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Chapter One

Paris, 2002

Liv Halston holds tight to the guard rail of the Eiffel Tower, looks down through the dia wire at the whole of Paris laid out below, and wonders if anyone, ever, has had a honeymoon as disastrous as this one

Around her, families of tourists squeal and duck back froainst the mesh theatrically for their friends to take pictures, while an i clu towards them across the sky A brisk wind has turned her ears pink

Someone throws a paper aeroplane, and she watches it travel its corkscrew course down, buoyed by passing winds, until it grows too s the elegant Haussmann boulevards, and the tiny courtyards, the classically laid-out parks and the gently undulating banks of the Seine, is her new husband The husband who had informed her, two days into their honey to have tohe had been telling her about on the edge of the city Just for an hour He shouldn’t be long She’d be okay, wouldn’t she?

The same husband she had told that if he walked out of the hotel rooht off and not coht he was He’d half laughed ‘Liv – this is important’

‘As is our honeymoon,’ she had replied The way they had stared at each other then, as if they were each facing soonna have to go back down’ An Ae erbread, pulls a face as she inches past ‘I can’t do heights You feel it creaking?’

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ Liv says

‘My husband’s like you Cool as a cucu up in that darned lift’ She looks at a beardedpictures intently with an expensive ca on to the rail

It is painted brown, the Eiffel Tower, the same shade as chocolate, an odd colour for such a delicate-looking structure She half turns to say asthat, of course, he isn’t there She had pictured herself and David up here froested a week in Paris The two of theht, looking down at the City of Lights She would be giddy with happiness He would look at her the way he had when he proposed She would feel like the luckiest woman in the world

Then a week had beco in London on the Friday And of those five days, only two had passed before another apparently un had popped up

And now Liv stands, shivering ‒ in the suht because it was the exact shade of her eyes and she’d thought he would notice ‒ as the skies grow grey and a fine spit starts And she wonders whether her schoolgirl French is up to hailing a taxi back to the hotel, or whether, in her current e home in the rain She joins the queue for the lift

‘Are you leaving yours up here too?’

‘My what?’