Four years ago today I posted this chapter of the Night We Met for the first time. It is still there, in all it’s rough glory for history to judge.
It is the stretch of The Night We Met where Alison and Christian are doing the unglamorous work of staying in love across three hours of highway: Canberra and Sydney, weekdays and weekends, a shared phone that is never private enough. What they have instead are letters. His arrive like weather. Hers are the first time she has ever dared put that kind of want on paper.
The subtitle I gave it then still holds: Alison begins to forget herself. Not because she is careless, but because his words pull her so far inside the page that the flat, the news, the flatmates with the kettle, all of it recedes. Princess Diana has just died. The television will not shut up about it. Alison has a letter on the bench and a hand she should probably keep still.
The song on this page was Sophie B. Hawkins. It felt right: someone who knows exactly what they are doing, and someone who wishes they were the one doing it.
If you are new to Alison and Christian, this is them before the later books get complicated — before Timor, before gold, before twenty years of unfinished business. If you have been here since 2022, welcome back. The letters still work.
Enjoy.
— JL
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