Free Snowstorms in a Hot Climate by Sarah Dunant

unpredictable. In my more paranoid moments, I think he does it deliberately, just to check up on me. Let’s just say he could walk in at any time.”
    “Good,” I said with a firmness designed to impress.
    “You sound like you really want to meet him.”
    “After that buildup? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m even looking forward to it.”
    Boasting, of course, is a kind of hubris. In the still of the night such things are heard and visited upon you. Four in the morning. Almost two hours had passed since our good nights. My body was grumbling at me to sleep, but my mind was running the show. Elly’s story was everywhere. There was no place where I didn’t crash into it; a feeling, a fear. Twenty-four hours ago I had been obsessed by other things, expending energy sewing up the few loose ends of my life. None of it was there anymore. Elly had whitewashed it out.
    I was fighting two quite separate emotions. The first was exhilaration at being plucked so suddenly out of my deliberate, controlled existence into the maelstrom of her life. That much was positive, full of warmth and color. The second emotion was fear, fear that I would not be strong enough to defeat him—or rather the him in her, because, of course, in every dragon myth half the problem is the princess. I knew her. I did not know him.Still, after all those words, he remained incomplete. Her emotions garbled him, minced him into a strange hybrid of villain and hero, explained nothing. A man who wielded the weapon of self-containment. If that really was his secret, then he and I had something in common besides Elly. Would he recognize it? Had she?
    In the eighteen years we had known each other, Elly and I had always operated differently. I turned somersaults in my head, walked across beds of nails, and spent too many years listening to my own heartbeat. I did not engage with the world. It was not my style. My act was perfected early, and it worked. People stayed clear of me. Even my parents had accepted the stranger in me. But not Elly. Elly had stayed. Right from the first moment outside the staff room, when I was the new girl, brainy and aloof, and she was the blithe spirit of the class, dropping a pile of textbooks in the path of the assistant headmistress and forcing me to laugh as she clowned about, trying to pick them up. I had expected to be lonely as an adolescent, had accepted it as my fate. Elly had marched straight through the Do Not Disturb signs and refused to go away when I tried to freeze her out. She had known that I needed someone. And she had decided that someone would be her.
    We had things in common, had even shared a certain attitude to the world. Maybe it came from the fact that each of us was an only child and used to our own company. My mother had always been terrified of procreation, afraid she wouldn’t know how to cope. She was right. She didn’t. She was too much of a child herself. Since she needed a father more than I, and since there was not room enough for two children in the family, I became the adult. It suited me fine. The only person who took any interest in me was my grandmother, but she lived in Paris, so her parenting was reserved for holidays. As for Elly, well, she always said she had been conceived in an absence of mind,which was not quite the same thing as an absence of contraception. Her father had wanted a son and had lost interest immediately. Elly had spent much of her childhood trying to win him back. A course of action which had, no doubt, alienated her mother. Certainly, by the time we met, the Cameron household was a battlefield, and Elly had started to enjoy the war. Finding me provided another outlet for her emotional energies, this time a positive one.
    Her sense of fun brought another dimension to those early teenage years, and I owed her for times which would otherwise have been dismal. Aggressive timidity is hardly a social asset, particularly during the first mating seasons. Whereas school