SNEAK PREVIEW
She Came to Stay is out now. Here’s a taster…
Prologue
It’s the biting cold she notices first. She’s been chilly throughout the journey but now that the train is pulling into Victoria station, she leans out of the window and a gust of wind smacks her face and messes up her hair. She’s spent ten minutes trying to get it just so and now it’s disheveled again.
As the wheels screech to a halt she feels the bodies of strangers push up behind her, eager to descend. Outside, the world is wrapped in a milky grey shroud that constantly shifts. She’s heard about the fog here but imagined something light and playful, not this thick swirling stew. For a moment she pictures the sunshine and fields she’s left behind and doesn’t feel sorry at all. What is there back home anyway, except faithless men and recriminations?
Despite the cold her hands are clammy as she tugs the carriage handle from the outside, the way she’s seen others do at previous stations, and the door swings open. She steps onto the platform and stares up at the vaulted ceiling. Passengers rush past, some knocking into her, all certain of their destinations. She shivers in her faded dress and thin buttoned-up jacket and realises she must buy a coat if she’s to survive the English winter. In her hand is a small case and inside that everything she owns. She swaps it from one side to the other and flexes her aching fingers; she’s been clutching the handle in her fist for the entire journey.
So this is London? Everyone starts again here, so why not her? She pulls the lapels of her jacket together so they kiss at the edges, and steps forward. She considers herself a rational person, so she puts the sudden dread that floods her body down to the strangeness of it all and her utter exhaustion. And she ignores the thought that scratches at the edges of her mind, the voice that whispers that this place will be her undoing.
Copyright Eleni Kyriacou, published by Hodder & Stoughton
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