If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.

Separately they had different strengths. Together they were complete.

Please come to me, Cat, because there's no surviving you. You don't have to love me back. You don't have to be mine. Just let me be yours.

He never knew what hit him, and that would have comforted me, except . . . just for one second, he would have had to know, wouldn't he? There must have been a blur, a sense of the world exploding, a flashpoint of receiving more damage than a human body could endure.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.

I had never felt the allure of another human being this strongly, warmth and curiosity mixing to form an unspoken question in the air.

The way I was brought up ‘he needed killing’ is an airtight alibi.