It was after that day his letters changed. He never said why, or what had happened. He just wrote less, and less often. All the humour had seeped away from what he wrote. There was less and less of Rob on the page. Susannah felt an inexorable shift he was sliding away from her. Her powerlessness and frustration chewed at her all day and she began to dread the aerogrammes in her pigeon hole.

She once read them straight away, leaning against the wall in the post room, desperate to hear him the only way she could. But now she put them in her bag, sometimes not reading them for hours, or until the next day.

She played scenarios over in her head all the time, instead of sleeping Rob killed or injured, or simply rendered unrecognizable by emotional trauma. When she did sleep it was fitful and interrupted by bad dreams. Once, a low-flying plane passed over the halls of residence and she sat bolt upright in shock and panic.

Rob's face silently regarded her from the bedside table.

1991.

Susannah's cashpoint card popped out of the machine, followed by four crisp five-pound notes. She always felt relieved, especially this late in the term, when it spat money at her. The grant covered tuition and board, but the rest came from Dad, and it was running out fast. She couldn't ask him for more. He was keeping Alastair, too. She'd lined up a job at WHSmith for the holidays, and she'd save what she could, but she wasn't earning now. Tucking the money into her denim wallet, she stepped aside to let the next kid in line get to the machine for the moment of truth. Twenty pounds. She'd try to make that last until Sunday. It was Friday night. She had meal tickets for halls, so it was basically beer money, although she needed new shampoo and couldn't do without conditioner, and some of her mates had been talking about going to see a film on Saturday afternoon. She had already bought her five-quid ticket to the bop tomorrow night.

She needed cheering up. She'd had another letter from Rob this morning. Funny seeing his handwriting on an envelope in her pigeon hole. Funny how so recently it thrilled her, and she'd rip the missive open and read it right there and then. If you'd told her even a few months ago how fast the chasm would open up, and how vast it would become, she wouldn't have believed you. It couldn't happen, she'd have said.

But it had happened. Something. She couldn't articulate what. It was subtle and secret, but it had happened. It wasn't only her, she told herself. A girl along her corridor Maria she'd been engaged when she arrived in her first term at uni, to a policeman in Croydon she'd been going out with since she was sixteen. She had a tiny diamond ring on her left hand, and she'd shyly shown it off the first time they'd met. They were going to get married the year she graduated, she said. He would come up every other weekend, and she'd go home for holidays ... They had it all planned out. Susannah remembered how excruciating it had been the first time he'd come. He'd sat in the bar looking like an alien. She'd gone home the next weekend, to break it off.

Everything was different here. Different and fantastic and all-consuming.

She'd been terrified, at first, of course. Everyone was, though some hid it better than others. Mum and Dad had delivered her to Bristol, with two suitcases, a large cardboard box from Waitrose, a yucca plant and a duvet. Dad had driven her mad, going on and trying to arrange the plant and hang her Robert Doisneau posters for her. He'd kept hugging her and saying he couldn't believe his little girl was leaving home. They'd taken her to a Berni Inn for lunch, and then they'd driven off, and she hadn't known whether she was more relieved or bereft to see the car disappear round the corner. She'd never been anywhere before where she didn't know anyone. There were a couple of kids from college here Matt, of course, and some girls she frankly hadn't been that close to but she had no idea where their rooms were, and this place seemed huge, much bigger now she was here than it had appeared when she visited. She'd found the phone room nearest her room more of a cupboard, really, at the end of the corridor next to the stairs and tried calling Amelia on the number she'd left at home yesterday, but whoever answered hadn't known who Amelia was, and she hadn't got a room number for her yet. There hadn't been anything else to do but go back to her room, move all the posters to where she wanted them, and line up her photographs. She had a picture of her and Rob, taken in the summer. He was behind her, with his big arms around her waist. It was taken just before he left. She had her head back, against his shoulder. She kept that one by her bed. That first night, when she'd changed into her pyjamas and brushed her teeth in the sink in her room (wondering all the while how she would ever bring herself to shower in the mixed stalls), she'd felt tearful, and ridiculously lonely, running one finger tenderly across the image of his face.

The first couple of days were a blur of finding her way around, and getting organized. She signed up for hockey trials, had her first tutorials, nervously looking around at her fellows, and her first lectures, given in an enormous, echoey hall, and lay nervously in bed at night listening to the soundtrack of music, shouting and laughter coming from the other rooms. Looking at Rob.

