“On?”
“Whether you want an honest answer or not.”
He laughed, but it felt empty. “If I didn’t want your honesty, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Well, go on then. What is it?”
“How do you know you love someone?”
Jessamine frowned, tilting her head as she studied him. “That’s a big question—one I’m not sure I should be answering on your wedding day.”
He exhaled sharply, running a hand through his hair. “I know.”
“Are you asking because you think you love someone, or because you’re scared you don’t love Kate?”
His throat tightened. “Would you hate me if I said both?”
“Shit,” Jessamine muttered under her breath. “Don’t tell me it’s about the reporter.”
He swallowed hard. “It’s like…” He paused, struggling to find the words. “It’s like my whole life has become this unsolvable arithmetic. Nothing adds up. Nothing makes sense. And she—she’s everywhere. She lingers in my head, Jess, no matter how much I’ve tried to push her out.”
Jessamine didn’t interrupt and just let him talk.
“I know it’s not even real,” he continued, his voice barely above a whisper. “Not in the way I’ve built her up to be. I’m an idiot.”
Jessamine was quiet for a moment, then said, “No, you’re human. But if you want me to be real with you, it sounds like you’re projecting. You admitted it yourself that you barely know the girl.”
He knew what she meant, but she was wrong. He’d read enough Carl Jung to know that, in his words,“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”This wasn’t as simple as him creating a fantasy about the idea of her. It wasdeeper, unexplainable, and had infiltrated him—mind, body, and soul.
IX
DAISY
Throughout the years, Daisy had learned that life is one of the most ironic and contradictory experiences. The worst years stretched endlessly, while those meant to be savoured slipped away too quickly.
A month after her thirty-first birthday, she moved to Sicily. She’d not long broken up with Idris after he’d laid into her while drunk, giving her injuries no woman should ever have inflicted at the hands of a partner.
Russell, wanting her to get away from prying eyes for a bit, suggested a break from journalism and taking a two-year copyediting gig at his brother’s firm in Italy. She was nervous at first; she couldn’t speak Italian, and she’d never travelled out ofEngland, let alone to a country where she didn’t know a single soul. But after some coercion from Edie that Russell wouldn’t replace her, she went.
Uprooting her life on a whim was one thing; realising that running from something didn’t mean it wasn’t still there was another. She grieved for Idris, not for who he was, but for the life she’d imagined with him. She searched for a way back to happiness in empty bars and strangers' beds, only to find the door locked at every turn. And by the time her days were up—all seven hundred and thirty-one of them—she realised she’d given away the last fragments of her youth chasing a fool’s dream.
Six months into her stay, she’d found herself daydreaming of Logan and decided to send him an email. They hadn’t spoken, not since they’d argued on her birthday, but to her surprise, his reply came almost instantly. He’d attached a photo of himself in a suit with his hair trimmed below the ear, labelling it his new look, and asked if she approved.
She replied with a heartfelt yes, adding a bittersweet congratulations on his wedding.
Moments later, he wrote back, teasing that he hoped she’d soon find her own Raoul Bova lookalike, making her promise that, when she did, he’d be on the guest list for the wedding. But she never found her Italian Mr Darcy and returned to London empty-handed.
Not long after her return, Russell messaged her, asking if she wanted her old job back. Copyediting for her had been steady enough. It was a quiet, undemanding job that made sense while she pieced her life back together, but it didn’t feel like her. Journalism had always been her drug: euphoric, addictive, and all-consuming. So, of course, she agreed without hesitation until Russell blindsided her with a suggestion: a short placement in the Middle East.
“It’ll be rewarding for you,” he said, watching her closely. “Professionally and personally.”
She wondered if this was his way of telling her she needed something radical to, as he put it, live a life where her “soul was on fire.”
“You’ll learn a lot,” he added, tapping his pen.
“Isn’t it dangerous over there?”
“Everywhere is dangerous.”
