Day I Left You

by Caroline Bishop

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

For readers of The Secrets We Kept and Jill Santopolo comes an epic love story about Greta and Henry, who by chance meet in 1982 East Berlin and find a love that’s meant to last a lifetime—until Greta vanishes.

I’m sorry. I can’t stay.

East Berlin, 1982. When Greta Schneider meets Henry Henderson, she is instantly smitten. An engineer on a work visa from Britain, Henry offers Greta a taste of the world beyond the Iron Curtain, a world that she yearns to explore as a translator once she finishes university. For Henry, Greta is simply perfect—bold and beautiful, her lively and inquisitive nature adding a vital spark to his everyday life.

But their time together is limited. Henry can’t stay once his visa expires, and Greta is forbidden from going beyond the Berlin Wall. It’s only been a few weeks, but they know how they feel about each other, so when Henry proposes, Greta accepts—and is given permission to start a new life with Henry in England. And for a time, everything is perfect. Until, one day, out of the blue, Greta walks out the door of their Oxford home, leaving a simple note behind.

Decades later, Henry still has unanswered questions. Greta loved him, and he loved her. They surmounted the odds to be together, and in his heart, he knows their marriage was happy. So why did she leave? How well did he really know his wife? When a young mother visits Henry’s antique restoration shop, she unknowingly brings with her a clue that sends Henry on a journey to find out what happened to the love of his life all those years ago.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, The Day I Left You is a gorgeous, spellbinding story about the nature of love, the memories we cling to, and the hurts we must leave behind to move forward.

Release date: February 18, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1: Henry

1 HENRY

OXFORD, ENGLAND, FEBRUARY 2018

Henry is halfway through his fish pie when he feels a sudden but not unfamiliar urge to get up from the table and leave the house. It is Wednesday evening, and he’s at his sister and brother-in-law’s place for a quiet dinner and catch-up, as he often is on Wednesdays. The food is always good (Charlotte’s sticky toffee pudding is legendary), the conversation is comfortingly familiar (even Ian’s bad jokes), and the evening provides a welcome break from his usual routine of dinner for one and a film on the box back home. So he feels a surge of resentment that tonight has been infiltrated by a stranger. It’s been a while since Charlotte and Ian have done this to him.

“And despite me telling him it was the best thing to do, he chose to ignore me and his business went belly up three months later.” Victoria shakes her head and makes a tsk sound. “I mean, I offer the best advice I can, but what can you do if people don’t listen to you?”

Henry utters a murmur of agreement, though he hasn’t, in fact, been entirely listening to her—the stranger—his mind drifting to the tricky issue of how to fix the broken legs of the wooden rocking chair that arrived in his workshop earlier that day.

“Oh, that must be so frustrating!” Charlotte rolls her eyes in exaggerated solidarity with Victoria. “Don’t you think so, Henry?”

Henry looks at his sister. Her eyes are slightly glazed from the wine, yet the message in them is clear, the silent sibling communication they have shared for six decades working as strongly as ever. Make an effort, won’t you? I invited her here for you.

I didn’t ask you to, Henry thinks. “Absolutely,” he says, and he sees Charlotte’s lips purse when he doesn’t elaborate.

His brother-in-law snorts from across the table. “Man of few words, our Henry,” Ian says as he tops up his wineglass.

Henry sighs and throws a tight smile at Victoria. It’s not her fault she’s been drawn into this oft-repeated family boxing match: in the red corner, Charlotte, determined to find her brother a romantic partner; in the blue corner, Henry, who is perfectly fine on his own, thank you very much. “If you really want my opinion,” he says, “I think advice should be offered with no expectation of it being followed. People must live their lives the way they want to. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

“That’s very true,” Victoria says with emphasis, as though he’s uttered something devastatingly insightful.

Charlotte and Ian exchange a knowing glance, though thankfully neither says what they are no doubt thinking: Well, you should know, Henry.

He takes another bite of fish pie, swallowing his mild annoyance along with it. He doesn’t want to have to make polite conversation with a stranger, not even a go-getter like Victoria, who runs her own business development consultant agency and is extremely successful and lives in a beautiful house in the leafy, middle-class Oxford suburb of Wolvercote, right next to Port Meadow. Charlotte told him all this in an introductory spiel when Victoria arrived at the door, half an hour after Henry. He smiled at her and said hello and asked questions and feigned polite interest, but underneath he bristled. There is a reason Charlotte and Ian didn’t tell him their tennis club friend would be joining them tonight. They knew what his reaction would be.

“Anyway, I don’t want to bore you by talking about my work.” Victoria leans forward. “Tell me about yours, Henry—it sounds much more interesting.”

What’s worse, he thinks as he replies with his standard answer—“I repair and restore modern and antique objects, primarily wooden ones, in my workshop in Jericho”—is that his well-intentioned but exasperating matchmakers have clearly told this poor woman he is willing to be set up. Or not in so many words, perhaps, but he can just hear Charlotte implying as much. I may be biased, but he’s such a lovely man, my brother, and he’s just never found the right woman for him, you know? It’s such a shame.

He’s been steered into so many “dates” by well-meaning friends and relatives over the years that he knows their tactics, can sniff out their futile hope at a thousand paces. Maybe this’ll be the one.

But he knows it won’t be. He had his one more than thirty years ago.

