chapter 1

1Once in a very blue moon, you are confronted by astonishing beauty, a beauty so ethereal it forces open a door and bursts upon you like a ray of sunshine. That moment happened to me as I walked in through the door one Monday morning and a blur of ochre caught my eye. The girl looked very young. She was reading a magazine and her hair had fallen over her face, partially covering it. Looking at her I almost lost count of time until my colleague Aanya leaned over and whispered, ‘Erm . . . Sid, don’t be so obvious.’‘Who’s that?’ I nudged her. ‘New intern,’ she replied.I knew I would see more of her, but curiosity got the better of me. So, I dropped the tripod I was carrying, on purpose, letting it fall to the floor with a loud clang. She looked up, surprised, pushing her hair away to reveal her face, and smiled. It was the most beautiful face I had ever seen, with a smile that lit up everything around her. And strangely enough it seemed like a face I knew from elsewhere.‘Cara?’ Aanya called out to her, and something about that name made me want to repeat it, rolling those syllables inside my mouth. She stood up, revealing an hourglass figure. Standing there transfixed, I watched her bend over, put the magazine back on the table, straighten her shirt and pick up her oversized designer handbag.‘Yes,’ she replied, in an accent that reeked of an upper- class foreign education. As Aanya led her on to the office floor through the doors behind the reception, she turned and, catching my eye again, smiled.I was a fan of disruptive technologies but this was going to be one disruption I wasn’t quite prepared for. As I stood there watching her walk away I knew she had changed something in me, dipping her beautiful hands into the serene, ripple-free lake that was my life and muddled it. After years of emotional drought, she had given me a reason to obsess.Damn you, Cara.