Prologue

Park Town, Oxford, 3 December 2022, 11 p.m.

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Sarah Foxcroft seldom texted, and never this late.

SARAH: Your readers want more. They’re hungry for authenticity. We need to discuss your direction. Urgently.

Chloe Summers read the message twice before setting her phone face-down on the desk. Sarah—her publisher at Foxcroft & Prince—had been pushing this argument for months: Chloe's novels were too restrained, too careful. Readers wanted heat, not subtlety. They wanted her to write what she lived, not what she imagined. But Chloe knew better. Her novels sold fantasy, not autobiography.

Outside, Oxford slept under December rain. Inside, the radiator ticked its way through another cold night, and her laptop displayed the evening’s progress: two words from four hours’ work.

Chapter One.

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Her study had become an archive of borrowed lives. Reference books on human sexuality lined the shelves—well-worn spines, margins rich with annotations. Notebooks stacked on the windowsill held fragments captured in cafés: overheard conversations, the shift in someone’s posture when they lied, the way people’s voices changed when they thought no one was listening. She collected these moments of human frailty, cataloguing the distance between what people said and what they meant. Then she turned those fragments into novels. Imagined lives built from scraps she’d never intended to inhabit herself.

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A framed photograph sat beside her keyboard, slightly faded now. Herself at twenty-three, graduation day, mortarboard askew, grinning at someone beyond the camera’s frame. Back then she’d been certain her future lay in analysing other people’s words, not shaping her own. Academic journals, tenure, the quiet satisfaction of footnotes. But academia didn’t pay well, and fiction—particularly the kind she wrote—did.

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The evidence lay scattered across her desk: a letter from Foxcroft & Prince with Sarah’s signature looping beneath an advance she still found absurd, an invitation to a literary soirée she’d already declined, a bank statement showing numbers that made her former lecturers’ salaries look quaint.

Her writing had brought money and recognition. It had also brought compromises she hadn’t seen coming, though Sarah called them opportunities.

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Her phone lit up again. Not Sarah this time, but a reminder she’d set weeks ago: Stefano. Paris next weekend? She dismissed it, watched the screen go dark, and found herself thinking not of Paris but of Rome instead. Three years ago, just shy of her fiftieth birthday. Another networking event she’d almost skipped…

Palazzo Zuccari, Rome, 20 November 2019, 6 p.m.

The gallery occupied a converted palazzo near the Spanish Steps, all vaulted ceilings and discreet lighting. Chloe stood before a large canvas—a nude study, the woman’s face turned away, her body caught in afternoon light that rendered her both present and remote. The painting’s title card read: Solitude No. 7

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‘Apparently it’s about modern isolation.’

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She glanced sideways. The man beside her was studying the canvas with polite scepticism. Late fifties, sun-weathered, wearing his suit jacket like an afterthought. His Italian accent was just pronounced enough to make every word sound considered.

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Or is it just a naked woman looking bored?’

‘Well, yes,’ Chloe said. ‘But that wouldn’t justify the price tag.’

He almost broke into a smile. ‘Fifteen thousand euros for emptiness. The market has spoken.’

‘The market speaks expensive nonsense most of the time.’

‘You’re English.’

‘Observant.’

‘Oxford, I’d guess. You have that slightly apologetic way of delivering devastating judgements.’

She laughed despite herself. ‘And you’re…?’

‘Stefano Russo.’ He offered the name with the ease of someone used to being recognised, then extended his hand when she clearly didn’t. ‘Fashion. Terribly dull. You?’

‘Chloe Summers. Also terribly dull. I write novels.’

‘Ah.’ His expression changed—interest replacing courtesy. ‘Romance, I think? My wife mentioned your name once. She has excellent taste in books and ruthless opinions about everything else.’

His wife. Mentioned within thirty seconds, as casually as his occupation. The gold band on his ring finger silent confirmation.

‘Cassandra insists meaning must come first,’ he continued, turning back to the painting. ‘She has strong views on most things. I suspect she’d find this piece rather lazy.’

Cassandra. Such an elegant, almost theatrical name. Chloe pictured a woman who would never be out of place in galleries like this, who might make others feel they didn’t quite belong.

‘And what do you think?’ she asked.

‘I think it’s quite pleasant to look at, which is probably enough.’ He tilted his head slightly. ‘Though I suppose you could argue that isolation and boredom are modern conditions worth that much money. Particularly if you’re the sort of person who can afford such declarations.’

They moved through the gallery together, falling into easy conversation about her writing—not the usual questions, but about the gap between observation and creation, honesty and confession.

‘Marriage serves one function,’ he said. ‘Passion fulfils a separate role. That’s where most people get confused. Expecting one relationship to handle contradictory needs.’

The logic was persuasive. The ease with which he delivered it was not.

‘That’s very tidy,’ Chloe said.

‘Tidy or honest?’

‘Does it have to be one or the other?’

‘In my experience, yes. Cassandra and I understand each other. We’re compatible in the ways that matter for a marriage. But compatibility isn’t the same as—’

He paused, glancing at her, considering what came next.

‘Isn’t the same as what?’

‘Hunger,’ he said. ‘The kind that makes you forget to be sensible.’

The word settled somewhere beneath her ribs—part invitation, part warning.

‘Care for some wine?’ She followed him to the bar.

Standing in that gallery with wine warming in her hand and his attention focused entirely on her, Chloe felt something she hadn’t felt in years: seen. Not as a writer, but as a woman who’d forgotten her own desire.

‘Dinner some time?’ he asked.

‘Yes. That would be lovely.’

‘Good.’ Stefano’s smile was genuine, or appeared to be. He lifted his phone. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

He already had her number. She hadn’t noticed giving it.

Park Town, Oxford, 3 December 2022, 11 p.m.

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She remembered how it had begun—as if it weren’t an affair at all. He checked Cassandra’s calendar before suggesting dates, spoke of his board meetings and her deadlines with the same composure he used for booking flights. Looking back, it hadn’t been spontaneous at all—more design than desire. Yet at the time, under the gentle acoustics of the palazzo, with wine softening her restraint, and his attention fixed wholly on her, she had felt something approaching restoration—a return to the woman she once believed herself to be.

Now, three years later, their affair had the orderly logic of a research project. His travel dictated when they met; Cassandra’s moods determined his own. Chloe no longer expected spontaneity, and certainly not the reassurance of future promise. Siobhan, her closest friend, knew only fragments—enough to offer the occasional raised eyebrow and the standard caution about married men. To everyone else, Chloe offered even less. When asked about her inspiration, she’d shrug and say ‘Research,’ and let the lie pass as modesty. Nobody noticed how little it explained.

Sarah’s message still awaited a response. Authenticity; the word had been following her for years

—from interviews, critics, and one man in particular who’d used it for different ends.

Chloe looked at her laptop: the two mocking words on the screen. Around her desk lay the artefacts of her success: the photograph of her younger self—unguarded, certain; the invitation to another night of smiles and pretence, of allowing strangers to believe they knew her because they had read her books. It was all a performance.

She picked up her phone and typed: 

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CHLOE: Let’s talk. Your office. When?

After sending it, a thought came to mind. She turned back to the keyboard. Beneath Chapter One, she added a single line—part provocation, part confession:

The trouble with writing about sex is that eventually people expect you to live it.

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