Good Morning, Helen
Helen Marsden has been a widow for three years. She is the secretary at a primary school in Cranmouth, a small town by the sea, and her evenings are very quiet.
Then a stranger writes to her about a comment she left in a local Facebook group. Michael is a widower too, working abroad on a site outside Istanbul. He is kind, he is funny, he listens, and every morning there is a message waiting for her: Good morning, my dear.
Eleven weeks later Helen stands at the arrivals barrier in Istanbul, in her green coat, with a yellow ribbon on her suitcase, waiting for a man who does not come.
Far away, in a room where the messages are written in shifts, a young man called Daniel has been writing to her all along.
A tender, painful and quietly hopeful novel about loneliness, the stories we are told on our screens, and the people who are really there.
Read the opening
I’m out. By the barrier. Green coat.
She had unbuttoned the coat in the passport queue, which was foolish, and done it up again to the top, which was worse. He had said he would know her by it. She had sent him a photograph of it, and he had written back like a forest, which she had thought a bit much at the time and had kept anyway.
Men came through the glass doors, singly and in twos, and each of them was, for half a second, him. One with grey at his temples looked straight at her. Helen’s heart did something it hadn’t done since 1989. He raised a hand. She was already smiling when she saw he was waving at a woman a yard to her left.
She moved along the barrier to where she could be seen from every door. The yellow ribbon Becca had tied to her suitcase handle brushed her wrist. She held her phone in both hands, as if it might spill.
12:31
Are you here yet? Maybe we’re at different exits?
Behind her a trolley squeaked. She turned so fast that something in her neck clicked. A cleaner, with a mop and a yellow sign, who gave her the look of a woman who had seen a great many people stand in exactly this spot.
Helen smiled, to show she was perfectly all right, and went back to watching the doors.
It was only twenty to one. There was no reason, yet, to think anything of it.
…