Haunted by an unspoken passion, a narrator decides to write some pages, pages comprising the story of the beginning, the blossoming, and finally the ending of a young woman's most intense love affair. 'Each day a page, to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once. Of how we could be.' An unformed, innocent student in her first semester at university, Flannery Jansen initially encounters her lover in a local diner. But her tentative overtures - a look, a blush - are dismissed and Flannery retreats, humiliated. Future chance meetings on campus discourage Flannery even more, for Anne Arden is sophisticated and poised; in Flannery's eyes almost impossibly beautiful. Until she realizes that Anne feels the same way about her. 'Like Turgenev or Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Brownrigg understands that the inexperienced lover is a detective who doesn't know which clues matter . . . mesmerising' Helen Dunmore, The Times 'Exuberant and wistful' Times Literary Supplement 'A candid, fresh and vivid novel' Sunday Telegraph