If I don't make it, know that
I loved you all along
Just like sunny days that
We ignore because
We're all dumb and jaded
—Our Lady Peace, "4 AM"

WHETHER YOU FALL

001

When Vesper Lynd was a child, she loved watching the birds from the fourth story window of her bedroom in the orphanage.

She was always wondering things—silly things, according to the other girls—such as what it would have been like to be a bird, to be pushed from the nest and still know how to fly. Opening the windows was forbidden, as the orphanage workers feared a fall (worse: a fall on purpose), but upon occasion she slipped the latch from its hook and pushed against the resistance of the rusted hinges, stuck her head out, and flew on borrowed wings.

It didn't matter that they were pigeons. She wasn't greedy. Beggars, as she and her orphanage mates were often reminded, could not afford to be choosers.

The birds were bright, never you mind the dull gray of their feathers. No matter how she tried to coax them into the fourth floor of the orphanage, with bits of stale bread she'd nabbed from the mess hall (true to its name, it was not a cafeteria) or birdlike ululations, they wouldn't fall for it. No bird was stupid enough to set foot into that orphanage. Doubtless, she thought, that was why they'd been born with wings, and she hadn't.

But once upon an autumn day, as the leaves died and took all the color in the world with them, a bird crashed into the fourth story window of the orphanage bedroom Vesper shared with five other girls. The others, affecting the worldly air of girls twice their ages, didn't look up from months-old copies of girl magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour and Vogue. (Vesper looked on them in disdain; they were, like her, barely out of training brassieres.)

Without a thought she rushed down four flights of stairs, slipped out the door in the kitchen, and went in search of the bird. She pondered broken wings and how to fix them; she imagined herself as a brunette Sleeping Beauty or a long-haired Snow White, singing with her constant bird companions. Maybe more would come, and she'd nurse them back to health too, and they'd be faithful only to her; maybe they'd teach her how to grow wings. Maybe they'd all fly away from here.

When she found the spot, precisely beneath the fourth story window of her bedroom in the orphanage, where she figured it had landed, she found the bird dead. Vesper Lynd learned a hard lesson that autumn day, when leaves died and took birds with them: that this was life. A fourth story window. Falling. Broken wings.

A cage, looking for a bird.

—

It is an ingenious idea, if only because it plays devil's advocate to everything M has ever believed about taking chances; about well-laid plans, and good intentions, and paving the road to hell.

MI6 has decided to hide her in the open.

She lives in London, still. She works for Her Majesty's Treasury, still; she has gotten a pay raise and a very handsome settlement from the government. Death benefits, she chuckles in darker moments, death benefits because Vesper Lynd has died, and the government means to compensate her for the loss.

Everything is water now. There is nothing that is not painted in shades of blue.

She lives across town from the old apartment she shared with Yusef. It is nicer, thanks to the government's money, but she does not keep cats anymore and she did not go home to retrieve her vinyl collection, her library, her feline companion, or her clothes. The re-configured deal with Quantum, which had been meant to save James Bond's life instead of Yusef's, was not the only gossamer wisp of the tangled webs Vesper Lynd had reweaved in her last days.

What that means is that he's got her cat. Or maybe not. Either way, it is not hers, and she doesn't stop to think that willing most of her worldly belongings to him might have been one more cruel decision in a string of them. But if not him, then whom?

Sophie Grey does not own a cat. Sophie Grey does not resent that she has been moved to a new office. Sophie Grey has blonde hair and brown contacts and her Treasury co-workers are not stupid enough to slip up and call her by that other name.

In essence, everyone lies.

Sophie Grey wears girly things which Vesper Lynd (ha) wouldn't have been caught dead in, and it isn't because Vesper Lynd resents what James Bond said, so long ago it seems like a dream: about overcompensating, and insecurity. Vesper Lynd is dead, and Sophie Grey does not need to overcompensate because she is not insecure.

Neither does she wonder what James would say about her newfound sense of style, because Sophie Grey has never met him, never loved him, never died to atone for betraying him.

—

She has painted two walls of the kitchen the color of his eyes, and the other two are painted stark white so that no one can accuse her of favoritism.

Sometimes men in black SUVs drive by her house late at night, when she is still up nursing her third glass of wine; she recognizes them, too, in the lift on the way up to her office. Once she thought she'd seen an agent, conspicuous for his expensive suit and stiff face and generic good looks, trailing her in the supermarket.

So kind of M, not to have forgotten her.

She goes to work and she comes home to an apartment which is spacious but barren, the walls of which she has painted in shades of blue, only because she can't stop drowning. Sophie Grey believes in poetic justice.

Because she is dead, Vesper Lynd believes in nothing at all.