Matt found her on the second day. He was the first person to knock on her bedroom door, and she was profoundly grateful when she opened it and saw him. She hugged him warmly. He dragged her to the bar with him, incredulous that she hadn't been. He seemed to know everyone there already, and the middle-aged bartender greeted him like a long-lost son. Her request for a diet Coke was denied with a smile, and a pint of beer put down in front of her like a challenge.

And that was how it all started to work. Matt's very new friends embraced her with the same instant intensity they had presumably shown towards him. Girls confessed crushes and guys talked about which teams they were trying out for. Everyone seemed to be yelling, and laughing, and soon Susannah was, too. They were all in this new, strange boat together, and the obvious thing to do was drink and smoke. Susannah had never been a big drinker at college. There'd been the odd party where someone brought beers, or broke into the absent parents' drinks cabinet and stole the vodka. She associated it with the 'cooler kids' while, at the same time, objectively recognizing that there was nothing really cool about throwing up in someone's flower beds or having to do a Monday morning trigonometry test with a hangover. On the rare occasions when she had more than one drink, she hadn't liked the sensation of being out of control, but here, in this new arena, the sensation was helpful. She was out of control, after all why not embrace it?

Tonight, though, more than a year since that first heady term at uni, Susannah was drunk. Not so drunk she didn't know what she was doing, but drunk enough to think that doing it was okay. Not so drunk that afterwards she would be able to say that it wasn't her fault. She was absolutely here, in this moment.

The big crowd of earlier in the evening had dissipated, as sometimes happened some had gone clubbing, and some home, to whatever essay crisis awaited them back in their room. Ten minutes ago, there had been perhaps twenty people around laughing, chatting. And now there were just the two of them.

Just her and Matt, back in Matt's room. She hadn't been here before. Her room had become one of those rooms where people congregated, and Matt was one of the crowd who was often there, but this was the first time she'd been in his. It was closer. He'd suggested it. It wasn't as messy as most guys' rooms, she reflected vaguely, thinking of the guys on her corridor, who lived like pigs, wading through dirty laundry until they ran out of clothes, and drinking black tea from stained mugs. There wasn't too much personal stuff in evidence that was the standard undergrad male girls needed an estate car to transport the pantechnicon of their stuff at the beginning of each term, but boys seemed to be able to manage on the train with a duffel bag. She saw just a few photographs stuck on the ubiquitous corkboard, and a plain, utilitarian duvet cover on the bed. His toiletries were lined up a bit too neatly on the narrow shelf above the sink in the corner, and there was a single U2 poster hanging on the wall. A few dirty clothes were strewn across the floor, but not many, and Matt immediately scooped them up and shoved them into the wardrobe. He had a kettle and a box of English Breakfast tea bags. Most guys she knew had optics.

Matt had been a good friend. He knew her from home, and it gave them a private shorthand. He knew Rob, he knew Alastair. When they were out in a big group, he always looked out for her wouldn't let her walk home alone, that kind of thing. She'd written to Rob about him, and how great he was. She thought she was lucky to have him. He was pretty cute plenty of girls flirted with him, but he never seemed very interested. He hadn't had a girlfriend at college either. There'd been a time when she thought he fancied Amelia, but the Minehead debacle might well have cured him of that.

She never knew, afterwards, what had started it: what had changed the mood. She'd gone back there with him because she was suddenly tired. Because she didn't feel like being on her own. Because Matt was their friend, hers and Rob's, and she thought he missed him, like she did. And because in her drunkenness she felt very fond of him. It had never entered her head that there would be anything else.

But now suddenly he was kissing her, and it felt good, and she wanted to kiss him back. She was turned on. This was a different Matt. He had his hands in her hair, holding her face still. He planted a deluge of small, gentle kisses on her cheeks, her eyelids, her forehead, her lips. And then something began to stir between them, seriously, and he was kissing her deeply, hungrily. The mood shifted heavily. His arms went around her back at first, holding her close, but soon, as she responded to his kisses, and pressed herself into him, his hands were on her breasts, pulling impatiently at the buttons of her cardigan.

And then she was pushing his hands away. But not because she wanted to stop. She could do the buttons more quickly herself. He undid her bra and peeled it off her shoulders slowly, staring down at her.

They were skin to skin, her hands at her sides. His fingers stroked her shoulder blades, her collarbone, tantalizingly. He broke away from kissing her mouth to suck at her nipples, and she arched her back, her fists clenched.

