Hope Levy, Marc (distant reading .txt) 📖

PRAISE FOR HOPE

“His best book! A killer! Buy two copies—one to mark your favorite pages, the other to keep perfectly intact on your shelf.”

—Le Parisien

“A true page-turner. Unputdownable. This surprising story is electrifying.”

—AFP

“One of Marc Levy’s most moving plots. A beautiful ‘Sleeping Beauty’ 2.0 with a most striking heroine.”

—RTL

“An extraordinary, touching, and humorous love story, on par with Jules Verne’s.”

—Franceinfo

“From love that never dies to unimaginable utopias, nothing is impossible for Marc Levy! Once again, he’s written a genius story that will have many fans hooked.”

—Télé 7 Jours

“A surprising, moving story that immediately takes hold of the reader.”

—Télé-Loisirs

“A wild gamble for a story full of emotions that will make readers cry with laughter.”

—Le Quotidien du médecin

“From the outset, this Romeo and Juliet 3.0 whisks the reader away. The fluid writing colors the story’s twists and turns and its surprise ending and adds a touch of humor.”

—Télé 2 Semaines

“A new, moving story of love and friendship—lighthearted and surprising. It really hits the spot.”

—Tribu Move

ALSO BY MARC LEVY

P.S. from Paris

All Those Things We Never Said

The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury

The Last of the Stanfields

A Woman Like Her

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2016 Marc Levy/Versilio

Translation copyright © 2021 Hannah Dickens-Doyle

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Previously published as L’Horizon à l’envers by Éditions Robert Laffont in France in 2016. Translated from French by Hannah Dickens-Doyle. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2021.

Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781542025645

ISBN-10: 1542025648

Cover design by Kimberly Glyder

For my parents, my sister, my children, my wife, and Susanna

Contents

Start Reading

A siren wailed . . .

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

MELODY

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Translator

“Nothing is more imminent than the impossible.”

—Victor Hugo

A siren wailed somewhere in the distance.

Josh pressed his face to the window, took a deep breath, and gazed over the red brick buildings in the neighborhood he and Hope had called home for a year now.

Flashing red and blue lights flooded the deserted street, drawing closer and illuminating the entire room while the ambulance drew to a standstill at the foot of the building.

From this point on, every second counted.

“Josh, I need to do this now . . . ,” Luke warned him.

Josh couldn’t find it within him to look at the face of the woman he loved.

“Josh,” Hope whispered as the needle slipped into her vein. “Don’t look. You don’t have to look. We don’t need to say anything. We never have.”

Josh moved toward the bed and leaned over Hope, kissing her pale, parted lips.

“It was a privilege to have known you, Joshy.” She smiled and closed her eyes.

There was a knock at the door, and Luke stood to wave the team through. Two men with stretchers had arrived, joined by a doctor who rushed to the bedside to take Hope’s pulse. From his bag, the doctor extracted a tangled web of cables and electrodes, arranging them over her chest, wrists, and ankles.

He assessed the markings printed on the strip of paper and nodded to the two paramedics. Sliding the stretcher toward her, they lifted Hope onto a bed of ice.

“We need to move fast,” the doctor said.

Josh watched as they carried Hope away, straining to follow when Luke grasped him by the arm and steered him over to the window.

“Do you really think it’ll work?”

“When it comes to the future, who can say?” Luke replied. “But as for tonight, we achieved the impossible.”

Josh looked down at the street below. The two men were loading the stretcher into the ambulance, and the doctor clambered in after them, pulling the doors shut behind him.

“If that doctor had noticed something . . . I can’t thank you enough.”

“Hey.” Luke shrugged. “You guys are the magicians here. What I did was no big deal. And what little I did do, I did for her.”

“What you did was absolutely essential, if her theory’s right. I guess time will tell. If we’re still here to see it.”

1

“Why are you always putting yourself down?” asked Josh. “How can a girl like you be so self-conscious? Or is this part of your master plan?”

“Master plan? That’s just the kind of dumb thing you’d come up with.”

“Maybe it’s your way of fishing for compliments . . .”

“See! I’m right!” Hope exclaimed. “If I really were pretty, I wouldn’t feel the need to fish for compliments, would I?”

“You’re exhausting, Hope. I love the way your mind works. You’re the funniest girl I know.”

“When a guy tells a girl she’s funny, it’s usually because she’s ugly.”

“Oh really?” Josh said. “Can’t a girl be funny and pretty? Now, if I’d said that, you would’ve called me a sexist pig.”

“And an idiot. But I’m allowed to say it. Anyway, what’s this Anita like?”

“Who?” Josh asked.

“That’s right, act all innocent!”

“It wasn’t a date, or anything!” Josh protested. “We were sitting next to each other, and we shared our thoughts on the movie.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Hope. “You guys had opinions about a movie that’s basically an hour and twenty minutes of car chases with a soppy kiss at the end?”

“You’re distracting me.”

“Oh, please! You’ve been checking out that brunette at the back of the library for an hour. Need a wing woman? I could get her number, ask if she’s single. Tell her my