one-hit wonder Read Free

sweaty hand. “There’ll be more where that came from when you bring him back. OK?”
    “Whatever.” He shrugged, folding up his copy of the racing form. “Whatever.”
    She slipped John’s box onto the passenger seat and tickled him under the chin. “You be a good boy,” she whispered into his ear, “I’ll see you in half an hour. Be good.” And then she closed the door and felt tears tickling the back of her throat as she watched the car pull away and her beloved cat disappear into the early evening London traffic.
    She sighed and made her way to a Starbucks, where she sat for a few moments sipping an Earl Grey tea and taking stock of what had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Her life, as she knew it, was over. And all she had to show for it was as much as she could fit into the back of a station wagon. She had no idea why she’d left her flat, no idea what she was doing moving into this one. It was just a gut reaction, really, to what had happened last night. And in a strange way it felt sort of . . . preordained.
    After ten minutes she picked up her bag and headed for Mr. Arif’s office. He looked thrilled to see her sans cat and handed over the keys with what seemed to be unbridled joy.
    “And may I wish you many, many, many years of contentment in your beautiful new home, most charming Miss Bearhorn. I am sure you will be most happy there.” Bee took the keys and headed wearily for Bickenhall Mansions, thinking that that was very unlikely indeed.

    one
    August 2000

    Ana’s train finally arrived in London, an hour after it was due.
    She stepped from the train while it was still moving and strode out into the sunshine with relief. The train she’d gotten on at Exeter, the train on which she’d gotten a seat, the train in which she’d been perfectly happy, had broken down just outside Bristol. They’d had to walk a quarter of a mile then, to the next station, and the next train had already been full when it arrived, so she’d had to stand the whole way from Bristol to London, with her feet trapped between three very large pieces of somebody else’s luggage, while the wind whistled through a stuck window, making tangles of her hair.
    Ana sometimes wondered if she was cursed. And then she’d wonder, more seriously, if Bee had gotten all the good luck in her family and left none for her. If that had been Bee sitting on the train just then, everyone would have fallen over themselves to come to her rescue. That was no exaggeration—men and women alike. If Bee had had to get off a train and trudge for a quarter of a mile through the countryside in a heat wave, someone would have offered to carry her bags. Actually, someone would probably have offered to charter a helicopter for her. But really and truly, the thing about Bee was that she wouldn’t have been on a defective train in the first place—she’d have been on a train that worked. That was the bottom line.
    Ana stood briefly in the middle of the concourse at Paddington, while she considered her next move. The midday sun fell in glittering columns through the glass roof, casting a hot checkerboard onto the marble floor. People walked unnaturally fast, as if they’d been put on the wrong setting.
    Everyone knew where they were going, what they were doing. Except her. She felt like she’d been sucked into the center of a huge, swirling vortex. There was a line of sweat rolling down between her breasts.
    Ana had no idea how she was going to find Bee’s flat. She’d never been to London before and had no mental map to work from. She knew it was divided into north, south, east, and west and that a river ran through it. She knew that Bee’s flat was somewhere near the center, somewhere in the vicinity of Oxford Street. But that was as far as her knowledge went. She needed an A-Z.
    She spotted a W. H. Smith’s and walked self-consciously across the marble on her newborn-foal legs. That was the thing with being nearly six feet tall: You ended