All the time, as he sucked and licked and kissed her, he was murmuring her name. 'Oh my God,' he whispered. 'Susannah I can't believe you're here.'

Afterwards she wondered why his words hadn't broken the spell. She'd been too far gone. No one had touched her like this in months. She'd been so worried and so lonely ... so very lonely.

And this felt so good. She didn't know how they got naked, but suddenly her jeans and her knickers were gone. And his were, too. This was the point of no return.

His fingers explored her warm wetness and she felt him, hard in her hands. 'Susannah can I ... can we ... ?'

She must have nodded. Maybe she spoke. She saw him, in the moonlight from the window, pull something out of his bedside drawer. Heard the wrapper rip and watched him pull the condom on and then, his hands under her behind, tilting her upwards, he was inside her, more quickly and easily than she might have expected.

She had the sudden thought that this wasn't his first time he'd done this before, even though she'd never known him to have a girlfriend. Did he know it was hers? Probably not. Everyone assumed she and Rob had slept together. Something that felt like sadness penetrated the pit of her stomach. It should have been Rob.

She waited, her hands hovering above his shoulders, waiting to brace herself, for it to start hurting. But it didn't.

Matt raised himself on his elbows and began pumping into her, his eyes never leaving her face. She closed her eyes, to shut out the thought that had exploded in her brain. It shouldn't have been him. It should have been Rob.

Most of the pleasure, the delicious sensations of a few minutes ago, had evaporated with the first thought of Rob that had invaded her brain. She was detached from this now. She wanted him to stop.

But in the end, it was over quickly. He came in about three minutes. He reared up and the veins in his neck stood out. With a grunt of satisfaction he dropped down heavily, forcing the breath from her in a whoosh. He was kissing her neck, still murmuring her name. If it had taken any longer, she might have stopped him. Waves of revulsion not for Matt, for herself were starting to wash over her. But it was too late. He was done.

In a few minutes more, he rolled off her and she turned her back to him so he couldn't see her face. He spooned her, his breath still coming fast, and put one arm across her proprietorially. She lay there until it seemed like he'd fallen asleep. Then she wriggled out of his grasp, and sat clutching her knees and looking at him.

Amelia's mum used to tell them far more often than either of them wanted to hear it, and often at completely inappropriate moments, when she was obviously struck by the opportunity that their virginity was a 'precious gift', not to be given away lightly. They'd giggled and pretended to gag, and tried to make her talk about ... anything else. Now it felt like she was right. Mrs Lloyd would most definitely not approve of this. She'd given it away. Not just lightly, but drunkenly.

She thought of Lois and her own mother. And then she thought about Rob. Guilt slapped her hard around the face, and a single tear escaped her eye and rolled down her cheek. She was afraid that if she started crying she might not be able to stop, or control herself, and that her crying would wake Matt.

She needed to get out.

Matt was sleeping soundly, it seemed. Crawling around the floor as quietly as she could, careful not to wake him up, she collected her clothes, and dressed quickly. Then she slipped out of the door and crept back to her room, desperately hoping she wouldn't bump into anyone. She had just reached her own floor, and her own corridor, before the vomit rose in her throat. She got to the toilet in time, sinking to the floor beside the bowl. Her head was killing her now sharp stabbing pains seared her temples.

It was the worst hangover of her life. Her head pounded, her stomach ached from throwing up, her throat was sore, and her heart palpitated.

Later, much later in the day, back in her room, as she lay as still and quietly as she could in her narrow bed, waiting for time to pass so that she might stop feeling so disgusting, Matt knocked at the door. He stood on the other side, knocking gently, and saying her name, for five or ten minutes, but she didn't answer. Eventually he went away.

She couldn't believe what she'd done. Nothing about it was right. The only thing she could take comfort in was that Matt had used a condom. At least she couldn't get pregnant ... at least she hadn't been that bloody stupid.

It was around 6 p.m. the next afternoon that she crawled from her bed to the desk and wrote to Rob. By then it was the only thing she could think of, the need to explain herself to him.

Dear Rob I've done something horrible, and I can't bear to tell you, but I know it would be much worse if I didn't tell you. I'd rather tell you in person, but who knows when we'll see each other again, so I'm writing this letter the hardest letter I've ever written.

