‘You need to pick the life you’d be most happy inside. Or soon there won’t be a choice at all.’

‘I met someone who has been doing this for a long time and he still hasn’t found a life that he is satisfied with . . .’

‘Well, Hugo’s is a privilege you might not have.’

‘Hugo? How do you—’

But then she remembered Mrs Elm knew a lot more than she should.

‘You need to choose carefully,’ continued the librarian. ‘One day the library may not be here and you’ll be gone for ever.’

‘How many lives do I have?’

‘This isn’t a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life – your root life – is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very . . .’ She searched for a delicate word. ‘. . . decisive has happened. Something that razes the Midnight Library to the ground, and takes us with it. And so I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress, I can tell. You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside. But you don’t want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.’

They both were silent for a very long time, as Nora observed all the books all around her. All the possibilities. Calmly and slowly, she walked along the aisle, wondering what lay beyond the covers of each book, and wishing the green spines would offer some kind of clue.

‘Now, which book do you fancy?’ came Mrs Elm’s words behind her.

Nora remembered Hugo’s words in the kitchen.

Dream big.

The librarian had a penetrating gaze. ‘Who is Nora Seed? And what does she want?’

When Nora thought of her closest access to happiness, it was music. Yes, she still played the piano and keyboard sometimes, but she had given up creating. She had given up singing. She thought of those happy early pub gigs playing ‘Beautiful Sky’. She thought of her brother larking about on stage with her and Ravi and Ella.

So now she knew precisely which book to ask for.

Fame

She was sweating. That was the first observation. Her body was coursing with adrenaline and her clothes were clinging to her. There were people around her, a couple of whom had guitars. She could hear noise. Vast, powerful human noise – a roar of life slowly finding rhythm and shape. Becoming a chant.

There was a woman in front of her, towelling her face.

‘Thanks,’ Nora said, smiling.

The woman looked startled, as if she’d just been spoken to by a god.

She recognised a man holding drumsticks. It was Ravi. His hair was dyed white-blonde and he was dressed in a sharp-cut indigo suit with a bare chest where his shirt should have been. He looked an entirely different person to the one who had been looking at the music magazines in the newsagent’s in Bedford only yesterday, or the corporate-looking guy in the blue shirt who had sat watching her do her catastrophic talk in the InterContinental Hotel.

‘Ravi,’ she said, ‘you look amazing!’

‘What?’

He hadn’t heard her over the noise, but now she had a different question.

‘Where is Joe?’ she asked, almost as a shout.

Ravi looked momentarily confused, or scared, and Nora braced herself for some terrible truth. But none came.

‘The usual, I reckon. Schmoozing it up with the foreign press.’

Nora had no idea what was going on. He seemed to be still part of the band, but also not in the band enough to be performing on stage with them. And if he wasn’t in the band, then whatever had caused him to leave the band hadn’t caused him to disappear completely. From what Ravi said, and the way he said it, Joe was still very much part of the team. Ella wasn’t there, though. On bass was a large muscly man with a shaved head and tattoos. She wanted to know more, but now was clearly not the time.

Ravi swept his hand through the air, gesturing towards what Nora could now see was a very large stage.

She was overwhelmed. She didn’t know what to feel.

‘Encore time,’ said Ravi.

Nora tried to think. It had been a long time since she had performed anything. And even then it was only in front of a crowd of about twelve uninterested people in a pub basement.

Ravi leaned in. ‘You okay, Nora?’

It seemed a bit brittle. The way he said her name seemed to contain the same kind of resentment she’d heard when she’d bumped into him yesterday, in that very different life.

‘Yes,’ she said, full shouting now. ‘Of course. It’s just . . . I have no idea what we should do for the encore.’

Ravi shrugged. ‘Same as always.’

‘Hmm. Yeah. Right.’ Nora tried to think. She looked out at the stage. She saw a giant video screen with the words THE LABYRINTHS flashing and rotating out to the roaring crowd. Wow, she thought. We’re big. Proper, stadium-level big. She saw a keyboard and the stool she had been sitting at. Her bandmates whose names she didn’t know were about to walk back on stage.

‘Where are we again?’ she asked, above the crowd noise. ‘I’ve gone blank.’