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at me, his face still soft with sleep, crumpled with marks from his pillow.
    “What the . . . ?”
    “You heard me.” I knew I was being unreasonable, but the words came tumbling out. “What’s the future, Jude? Even if I move in here—what’s the plan? Do I sit here weaving my shroud like Penelope and keeping the home fires burning while you drink Scotch in some bar in Russia with the other foreign correspondents?”
    “Where’d this come from?”
    I just shook my head and swung my legs out of bed. I began pulling on the pile of spare clothes I’d left on the floor after the trip to A&E.
    “I’m just tired, Jude.” Tired was an understatement. I hadn’t slept longer than two hours in the last three nights. “And I can’t see where this is heading. It’s hard enough now when it’s just the two of us. I don’t want to be your wife-in-every-port stuck at home with a kid and a raging case of postnatal depression while you’re getting shot at in every hellhole this side of the equator.”
    “Recent events kind of imply I’m in more danger in my own apartment,” Judah said, and then winced as he saw my face. “Sorry, that was an asshole thing to say. It was an accident, I know that.”
    I swung my still-damp coat round my shoulders and picked up my bag.
    “ ’Bye, Judah.”
    “ ’Bye? What do you mean, ’bye?”
    “Whatever you want.”
    “What I want is for you to stop acting like a goddamn drama queen and move into my flat. I love you, Lo!”
    The words hit me like a slap. I stopped in the doorway, feeling the weight of my tiredness like something physical around my neck, pulling me down.
    Hands in pale latex, the sound of a laugh . . .
    “Lo?” Judah said uncertainly.
    “I can’t do this,” I said, my face to the hallway. I was not sure what I was talking about—I can’t leave; I can’t stay; I can’t have this conversation, this life, this everything. “I just— I have to go.”
    “So that job,” he said, the beginnings of anger in his voice. “The one I turned down. Are you saying I was wrong?”
    “I never asked you to do that,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I never asked you. So don’t you put that on me.” I hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder and turned to the door.
    He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to stop me. I walked out of the flat reeling like I was half-drunk. It was only when I got on the tube that the reality of what had just happened hit me.

- CHAPTER 5 -
    I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedomin a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays . Ports say . . . I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape , maybe.
    I had spent the train journey avoiding thoughts of Judah and trying to distract myself with research on the trip ahead. Richard Bullmer was only a few years older than me, but his CV was enough to make me feel hopelessly inadequate—a list of businesses and directorships that made my eyes water, each a stepping-stone to an even higher level of money and influence.
    When I brought up Wikipedia on my phone, it showed a bronzed, handsome man with very black hair, arm in arm with a stunningly beautiful blonde in her late twenties. Richard Bullmer with his wife, the heiress Anne Lyngstad, at their wedding in Stavanger, read the caption.
    Given his title, I’d assumed that his wealth had been handed to him on a plate, but it looked, from Wikipedia at least, as if I’d been unfair. The early part of the picture was cushy enough—prep school, Eton and Balliol. However, in his first year at university his father had died—his mother seemed already to be out of the picture, it wasn’t entirely clear—and the family estate had been swallowed up in death duty and debts, leaving him, at nineteen years of age, homeless and alone.
    Under those