I shook my head.

“Please, Sarah.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I’ve chosen Lawrence. I’m thirty-two, Bee. If I want to make a stable life for Charlie, I have to start sticking with my choices. I didn’t stick with Andrew, and now I know I should have. But now there’s Lawrence. And he isn’t perfect, you’re right. But I can’t just keep walking away.” Sarah took a deep and shaking breath. “At some point you just have to have to turn around and face your life head-on.”

She looked at me for a long time, and then she held on to me and we hugged each other tight.

“Oh Bee,” said Sarah.

We stood and held each other like that, and after we had been quiet for a long time Sarah stood up straight and swept back her hair.

“Go down and play with Charlie and Lawrence,” she said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I looked at Sarah and she smiled at me, and I walked back down the steps to the place Lawrence and Charlie were playing. They were picking up the small round stones from the edge of the mud and throwing them into the river. When I came close, Charlie carried on throwing stones and Lawrence turned to me.

“Did you talk her out of it?” he said.

“Out of what?”

“Her book. She had some idea she was going to finish a book Andrew was writing. Didn’t she tell you?”

“Yes. She told me. I did not talk her out of the book but I did not talk her out of you either.”

Lawrence grinned. “Good girl. See? We’re going to get along after all. Is she still upset? Why hasn’t she come down here with you?”

“She is making a phone call.”

“Fair enough.”

We stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

“You still think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“I’m not,” said Lawrence. “I’ll even help you, if you help me.”

“What help do you need from me?”

“You could just go, Little Bee. Couldn’t you? Quietly and without fuss.”

“I already thought about that.”

“So what’s stopping you? Money? I can give you money.”

I looked down at my shoes and then I looked back up. “You will pay me to go away?”

“Don’t make it sound like that. It isn’t easy to get started in this country without money for food and rent. I don’t want to put you on the streets, that’s all.”

He was still holding a stone in his hand and I took it from between his fingers. It was warm and smooth and I turned it around and around in my hands, polishing it with the moisture in my palms.

I said, “What is your wife’s name?”

Lawrence looked at his hands. “Linda.”

“And your children?”

Lawrence did not look in my eyes.

“Sonia,” he said. “And Stephen. And Simon’s the, um, the baby.”

“Hmm.”

I weighed the stone and I turned it around and around between my fingers and then I dropped it on the sand.

“You should go back to them,” I said.

Lawrence looked at me then, and I felt a great sadness because there was nothing in his eyes. I looked away over the water. I looked and I saw the blue reflection of the sky. I stared for a long time now, because I understood that I was looking into the eyes of death again, and death was still not looking away and neither could I.

Then there was the barking of dogs. I jumped, and my eyes followed the sound and I felt relief, because I saw the dogs up on the walkway above us, and they were only fat yellow family dogs, out for a walk with their master. Then I saw Sarah, coming down the steps toward us. Her arms were hanging by her sides, and in one of her hands she held her mobile phone. She walked up to us, took a deep breath, and smiled.

“I called work,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you both.”

She held out her hands to both of us, but then she hesitated. She looked all around the place where we were standing.

“Um, where’s Charlie?” she said.

She said it very quietly, then she said it again, louder, looking at us this time.

I looked all along the thin strip of sand. Children were still making their sand castles beside the river, although the level of the water was rising and the beach was getting narrower. None of the children was Charlie.

“Charlie?” Sarah shouted. “Charlie? Oh my god. CHARLIE!”

I spun around under the hot sun. We ran up and down. We called his name. We called again and again.

Charlie was gone.

“Oh my god!” said Sarah. “Someone’s taken him! Oh my god! CHARLIE!”

Horror filled me completely, so that I could not even move. While Sarah screamed for her child I widened my eyes into the blackness of the drainage tunnels in the embankment wall, and I stared into them. I looked for a long time. I saw that the night horrors of all our worlds had found one another, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began-whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle.

ten

I HELD LITTLE BEE for a long time. Then I asked her: Will you go down and play with Charlie and Lawrence? I have to make a phone call.

After she walked down the stone steps, I held on to the iron railing of the embankment and I held on to my memories of Andrew and I held on to my mobile phone. The phone was shaking in my hand, showing five bars of signal. The reception was so strong in the center of London, one hardly needed the handset at all. The air positively crackled with connectivity, as if one might simply direct a thought at someone and be received loud and clear. My tummy lurched and I decided, Right, I’ll do it now, before I calm down and change my mind. I called the publisher and told him I didn’t want to edit his magazine anymore.

What the publisher said was, Fine.

I said, I’m not sure you heard me. Something extraordinary has happened in my life, and I really need to run with it. So I need to quit the job. And he said, Yeah, I heard you, that’s fine, I’ll get someone else. And he hung up.

And I said, Oh.

I stood there for a minute, shocked, and then I just had to smile.

The sun was lovely. I closed my eyes and let the breeze air-brush away the traces of the last few years. One phone call: I realized it was as simple as that. People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

I was already thinking about how I might carry on with Andrew’s book. The trick, of course, would be to keep it impersonal. I wondered if that had been a problem for Andrew. He never liked to put himself in the story.

But what if the story is that we are in the story? I started to understand how Andrew must have agonized over it. I wondered if that was why he had kept so quiet.

Dear Andrew, I thought. How is it that I feel closer to you now than I did on the day we were married? And after I just told Little Bee I didn’t want to hear what she had to say because I know I need to stick with Lawrence. This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

My phone went, and my eyes snapped open. It was Clarissa.

“Sarah? They just told me you resigned. Are you crazy?”

“I told you I was thinking about it.”

“Sarah, I spend a lot of time thinking about bedding Premiership footballers.”

“Maybe you should try it.”

“Or maybe you should come in to the office, right now, and tell the publishers you’re very sorry, and that you’re going through a bereavement at the moment, and please-pretty please-could you have your nice job back.”

“But I don’t want that job. I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.”

“Everyone wants to make a difference, Sarah, but there’s a time and place. Do you know what you’re doing, honestly, if you throw your toys out of the pram like this? You’re just having a midlife crisis. You’re no different from the middle-aged man who buys a red car and shags the babysitter.”