I slept with Matt last night. I was drunk and I was sad and lonely, and it just happened. And I know that sounds so pathetic, and it is. I don't have any excuses.

I hate that I did it. I thought of you the whole time, and the minute it was over I felt sick. I would do anything to take it back, but I can't.

But I can't not be honest with you, Rob. We've always told each other the truth and so I have to about this one, awful thing.

Please forgive me. Please tell me that you have. I can't bear it if you don't.

It is you who I love. It is you who I want to be with. I hate that I can't be with you. I want you every day. Please believe me.

Susie She cried the whole time she was writing. Then she pulled on her jeans and a sweatshirt, grabbed her towel and washbag, and went down to the postbox to post the letter before she changed her mind, still moving gingerly. Then she went straight to the shower, and scrubbed herself hard under the hottest water she could stand on her skin. She was dry, dressed and back in her room, risking a piece of dry toast, before she began to wish she hadn't mailed the letter, but it was too late by then, of course.

Saudi Arabia The letter took six days to arrive. Mail was given out in the morning, in the mess hall. Your name was called, and your letter, or parcel or package, was unceremoniously thrown at you. Rob heard his name often his mum and dad wrote all the time. Mum wrote long chatty letters, with stories and cartoons she cut out from the newspapers, and socks, and Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Dad scribbled brief notes on the end of Mum's letters, always signing off with io ti amo, figlio.

Susannah wrote, too. Not quite as often as Mum, but something came once a week, usually even if it was sometimes a postcard with a quick message. When he saw her handwriting on the envelope, he smiled to himself, and tucked the letter into his pocket to read by himself. Being alone was one of the hardest things to achieve here. There was always someone around, always noise.

It was still chilly in the mornings. There was a definite nip in the air sometimes, although the sun was bright and strong by lunchtime it would feel warm. Squinting in the sunlight, Rob found a box to sit on and pulled out the letter.

After he'd read it, he sat for a while, staring out beyond the fence with the barbed wire, looking towards the desert that stretched away into the horizon. Then he slowly folded the letter neatly into four, and put it back into his pocket.

1993.

Almost from the first moment Susannah met Sean, in a wine bar in Battersea, just before Christmas 1993, she thought she was getting something right at last. It was as though the last years, in personal terms, she'd been travelling up the wrong track. Now she'd corrected the path she was taking. This was the right time. The right place. This was the right guy. Everyone was pleased about it. Mum and Dad liked him. He was already mates with Alastair, so he'd passed that particular test before he even knew he was taking it. Amelia liked him, but didn't fancy him, so that was okay, too. It was simple and straightforward and easy.

Sean was lots of things Rob had never been. He was a strawberry blond, for a start, with blue-green eyes. Not nearly as tall as Rob had been, he had just a few inches on Susannah. He was thin almost wiry. And he was funny. Rob could be funny, but overall he was a serious, sometimes intense guy. Sean seemed, the first time she met him, and for a long time afterwards ... just light.

That, as much as the sparkling blue eyes, was what had worked for her, that first night. He was the first guy in a very long time that she could imagine being in a relationship with.

She hadn't gone out with anyone at all in the previous eighteen months, except in big groups, and Amelia said that didn't count. Susannah had chosen Chester for her year of law school, after she graduated. A lot of her friends headed to Guildford, close to London, and Mum wanted her to go, too she'd have been less than an hour from home but she preferred to be somewhere far away. She'd never been to Chester, before she chose it, but in the end she loved the town, and it had been a good year flying by and over almost before it had begun. She'd shared a surprisingly un-grotty terraced house with three students who'd been on her course at Bristol two guys, Conrad and Ben, and a girl she'd never known well but had always liked, Robyn. Robyn was sporty probably the main reason they'd never been close as undergrads. She ran long distances and trained almost every day. Conrad and Ben were easy-going and a good laugh, but serious students, too. It was a fast-paced year of baked beans on toast, quiet nights in the pub and bloody hard work. She'd found jobs in shops and restaurants in Chester during the Christmas and Easter holidays, not keen to come home to the village. For all sorts of reasons.