He doesn’t want to be rude, though, so he answers a few more questions from Victoria about his work, expresses interest in Charlotte’s renovation plans for their kitchen, and offers his brother-in-law an eye roll of solidarity when Ian reminds his wife that he lives here, too, and wouldn’t mind a say, and then when an acceptable length of time has followed their demolition of the fish pie, he pushes back from the table. “That was fantastic, sis, but I must be off.”

“What?” Charlotte gasps. “But I’ve made sticky toffee pudding!”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He pats his stomach, which is rounder than he’d like it to be, but he supposes he looks a lot better than some sixty-two-year-olds he knows. “Trying to ease off the puddings.”

“Since when?” Ian laughs, his face a picture of incredulity. “Come on, Henry, Charlotte made it specially.”

Emotional blackmail—another tactic.

“Well, I’ll certainly go for dessert,” Victoria says with a broad smile. “Never been one to deny myself a pud.”

“And nor should you,” Henry mumbles, but his chest tightens a little as he sneaks a glance at his watch. It’s quite a trek on the bus from here in Kidlington to his home in Cowley on the other side of Oxford, and he wants an early night so he can get to his workshop first thing tomorrow. He needs to finish waxing Mrs. Cleary’s table before she comes to collect it—it needs another coat to make it shine in exactly the way he wants—and then he’s got an old love spoon to repair and oil, before starting on that beautiful handmade rocking chair, all before the end of the week.

“Just a small portion?” Charlotte pleads.

“All right, then,” he relents, and his sister beams before heading to the kitchen.

“That’s the spirit,” Ian says. “You don’t have anywhere else to be tonight, do you?” He turns to Victoria without waiting for an answer and lowers his voice, mock-conspiratorially. “He’s probably planning to get in a bit of work before bed. He could retire, but he’s chained to that workshop of his. Anyone would think you’ve nothing better to do, right, Henry?”

Ian laughs as he says it, but the familiar jibe sounds stale and tired to Henry’s ears. He is passionate about his work, that’s all, and has no interest in joining his newly retired brother-in-law on the tennis court, or down the pub to watch the football, or whatever else Ian thinks Henry should be doing instead of sitting in his workshop with a coffee and some music as he loses himself in the soothing rhythm of sanding and polishing. None of Ian’s pastimes are better than that.

“I think your work sounds wonderfully satisfying, Henry,” Victoria says, “and extremely worthwhile.”

“Thank you.” Henry tosses a pointed glance at his brother-in-law and then smiles at Victoria. She isn’t unattractive, this fiftysomething businesswoman with her glossy brown hair (clearly dyed) and petite figure (tennis twice a week), and she’s certainly the sort of woman his sister would call “a catch,” especially given the difficulties of meeting new people at his age. But he can’t help but be irritated with how Victoria ends every sentence with an upwards inflection (she’s Australian and still sounds it, though she left twenty-five years ago) or the way she laughs more than is strictly necessary when he makes a little joke (he’s really not that funny) or the excess of mascara on her eyelashes, gathering in little clumps at the tips.

“Here we go!” Charlotte returns with the pudding and a jug of sauce, and Henry is grateful to escape Victoria’s hopeful gaze.

It’s another half an hour before he’s scraped every last drop of toffee sauce from his plate and feels able to leave. He thanks Charlotte for the meal, ignoring her clear disappointment, and offers Victoria a polite kiss on the cheek.

“Great to meet you, Henry. This was fun,” she says, the upwards inflection on fun making her sound more doubtful than perhaps she intends. Or not.

“Yes, it was.” He tries to sound earnest. “Lovely to meet you, too.”

Victoria cocks her head, analysing him perhaps, or waiting for him to say something else, something better, but he can’t manage it. Silence hangs in the air a moment too long, before Ian breaks the tension. “See you soon, then, Henry. Don’t work too hard.”

Outside, Henry zips his jacket to his chin against the February chill and looks at the sky. It’s impossibly dark—no moon, and the stars are covered with cloud—and the breeze is picking up. He sighs, expelling a white puff into the cold air. His life wasn’t meant to turn out like this, going home on his own to an empty house after an awkward blind date. He was meant to be with Greta. His wife, his love, his one. “Face facts, Henry,” Charlotte said after Greta disappeared on that awful day, leaving him only that bewildering, devastating note to come home to after she failed to show up at the cinema, “maybe she wasn’t as perfect as you made her out to be. Maybe she wasn’t your one after all.” But he refused to countenance his sister’s words. “Well then, why’d she up and leave?” Charlotte said, adding with a touch of cynicism, “Maybe you can’t ever really know a person.”

It was a depressing statement then, and it still depresses him now.

He puts his hands in his pockets and starts to walk away.

“Henry,” Charlotte calls softly from the door, and he turns, expecting to see the usual questions in his sister’s face: Why didn’t he like Victoria? Why can’t he just give people a bloody chance for once in his life? “Take care, won’t you?” she says instead, a little sadly.

He nods and lifts a hand in a parting gesture, before turning back down the road. No, he knew Greta, and she knew him, he thinks for the umpteenth time as he walks towards the bus stop. And he knew that her abrupt departure was out of character, that it wasn’t as simple as Charlotte made out. But that doesn’t answer the question his sister asked thirty-four years ago, the question he has tried to suppress but which resurfaces every time someone attempts to set him up with another woman; the question to which he has never, to his anguish, received a definitive answer: Why did his loving wife wake up one day and choose to disappear from his life without a trace?