Chapter One
Daisy
There wasn’t much that Daisy didn’t love about this early part of the day. The air had a different scent to it. The birds sang almost entirely uninterrupted by outside noise. It rarely rained and, as the N73 whirred through the streets of Stoke Newington toward Goodge Street at just after 4:00 a.m. on a cool autumn morning in October, there was a feeling of potential that built up inside her chest. Anything could happen, because the day had only just begun.
Today Daisy sat in her usual seat (ground floor, one row from the back, driver’s side) and pulled out her phone, going straight to the E! website as she always did. Whatever the Kardashians, Bennifers and Meghan Markles of the world had been getting up to in America while she slept should already be on these pages and she could start writing a few scripts on her phone. Her fiancé, Zack, regularly questioned why showbiz news was so urgently required first thing in the morning, and who wanted to know about some woman fromSelling Sunsetanyway? To be fair to him, the question normally came as Daisy’s alarm went off at 3:30 a.m., waking him, so he’d probably have said the same thing were it about anything, including his true passion—padel.
It was a question she asked herself when she was first offeredthe early-shift journalist role at Entertainment Now! five years ago. Did people reallyneedto know what Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala while they ate their breakfast? Or who Taylor Swift had allegedly criticized on her latest single while they did a 5:00 a.m. abs workout? She learned very quickly the answer was yes, and once she understood it was her job to provide them with that information, she began to take it more seriously.
Scanning the headlines as the bus kept moving, an actor from the new Marvel film was photographed leaving a restaurant with his costar, rather than his girlfriend. Could there be a good pun in there somewhere? Turning his womanizing into a superpower? She stared ahead, pondering something better as they pulled in at Angel station; the double doors opened, and someone stepped onboard.
It was him, again. The same man she’d seen almost every day for the last three months. This morning he was dressed in baggy light blue jeans, a tight brown jacket zipped up and a cream baseball cap, pulled low over his face. He tapped his card and walked toward Daisy. She looked away, only turning back once she heard that he’d taken his seat. The same seat he always took, two rows in front of her and on the opposite side of the bus. He reached into the backpack he put on the seat beside him and she kept watching; she needed to know for sure what she already suspected.
She couldn’t help it. She let out one small laugh—a single breath out of her nose—as he pulled out the exact same book he’d pulled out every day since he started sharing this bus journey with her in early July. It wouldn’t be that unusual except she had witnessed him, a couple of weeks after first seeing him, reach the final page of the book, pause for a minute with a small tilt of his head, and turn it right over to the beginning and start again.
Daisy had made many wild assumptions as to why. He was an actor playing one of the parts in the book and this was howhe got into character. She’d even searched IMDb which had discounted this idea as there was, according to the internet, no film or play of a Virginia Woolf book she’d never heard of calledOrlandoin the works. So perhaps he was writing a remake.
Perhaps he was an author and wanted to copy the style of Woolf’s prose so completely that he was reading it until it absorbed into his bones.
Maybe he was a spy, and this book was his cover and he didn’t think anyone would be observant enough to notice it was the same book every day. He had misread his bus audience. Whether she’d always been that way, or her job had made her so, Daisy was observant. It was something her best friend, Clara, regularly declared ascreepy. “How did you evennoticethat?” she’d ask as Daisy accurately deduced someone’s entire mood based on the way they walked into a party, or from the pitch of their laugh. Given that Clara was also a journalist at Entertainment Now! and one of the least observant people Daisy had ever met, it probably wasn’t her job that made her that way. Daisy had once sobbed all night long after being bullied into a dramatic bob haircut by her bored hairdresser (and by bullied, she meant he excitedly suggested it and she agreed because she hadn’t wanted to disappoint him) and the next day at work Clara hadn’t even noticed.
Perhaps he was reading the book to—
Her phone pinged with an alert. A-list movie star Gary Newman has been airlifted to hospital in Hollywood following a car crash.Shit.Daisy scrolled through the article and then googled other sites to get as much information as she could, typing up a quick script so that by the time the bus reached Goodge Street, she’d gotten something ready she could immediately post. She grabbed her bag as the bus slowed, waved a hurried thanks to the driver and scrambled off. As the N73 pulled away to continue its route toward Oxford Circus, Daisy ran across the road and up Torrington Place, using her fob to enter the four-storybuilding that housed the entire Now! news network, including her department.
She waved at Clive on security, who she’d usually stop and chat to, shouting “Gary Newman’s in hospital” as she passed to explain her urgency.
“Oh shit. I love that guy!” he shouted after her as she took the stairs to the second floor and ran to her computer, immediately uploading the script she’d emailed to herself onto the system, so radio stations across the country could download it for their 5:00 a.m. bulletin.
Daisy scanned articles and wrote up a few other news stories: a singer taking on her first acting role, complete with audio from an interview her colleague Felicity had done on Friday. A sports personality who was making a public apology for tax evasion. A reality TV star who was speaking out about the dangers of cheap Botox.
At five minutes to five Daisy’s phone started flashing with a call from her mum. That was odd; she never called too close to the hour, and rarely this early. She knew that in Daisy’s job the minutes in the run-up to a live bulletin were precious. It had to be something important.
She scanned the news one more time, sure that she’d covered everything, and picked up.
“Have you heard from Dan?” Daisy’s mum asked, the moment she answered.
Daisy sighed, pressing her thumb and forefinger into the bridge of her nose.
“It depends when you last heard from him?”
“Lunchtime yesterday, which was early morning in San Francisco. Which means he’s been gone a whole day.”
Daisy squinted, doing the maths. “Well, not a whole day because it’s not lunchtime here, is it? It’s...” She looked at her watch. “Four fifty-six. Why are you awake?”
“Because I set an alarm to say good-night to Dan.”
And yet I didn’t get a good morning,Daisy thought, but it was pointless saying that. Her younger brother was the love of their mother’s life, and to be honest Daisy preferred it that way. Since he’d gone traveling, Daisy had fielded more calls from her mum than she had in the last thirty-one years of her existence, and she didn’t know how Dan put up with it.
“I’m sure he’s fine. I haven’t heard from him either, but—”
“Oh God.”
“But I often don’t when he’s moving between places. Wasn’t he headed to Big Sur?”
“Yes and I’ve googled the roads. They’re treacherous.”
“Mum,” Daisy said, adopting the calmest voice she could. She understood that Dan doing a road trip, plus how similar he looked to her dad, was prompting her mum’s escalating worry. “He’s going to be okay.”