Amelia was back from her third year in France, and was finishing her own degree at Manchester, which was a doable and affordable train journey they saw more of each other that year than they had in the previous couple. And that summer, when they'd both finished, Amelia graduating with a 2.1, they took the InterRail trip they'd talked about so often as young teenagers, travelling widely in France, where Amelia's fluency made life easy, and then through Switzerland, Italy and Spain, too. It had been everything Susannah had imagined it would be. It felt, when they got home, that they were back to where they'd been before Minehead, and Cranwell. They felt close again, and Susannah knew she never wanted to go back to those estranged days. Amelia was her best friend, and she loved her. She understood herself better when she saw herself reflected back at her from Amelia. They talked about another trip, further afield Thailand, maybe, or India. But real life beckoned Susannah much more forcefully than it did Amelia, who would have happily kept on travelling for a few more years. She found herself quite ambitious after her years of studying, applying to the best firms.

Susannah was taken on by a big City law firm one of her top three choices for her articles, and Amelia got a job she found interesting enough to stay around for at a translating agency with a group of young, like-minded colleagues, all still vaguely uncommitted to their adult lives. The two of them rented at first a small, ground-floor, two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat together Susannah paying two thirds of the rent to reflect the difference in their salaries, and therefore getting the bigger bedroom and the double bed. Amelia petitioned hard for it, claiming that a double bed was wasted on Susannah, and that she'd get much more use out of it, but Susannah refused to give in. She had a feeling, she laughed, that her luck was about to change ... A few months later, the argument was resolved, when Amelia's father, horrified by a visit to the small flat, pretty much insisted on paying the deposit and half the mortgage on a bigger and nicer place within reach of Clapham Common.

Susannah could have had no idea, though, when she first came to London, how relentlessly the law firm would extract their pound of flesh from the small army of articled clerks they took on that, and every, September. By November, she was regularly working fourteen-hour days. Sometimes they worked into the early hours, coming home in company taxis only to shower, before heading straight back in.

Amelia petulantly, and sometimes only half jokingly, claimed to feel like a neglected wife, tutting at her and claiming the long hours were all about machismo and hot air. Her hours were pretty lax 9.30 a.m. until 5.30 p.m. with a lunch break of 90 minutes, so far as Susannah could gather. On those mornings, when she heard Susannah come in and jump into the shower while stripping off yesterday's clothes, Amelia would get up and make her tea and a fried egg sandwich, and sit with her, her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her, nursing her own mug, while Susannah ate, and moaned, unconvincingly, about work. One evening Susannah came home at 7 p.m., and brought flowers, like an errant husband.

She loved the work, truthfully, and she loved the environment. She liked the discipline of what she was able to do, exercising her intellect and utilizing all the work she'd done at university and law school. She saw a clear path here. She'd work hard, she'd progress. Associate, partner ... She liked earning her own money, too. It wasn't a huge amount, but compared with student days, she felt wealthy. She had money for rent and food, a pension, and there was still disposable income more than she'd ever had before left over at the end of the month. Spending it was fun. She really felt like a grown-up, for the first time. She cut her shoulder-length hair into a bob with a thick fringe, and had subtle highlights put into it, drying it straight and smooth. She started shopping for work clothes at places like Jigsaw and Hobbs, and then (as Amelia put it, it was the fashion equivalent of going from dope to cocaine inevitable, really) a beautiful black wool gabardine trouser suit at Joseph, knowing with a frisson of almost shameful excitement that she'd never be able to tell her mum how much it had cost, even forty per cent off in the end of season sale.

She'd been wearing the suit in the wine bar the night she met Sean. That and her new hair and her new confidence.

Alastair worked with a guy called Hugh, who lived with Sean, who was an old school friend from home. So his provenance was secure he was vouched for. Susannah was at the bar with Amelia and a couple of other girls from the firm who lived nearby. Amelia had invited three colleagues from the agency and Jonathan, of course, who was omnipresent now. It was a big gathering that night everyone in a festive mood offices were closing tomorrow or the next day, and frankly could have closed the day before for all the work that was being done, even at Susannah's uptight firm. Christmas was coming, and the wine was flowing, barely soaked up by the fancy bar snacks.

Susannah was pleased, these days, to see that Alastair and Amelia had recovered the easy teasing bantering relationship of their youth. Maybe Al had been right when he said she was the one, of the three of them, with the biggest problem. They greeted each other with a huge bear hug. Alastair was head over heels these days with a secretary from his office Kathryn who was, he said, coming later. Everyone was coupling up, he said, and he wasn't going to sit out.

