It happened six years ago, when Sally and I first got here, but it seems a lot longer, because in a way it happened to someone else. I don’t really speak that person’s language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don’t want to forget her, I don’t ever want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I’ve been me so far.

We have the same name, Jennifer Gluckstein, but she hated that, too, and I don’t mind it so much. Not the Gluckstein—what she hated was the damn stupid, boring Jennifer. My father named me. He used to say that when he was a boy, nobody was called Jennifer except in a few books, and Jennifer Jones. He’d say, “But I always thought it was a really beautiful name, and it actually means Guenevere, like in King Arthur, and why should you care if everybody in the world today is named Jennifer, when they aren’t named Courtney or Ashleigh or Brittany?” His name is Nathan Gluckstein, but his stage name is Norris Groves, and everyone calls him that except Sally and me and his mother, my Grandma Paula. He’s an opera singer, a baritone. Not great, I always knew that, but pretty good—semifamous if you know baritones, which most people don’t. He’s always off working somewhere, and he’s on a couple of albums, and he gives recitals, too. He’s sung at Carnegie a couple of times. With other people, but still.

Meena says—Meena’s my best friend here in England—Meena says that if I’m really going to write a book, then I have to start at the beginning, go straight through to the end, and not ramble all over everywhere, the way I usually do. But where does anything begin? How far back do you have to go? For all I know, maybe everything starts with me rescuing Mister Cat, when I was eight and he was just a kitten, from a bunch of boys who were going to throw him off the roof of our building to see if he’d land on his feet. Maybe it really starts with Sally and Norris getting married, or meeting each other, or getting born. Or maybe I ought to go back three hundred years ago, back to Tamsin and Edric Davies… and him.