February 1926

The February dawn crept in slowly, apologetically, as if it sensed how unwelcome it was. The room came into focus in increments, like a photograph developing.

But the numerous images that had lined the walls were gone now, like everything else. The room—never lavishly furnished—had been stripped back to impersonal functionality: a scarred table, a flimsy bentwood chair. A canvas kitbag was propped against the table leg. Her gaze flinched away from it.

She missed the faces on the walls. He photographed strangers: the poor and the dispossessed, the wounded and the mad, capturing dignity in their distress. Suffering gave people a natural nobility, he said, though she knew it was pointless to hope it might do the same for her. She had chosen the coward’s way out. There would be no honour in her pain.

He lay behind her, the way they naturally fitted together, his chest against her back, his hard thighs tucked beneath her knees. She couldn’t see his face but she knew he was awake and, like her, was watching the treacherous daylight gather. Across the city it would be stealing into another room, stretching out across an empty bed, touching the snowy silk folds of the wedding dress hanging on the wardrobe.

She had to go. Before the world woke up properly. Before her absence was discovered and the alarm was raised.

She turned to him for one last time.