Before We Say Goodbye

The hardest goodbye is the one you could still prevent.

Mara Velić has thirteen hours left in the city she has lived in for twenty-two years. The trunk is packed, the flat is empty, and the night train leaves at eight minutes past eight.

Theo Lind arrives at half past eight in the morning to help her carry it down, and neither of them says the thing. He will not ask her to stay. She will not ask him to come. They have both had two months to work out why, and they are both right, and it is the worst kind of being right there is.

Eleven months ago Mara's younger sister died at home, alone, while Mara was out. Everyone in that city has been careful with her ever since — her aunt, her employer, her landlady, all of them privately deciding what she could bear and then arranging it in silence. Today, one by one, they stop.

There is a box on top of a wardrobe that she has not been able to touch since November. There is a grave she has not visited since the funeral. There is a man who has spent eleven months not telling her things because she had enough, and who has decided that today he will tell her all of them, in order, useful or not.

A slow-burn historical romance told across a single day — one station, one trunk, one clock — about grief that will not answer to facts, the particular loneliness of being handled kindly, and two careful people who have exactly one day to stop being careful.