“Start at the beginning, Jo,” he said, opening his pad just like a TV detective. “What happened first?”
As if I knew when it began. Endings are unambiguous—a slammed door, a final chord, the vacant, glassy stare of the dead—but beginnings are always a matter of perspective. Sometimes you can’t tell where a story begins until you reach the end. That’s fine if you’re writing fiction, but in real life, it’s too late.
I explained this. He said, “You’re making it too complicated.”
“‘Just the facts, ma’am’?” I said.
He smiled as one does at an oft-heard joke. I looked at him properly for the first time. The boyishness was gone, but the lines around his eyes and mouth suited him, lending gravitas to his face. His eyes were green, but a darker, warier shade than I remembered, rain forest instead of meadow. I wondered if he’d ever married. His ring finger was bare, which meant nothing. Hugo and I exchanged rings when we married, but Hugo never wore his. It chafed him when he wrote, he’d said.
“A series of incidents occurred,” I said. “But I don’t know how they’re connected, if they even are.”
“Just tell me what happened,” he said. “Let me make the connections.”
How strange, I thought, that Tommy should be giving me the very advice I give my writers. “Just show what happens,” I tell them, “don’t explain it.” He waited patiently, his pen motionless against the pad. I saw that he was a man who understood the uses of silence.
“It began,” I said unforgivably, “on a dark and stormy night.”