Chapter Text
Prologue — London, New Year’s Eve, 1972
The trick to any party was to stand behind the camera, where no one thought to look back.
Andrea had worked this one since nine. The drawing room of the house on Cheyne Walk smelled of smoke and Chanel, and in the far corner a band was murdering something by the Stones. Everyone who mattered that season was there, and a good many more who only wanted to be. She moved along the walls with the Leica at her eye, and the room stopped seeing her. People angled their faces toward the lens and forgot the woman behind it. That suited her. She had been forgetting and being forgotten in rooms like this for more years than she would ever put a number to, and she had learned that the safest place in any decade was the one just outside the frame.
She found the redhead by accident, through the viewfinder, while she was framing someone else.
The woman stood near the windows in a dress that outshone everything else in the room. Three older men had angled themselves toward her, and she was giving them nothing back. The cigarette in her hand stayed unlit. Red hair, unfashionably bright, pinned high off her neck. Early twenties, maybe.
Andrea held the frame on her longer than she meant to. Then she took the picture before she thought about it. The shutter was a small sound in all that noise, but the woman’s head turned anyway, straight down the barrel of the lens, and she smiled like she knew exactly what Andrea had just done.
Then she was crossing the room.
“You’re meant to ask first,” she said, pointing to the camera. Her accent was thick with broad East End vowels she hadn’t bothered to smooth out for a room like this.
“I’m the photographer. I don’t ask.”
“You should.” She was already grinning when she put out her hand. “Miriam.”
Up close, she had a scatter of freckles she’d tried to powder over. Andrea shook the hand. She gave the name she’d picked for this decade, plain and common. “Iris.”
“No, you’re not,” Miriam repeated the name slowly, with a lift at the end that made it a question and an accusation at once. “Iris.” She let it hang there, unconvinced, and laughed. “But all right.”
They talked through the worst of the band’s set, and Andrea let her do most of it. She had spent years learning to ask questions and give nothing back; here was a woman who wanted to be asked, who answered before the question finished. Miriam was at St Martin’s, studying design, and she was going to have her own line one day, with her name on it. She stated it as fact, with no doubt anywhere in it, and Andrea believed her completely. That belief was rare in her; she had heard every ambition the twentieth century had to offer and watched most of them come to nothing.
“Where will you show it?” Andrea asked. “The line.”
“Here. Or Paris, if they’ll have me.” Miriam tipped her head. “You think I’m joking.”
“I was thinking that you’re very young.”
“You’re not much older.”
And there it was, the fact she never said out loud: she was older than this woman could begin to imagine, and the truth was the one thing she could never give her.
Midnight came up on them fast. Someone near the band started the countdown, and it went up through the room until the whole party was shouting the numbers down together. Miriam took Andrea by the wrist and pulled her out of it, down a service corridor and up a half-flight of cold stairs to a door that gave onto the roof. London spread out below them under a sky going green and gold at the edges, the first fireworks already breaking over the river. The cold went straight through Andrea’s coat the moment the door opened.
“I feel like I can see the whole year coming from up here,” Miriam said, and leaned on the parapet. The wind took her hair out of its pins, and she let it. “It’s a new year. You’re meant to do one or the other tonight. Let something go, or wish for something. Which one you pick?”
Andrea looked at her: red hair loose and blowing across her face, red lipstick almost gone. Twenty-one, and certain she had all the time in the world. The truest thing Andrea could have said was that she wanted to kiss her, and she was sure saying so would ruin the night. So she let go of something smaller, just as true. “I’ll let something go,” she said. “My name isn’t Iris.”
“I know.” Miriam wasn’t surprised in the least. “You don’t look a thing like an Iris.”
“Andrea.” She said it before she could think better of it. She hadn’t spoken it out loud since the night she’d left the town and every person who had ever known her by it. It came out unsteady. “It’s Andrea Bowman.”
Miriam turned to face her fully and gave her the widest smile of the night. “Andréa,” she said, and no one had ever pronounced it like that. She lengthened the middle of it and softened the consonants, almost singing it. An-dré-ah. “That one’s true.”
Andrea smiled back at her and nodded.
“Then I’ll trade you,” Miriam said a word back to her, low and quick, and the wind took most of it. Andrea caught two soft syllables and nothing she could hold onto. When she only looked at her, Miriam laughed, off balance for the first time all night. “It’s nothing. It’s from before, from my family.” She stopped there and didn’t go further. “There’s no proper English word for it. It means the person you were always meant for. It’s decided before you’re even born, and you only have to live long enough to find them.” She shrugged, like the word had no special meaning to her, but she was watching Andrea when she said it.
“Say it again.”
“Bashert.”
Andrea repeated it back, wrong, and Miriam made her say it again until the vowel came out right.
“Your turn, then.” Andrea leaned on the parapet beside her. “Let something go, or make a wish?”
Miriam tapped her chin, considering. “A wish,” she announced, grinning now. “A kiss. From you.”
Andrea huffed a laugh. “That’s easy,” she said, and leaned in and kissed her once on the cheek, near the corner of her mouth.
She pulled back, and Miriam hadn’t moved. Her eyes were half-lidded, her lips just parted. She wasn’t turning it into the joke it was supposed to be. It stopped Andrea where she was, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin. She leaned in again, slower, and waited there a breath, giving Miriam every chance to pull back or call it a mistake.
Miriam didn’t.
So Andrea kissed her, soft at first, hardly any pressure at all. Then Miriam’s hand fisted in the front of her coat and pulled her in, her mouth opening under Andrea’s, and a low sound broke out of Andrea and got lost between them. Miriam deepened it and drew her closer. The cold and the fireworks faded to nothing, the city’s noise going with them, until there was only her mouth on Andrea’s and the new year arriving around them.