Prologue
When they were in love, it seemed the sun shone on them every day. When they were in love, when day became night, dark skies blanketed them in a velvet warmth and drew them closer together. Every hour they knew was succulent and miraculous. Every moment they shared was a kind of paradise.
Sometimes she caught him looking at her, entwined in sloping grass on a seasidey summer’s day, or in the pearly milk of a winter’s morning as they lay plaited and half-awake in bed.
She drank in the trace of his lopsided smile and his green eyes steady and true and full of love for her – for her!
– and almost believed it could be forever, this love.
That they would always be this way, lying in each other’s arms and summoning their combined future to be both certain and endless.
Maggie and Ed. Ed and Maggie. How could it be any other way?
When they were young and in love it appeared they had a lifetime, but they were wrong.
Lifetimes were long enough roads to see them stumble, or lose their way, or take each other far from reach.
They were roads that led where she least expected: a wintry pier on a blustery December afternoon where an icy wind, whipped from a grey sea, did nothing to dry her bitter tears.
That day, she had cried until she felt her heart was all wrung out, like a useless rag.
She had just lost him forever and he had not even said goodbye – that word was hers – and she knew she would not see him again.
There was no road that might lead her back to him now.
No rising and falling sea that would carry her his way again.
He was lost, and so was she.