I am Rizla and this is my story. It is the day before yesterday and I am dead. The day of my death was 14th February 1960, Valentine's Day, in Brighton. 'I'm floating 200 yards off the coastline in the icy waters of the English Channel. My final glimpse of life is through the top of the water. It is a pier. A beautiful woman is looking down. She's laughing at me. There's a man. He's also laughing. His arm is around her shoulder.
In Venice, Frances Croy is working to leave the previous year behind: another novel published to little success, a scathing review she can't quite manage to forget, and, most of all, the real reason behind her self-imposed exile from London: the incident at the Savoy. Sequestered within an aging palazzo, Frankie finds comfort in the emptiness of Venice in winter, in the absence of others. And then Gilly appears.