Susannah had met Hugh a couple of times at dinner parties at Alastair's flat, and tagging along to corporate softball tournaments on Clapham Common the previous summer and liked him, although she had never considered him romantically, and she was pretty sure he didn't see her that way either. He was a lot like her brother, and she found him easy, unthreatening company. She was talking to him about her articles when Sean came into the bar, straight over to them, loosening his brightly coloured tie with his finger and undoing his top button.

'I'm Sean Dexter,' he said, straight away, offering his hand formally, and fixing her with an unwavering stare that might have been disconcerting if it wasn't so very nice to be in its beam.

She shook his hand, and he held hers for just a few seconds longer than he needed to.

'Susannah. Susannah Hammond.'

'This is Alastair's sister,' Hugh offered, though neither of them was really listening to him by then.

The attraction was instantaneous and, as Susannah related to Amelia the next day, instantly sexual, even if, in her case, it was fuelled by a couple of glasses of wine. His eyes had an enticing sparkle to them that she found almost irresistible. She knew, almost immediately, that she was going to sleep with him. And that really never happened to her. Everything about Sean and that first encounter swept her away just a little. She didn't know, that first night couldn't have done that she was going to marry him.

It didn't happen that first night, of course. Nothing happened. That wasn't her style Matt, and what had happened in her that wretched evening at university, had made her forever wary of decisions made under the influence. And it seemed it wasn't his style either. He kissed her cheek softly, smiling at her almost regretfully as she left with Amelia and the other girls. She had written her numbers on his card, and he waved it at her as she climbed into the taxi, nodding his promise to use it.

He'd called her, the next day, at work, and they'd flirted down the line for a while. He was flying to Chicago that night with his cousins to spend Christmas with family who lived there. He wouldn't be back until the 2nd of January, he said, but could he please see her on the 3rd if she was free? It amused her that he added the 'if she was free'. There was something sincere and earnest about his request, and of course she acquiesced.

Two days later, on Christmas Eve, Alastair picked her and Amelia up from their flat to drive them home for the festivities. He was the only one with a car, a new Renault Clio. It was freezing cold and damp, and they ran out when they saw him, double-locking the door to the flat, keen to get back into the warm as fast as possible.

'Susannah's in love,' Amelia had blurted out, after planting a big smacking kiss on his cheeks as he put their cases in the boot.

They climbed in. Susannah punched Amelia's arm, but only playfully.

'Hallelujah.' Alastair took both hands off the steering wheel for a moment, and raised them heavenward. 'Is it possible? Can it be? The long drought's over?'

'Shut up, both of you. I liked it better when you weren't talking to each other.' Susannah tried to sound stern, although she didn't pull it off, even to her own ears. She'd known Amelia would do this. 'You make me sound like a bloody nun.'

'You've certainly been doing a passable impression of a novitiate over the past few years, unless you have a secret double life neither of us know about, which I highly doubt,' Alastair laughed. 'Who is the poor unsuspecting guy?'

'Like I'd tell you?'

'He's called Sean. He was in the bar, you know, the other night? The blond one cheeky chappy looking ...' Amelia offered helpfully.

'Hugh's flatmate?!' exclaimed Alastair.

'Cheeky chappy?! That's a bit harsh, isn't it?'

'You know what I mean you like that clean-cut, wholesome type. Think so, Al. Is that right, Susannah?'

Susannah nodded. 'Don't want to talk about it. Nothing to talk about.'

'Not true!' Amelia shouted accusatorially. 'He's away for Christmas but he's fixed to see her the day he gets back ... jet lag notwithstanding. Can't wait another minute, obviously ...'

'Do shut up. Or I won't go out with him.'

'Thus cutting off your nose to spite your face ...'

'Thus not giving you anything to wind me up about.'

'You know we'd find something else.'

'You're bastards.'

'What about you, Meels?' Alastair asked, looking at her in the rear-view mirror. She was sitting in the middle of the back seat, all the way forward with her knees hunched up, her face resting on her hands. 'Who've you got dangling on your hook these days? Jonathan still in the picture?'

'Yes that's right. Start on her. She's a much easier target than me. And what about you? We can talk about Jonathan and Kathryn all the way home ...'

Alastair and Amelia cheerfully continued the thrust and parry of their conversation, laughing and joking and Susannah sat back in the front seat with her eyes closed and let their voices wash over her. She was happy. She felt so ... normal. Almost just like them. Yes, there was a guy, and although it was ludicrous to start talking about love, or a future, it felt like it might, just might be the start of something. And it was time, after all.