He knew that she was staying for him. He knew it even before her text message arrived that morning—the one that stopped his heart with the single sentence: “Now I’ll be near you.” What now? He didn’t care. Whatever it was would be difficult and yet he felt sure that there was a way. A way now to see her whenever he could; maybe one day a way that he could be with her and her alone, somewhere else and always. He was walking home from the tube station. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, began once again that evening and she would surely be in synagogue with her family and he could sit in the men’s gallery and look across at her and start the new year knowing that, however fucked up it all might be, the woman he loved loved him too. In the meantime, walking home to Primrose Hill past the bright graffiti and high, copper-green girders of the Chalk Farm footbridge, he felt sick with lust and manic with possibilities. Maybe Rachel would fall in love with someone else and leave him.
