Five(3)

And then, Mrs. Worth finds herself lying on the concrete floor of the platform. She tries to get her bearings, but she is too light-headed. She does not know how she came to be there. But the others do.

At 7:02 and thirteen seconds they heard Emma shout, “Gideon!” They saw Emma and Gideon struggle over her phone, Gideon clutching his mother’s wrist and pushing her arm, the phone flying from Emma’s grasp with surprising velocity as she wrestled her bag and her child. They saw the phone shoot past Mrs. Worth’s head, surprising her and throwing her off balance. As the phone slid off the platform edge and onto the tracks, Mrs. Worth fell due to the hit of nicotine, the cold, the fact she’d had no breakfast, her nerves, and her advanced age—Mrs. Worth will be seventy-eight this year—which combined to trigger a cardiac event. She feels a sudden shooting pain from her chest to her jaw to her arm.

From her position Mrs. Worth doesn’t know the others are looking over the platform edge to see where the phone fell; she can’t see Emma running to the edge, Gideon running to the stairs. She doesn’t register Emma yelling, “Goddamn it!”

She only notices the pin-striped burgundy knee of the stranger kneeling beside her. The brown skin of the hand put out toward her, a memory from a long time ago of a hand put out to help her, and then she looks at his face.

“Um,” the stranger says, “Are you all right?”

Despite her disorientation, she manages to give a Mrs. Worthian answer: “Of course I am, don’t be ridiculous,” she says, although she thinks she is having a heart attack and she finds it most inconvenient.

“Okay,” he says, unsure. “Are you here with someone?”

“Do I know you?” she asks in a tone that makes him feel as though his question was too personal.

“Uh, no, sorry, look, do you think you can get up? Maybe you shouldn’t get up, actually. Did you hit your head?” he says, looking down at her, then up at the digital information display. It says the time is 7:02. Four minutes, he thinks.

“I need to get there. I just need to get there,” Mrs. Worth says, finding the words hard to say because a fist is tightening around her heart and it won’t let go.

“Um, yes, okay, but first we need to make sure you’re all right. Can I call someone for you? Do you have a mobile?”

The Good Samaritan is Sonny, a young man of twenty-seven. He grew up in this affluent London suburb, attended a private school nearby, and has been living here since coming home from university to save money and work out his next steps in life. Except that his homecoming was almost six years ago, and he should have made more progress by now. But a few things got in the way. They always do.

Sonny makes excellent first impressions. He is attractive and instantly likable. He is tall with a slim, athletic, runner’s build, and handsome, with a unique sense of style. He relies on his looks, his dress, his racially ambiguous features, as a kind of sleight of hand, a misdirection. There is so much to look at when one meets Sonny—his face, his clothes, his eyes, his way of being—that people often don’t actually see him. And he knows it, and this is how he prefers it.

He is wearing an outfit this morning that is very Sonny. A burgundy pin-striped suit with slim-fit flared trousers. To guard against the cold, he’s not wearing a coat but an oversized, chunky-knit claret and orange bohemian scarf that is completely inappropriate with a suit, except when Sonny wears it.

The hem of his trousers hits well above his ankles, drawing attention to his white patent wingtips, which he wears without socks, despite the cold day. He is wearing a black shirt with a thin black satin tie. His nails are carefully manicured, painted white. The manicure is feminine but on Sonny’s hands also unexpectedly masculine, as is the suit, which he found in the women’s section of his favorite vintage clothing shop. His head is shaved but for the crop of copper-brown curls with bleached streaks, which he sometimes ties back to look serious but today put up in a topknot that falls forward just so, allowing one or two of his spiral curls to escape and fall charmingly just in front of his left eye, which is brown, drawing attention to his right eye, which is green.

His green-eyed mother said the green eye was from her Colombian father and the brown eye from her Jamaican mother, and though they had both passed, they loved him so much they came back to see the world with their grandson. Sonny’s pale and freckled, copper-haired, blue-eyed Scottish father, whom his wife’s parents had never trusted, said his son’s different eyes were the result of his mother drinking when she was pregnant, and people laughed when he said this, because they knew that a woman like her would do no such thing.

If you were his friend you would say to your other friend, “Only Sonny,” and both of you would shake your heads and smile and know you meant that only he could pull off this outfit. You are, and always will be, a little bit in love with him, but you tell your friends that you would never date him because he’s soooo amazing but he has capital I Issues. Although, if you were honest with yourself, you know the reason you are not dating him is that he has never shown the least bit of interest in you. Not in that way. Oh—you think longingly, in secret—but if he did, you could definitely be the one to save him. Definitely.

Except you couldn’t, because one of his Issues is that he is ?32,000 in debt due to an online gambling addiction, and even his closest friends don’t know. His girlfriend—who isn’t as good-looking as he is, which you and the other girls find annoying because you’re all better-looking than her—knows about the gambling. But she doesn’t know that he’s at this station today.