We will never be together. I am too brittle, hidden and snappish, and you are too married.

You are altogether too married. For those of us who've never known the state it sails past us like a cruise ship, lamps all on and parties raging. We wave from our smug or perhaps lonely shores, waiting till the sea-scattered brightness has withdrawn its silvery music, and we're left alone in the dark, on dry land, to carry on with our unfettered midnight explorations.

Inspired by an unspoken passion, a narrator writes some pages, comprising the story of the beginning, the blossoming, and finally the ending of a young woman's most intense love affair. 'Each day a page, to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once. Of how we could be.'

An unformed, innocent student in her first semester at university, Flannery Jansen initially encounters her lover in a local diner. But her tentative overtures, a look, a blush, are dismissed and Flannery retreats, humiliated. Future chance meetings on campus discourage Flannery even more, for Anne Arden is sophisticated and poised; in Flannery's eyes almost impossibly beautiful. Until, one day, she realizes that Anne feels the same way about her.

SYLVIA BROWNRIGG is a novelist and reviewer. She was born in California where she spent much of her childhood before moving to Oxford with her family. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in philosophy. She now lives in London and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. She is the author of two previous critically acclaimed works, the short-story collection Ten Women Who Shook the World and a novel, The Metaphysical Touch.