The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Riley
Cover design by Lucy Kim; cover photograph copyright © Artur Debat / Getty Images
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ISBN 978-0-316-36218-4
LCCN 2019948241
E3-20200515-DA-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. Before Volcano
Holudjöfulsins
II. Volcano Barcelona
Sunday
Kýr
Monday
Ljósmyndari
Tuesday
Endurkoman
Wednesday
Smiður
III. After Volcano
Thursday
Discover More
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Riley
For Sarah
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“Eruptions and cataclysms and plagues and the colliding of planets were the only real, the only inevitable events, and the human activities that happened to lie in their path, and which are destroyed with such blind ease and ignorance, were of as little real importance as the doings of insects. How effortlessly they had all been burnt up! How pointless all our passions and complications and the intricate structure of our little society now seemed!…How microscopic, how minute, were the feuds, the passions, the pleasures and the vanities of the small anachronistic community of Saint-Jacques!”
—The Violins of Saint-Jacques
by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1953
“Barcelona is something else, isn’t it? There you have the Mediterranean, the spirit, the adventure, the high dream of perfect love. There are palm trees, people from every country, surprising advertisements, Gothic towers and a rich urban tide.…What a pleasure it has been for me to meet that air and that passion!”
—letter to a friend, Federico García Lorca, 1926
I.Before Volcano
“To you and me,” Will said, lifting his wine, a local something, butcher red. The label said it was from Penedès, just down the coast, and it featured a bull with roses where its horns should be.
“To 1-2-3,” Whitney said, lifting her glass to match, and they clinked a heavy clink, and it rang out around the dining room like a good idea.
Heavy chatter blew about like smoke, ninety-nine percent of which neither of them could understand. They couldn’t even tell whether it was Spanish or Catalan being spoken most of the time. Written signs they could distinguish: the extra Js and Xs and liquid double-Ls that had tempted their Scrabble brains for the last four days. But with the talk, they were hopeless—they weren’t wired for translation.
They’d strolled in without a reservation, typically impossible, they were told. But given that the booking at the bar was already a mitja hora tard, the hostess sat them there at the edge of the dining room under the condition that they might be asked to get up at any moment. It was good enough for Will and it was good enough for Whitney. They were compatible like that, key-cut for one another.
There was no wine list except what was written on a chalkboard above the bar, and so they’d put their faith in the hostess not to rob them blind. Now they sipped from their glasses and took each other in. Will with his wide edges, his twice-broken nose, his shaggy mop lightened by a lifetime of sun and salt. Whitney with her silver eyes and brows thick like lipstick, her freckled cheeks crisped from a Memorial Day weekend pounding the sawed-off sidewalks of the metropolis on the Mediterranean. They knew each other’s faces; they were seven years known. They knew the battery of inflections inside and out. But they’d never seen in the other’s what they saw just then: the set jaws, the knotted throats. The frame-up of fuzzed uncertainty and cold nerves. What they knew the looks to mean was that it was finally time to confess.
“You or me first?” Will said.
Whitney exhaled and blinked deeply. Her hand found her hair, dark and wet as ink. She loosened the belt of her coat to let the air in. She had beads of sweat on the sides of her nose that caught the overhead lights. It had been a longer walk to the restaurant than they’d anticipated. But it would be worth it—it had been recommended by Gwyneth.
Whitney didn’t have to say it, and still Will understood that it was his turn to go.
“Well, okay then,” he said, and halved his glass. “I guess, uh, I guess the first one then.…The first one I met at a party. She came right up to me. We talked. We went—”
“Whose party?”
“A young-lawyers thing. The ones I never go to.”
“But you went this time.”
“Well, how else?”
Whitney sucked in her lips.
“I couldn’t tell anyone, remember?” Will said. “I didn’t tell Mark. I didn’t tell Dave or Jay. No websites. No apps. Not even the one with the bees. So: one of those happy hours.”
“And so she walks right up to you and does what?”
“She asks me what firm I’m at.”
“And you tell her: I work for a media company.” Whitney did the voice that sounds nothing like Will: Christian Bale’s Batman as a contracts associate.
“She asks me where I went to law school, if I know so-and-so. Connections are made.”
“And she just assumes you’re available.”
“There’s a reason I
