no way I could.”
“Why not?” he said. “My flatmate’s gone until the end of July.”
“I couldn’t work,” she said.
“We’d find you something,” he said. “Just say yes. It’ll be brilliant.”
Since childhood, Sam had been an overthinker. She had always done the responsible thing, fearing that anything less would mess up her life. But this wasn’t her life. It was only a summer.
Her mother was furious. Beneath that fury, Sam could tell, was fear. “If you go, you’ll never come back,” she said. “You need to finish school first.”
“I’ll come back,” Sam said.
“We don’t even know this person,” her mother said. “And you’re going to live with him?”
Sam felt sorry for her. Three years earlier, her parents had the power to forbid her from bringing Sanjeev into her bedroom and closing the door, or going to a party before they’d talked to the host’s parents. Now it was up to Sam whether to cross an ocean and move in with someone.
“We won’t be living together. Not like that,” she said. “His roommate will be gone and it’s a two-bedroom, so—”
She let her mother fill in the blank.
* * *
—
Clive shared the ground-floor apartment in Walthamstow with an old friend called Ian, whose Midlands accent Sam could only understand approximately forty percent of the time. Ian was in Ibiza for the first month Sam lived there. In his absence, they played house, cooking dinner and dancing in the kitchen; walking around naked; snuggling on the sofa, trading sections of the Guardian.
He showed her his favorite British comedies on his laptop: Peep Show and Spaced and The Inbetweeners. When Clive hugged her, his chin rested perfectly on the top of her head.
They had a small walled garden out back. A previous tenant had planted thyme and oregano. Sam watered them and picked off the best shoots, feeling more adult than she ever had before. She wondered if a person with one life could go somewhere new and just start another. Once, a neighbor rang the bell and said, “This magazine came to my house in the post, but I think it belongs to your husband.”
Sam was amazed. The woman had clearly seen them together and assumed they were married. A year ago, a neighbor back home had mistaken her for her sister Caitlin, who was twelve at the time.
It was impossible to separate her feelings for Clive from her feelings about the city itself. Sam was in love with both. Walthamstow was as far from Isabella’s London as could be. For the first time, Sam felt like she belonged somewhere that Isabella didn’t even know existed, instead of the other way around.
There was an outdoor market on the high street, rows of tents bursting with fruit and vegetables, dresses and handbags, tins of nuts and spices the size of a drum. In a single block, she might see women in burkas, women in saris, women in ripped jeans, all mixed in together. She might stand still and hear a half-dozen languages spoken at once.
Carrying out otherwise mundane tasks in a foreign country felt like an achievement. Small victories like catching the right train or learning the funny names of things in the grocery store: Rocket. Aubergine. Fairy cakes.
Sam went to every museum. She was in awe of the city. She felt like an infant, discovering the world. She sometimes went on Clive’s walking tours and pretended to be a flirty stranger.
Sam took photographs and then, alone back at the house, painted from them on blank postcards. She had never been the type who could set up an easel in public and go for it while strangers watched over her shoulder.
She painted an old church in Hampstead, boarded up, blackened by dirt and decay, the hands on the clock out front rusted and unmoving. She painted the homeless men sleeping beneath the overhang, their stuffed red shopping bags in a line against the door. She painted a proper British woman in a fur coat and hat, walking a beagle with a flowered umbrella in its mouth. She painted the window of a chocolate shop, and the double-decker buses on Oxford Street.
She sent all her paintings home to her mother and father.
* * *
—
Three weeks after Sam arrived in London, a friend of Clive’s got her a temp job in a legal office in Covent Garden. She was filling in for someone’s secretary who was out with a cold. It was only a one-day assignment, but Clive’s friend said if Sam did well,