picked it up.
Read it.
And the bottom dropped quietly and completely out of her morning.
— End of Chapter 5 —