"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things." — Jonathan Safran Foer

WHETHER YOU FALL

004

When Sophie receives a dossier in the mail that contains the damning evidence of Yusef's betrayal, she understands that the news is punishment for her audacity in attending the SIS black-tie do. M's cruelty masquerades as kindness, and also serves as a warning, a warning for so many things that she does not bother to make a list. Inside her head, love-knots unravel, and she touches the empty space where her collarbones kiss.

It is not to say she misses the man, or even the necklace, though both comprised so much of her identity for so long. He was everything she had wanted or wanted to be: a kind, sensitive artistic soul who smelled like charcoal and loved like a blank canvas, that boundless and that empty, who was company for a lonely heart afraid of facing the night alone but even more afraid of facing it with someone else. An artist who never sold a painting, who did nothing but curse at fickle muses and exchange hisses with her cat.

She hadn't loved him, which makes his betrayal worse, because there is no gentleness of prior emotion to temper the anger and humiliation that she feels now.

Safety was the drug Vesper Lynd overdosed on, and asceticism was her decadent indulgence.

Sophie, though: Sophie overdoses on lack. She has nothing: miles and miles of it.

Sophie Grey passes a hair salon every day, and today she stares at it from across the busy street like it's about to bite her. And it just might, too—she has tried to ignore it for so long. In the end, she can't resist, and walks in after work that day.

Isn't it ridiculous to give so much credence to that old-fashioned idea that ties together, so inextricably, a woman's identity to her hair? But the more she has lost, the more she has been reborn. Afterward, she trashes the doe-eyed contacts in a coffee shop bathroom. Sophie walks in and Vesper Lynd walks out.

In every reflecting surface she passes on the way home, Vesper Lynd smiles at her and she smiles back.

Vesper is learning, now: home, sometimes, is a choice you make.

When M hears, she gives Vesper a tongue-lashing using the kind of tone fit to peel wallpaper from the walls. Irresponsible, unbelievable, hard-headed, every bit as brassy as before! Has death taught you nothing? What can you hope to accomplish with this—this—completely impotent show of rebellion? Do you think going back to brunette is going to change your life? You've only endangered it! We don't know who is still looking for you, and allowing you as much leeway as you've had before was a show of kindness you didn't truly deserve!

And, quieter: Playing Cinderella with hair color rather than glass slippers. You're a fool.

Vesper calls her bluff. It's a trick she learned from James, a trick she'll take to her second grave since she took nothing to her first she'd want to build a legacy upon. Not even when M threatens to send her to South Africa, to rural parts of eastern Europe, does she waver. Not even when she asks, demands, her real name back and is mercilessly denied.

Yielding is not an option.

She's still squinting from the sunlight, because it is much stronger here on the surface rather than down in the canal depths; but she's getting her land-legs back and that's air in her lungs rather than Venetian water. She gives Sophie Grey a merciful death one night, lighting candles and even saying a quirky little prayer, wine-drunk and looking forward to tomorrow for the first time in ages.

And she knows what comes next. She knows, even if it is only a faint possibility lingering at the back of her mind. Vesper now sees hidden faces of the stars, the stars that have turned their backs on her for so long; and the ghostly breath of what-could-have-been and what-may-yet-be as it breathes down her neck like a long-lost lover. In the space of time that has lapsed since that night in the ballroom, M at her side and James Bond below, she has gone into the cocoon a caterpillar and emerged—well, Vesper Lynd was never a butterfly—

But maybe you don't have to be a butterfly, or a bird, to grow wings. Or to deserve them.

It is too bad that Vesper does not see the broken glass of her window when she comes home weeks later, nor the moving shadows alongside the stationary ones. When she does notice, they are already on her.