In Concerto, my latest novel, Catriona hears the hero before she first sees him – he moves in to the house next door, and one night she hears him playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. I write:

Entranced, the eighteen-year-old musician listened with a beating heart to the liquid notes that floated to her through the night, a mesmerizing melody that held her in its charm long after it had ceased to play.

The next day, the music haunts Catriona, and so she goes over to the house next door to try to learn about the mysterious pianist. She is caught by him as she creeps towards the piano room, and her first impression is coloured by his mood:

Caught unawares, Catriona was almost scared out of her wits by the angry voice that accosted her. She looked a long way up to face her interrogator.

In the silence of that moment her impression was that a foreign sculptor had made this man and then stood him in the wind and the sun, allowing them to weather his face into a dangerous attraction. He was perhaps in his mid-twenties and very tall, his lean frame making his height deceptive. His dark hair was windblown into a fashionably wild look. The very bright emerald-coloured eyes staring down at her were glittering with anger, but riveting in his bronzed face, the contrast somehow increasing the threat he emanated as he towered over her.

At this point, something begins to niggle Catriona – some awareness of familiarity. But only after a brief exchange with the man, in which he is arrogant and curt, does she realise:

Only that morning his photograph had been plastered on posters all over the walls of the Conservatoire, announcing his upcoming piano concert. She had read about him in gossip magazines and broadsheet newspapers but had never heard him play. Until now she hadn’t given him any thought at all, too preoccupied as she was with her own life and dreams. His name was Umberto Rolando Monteverdi, a rising star in the world of classical music and the son of the famous opera diva, Calandra. With a name like that, no wonder the man had such an inflated ego.

The French term coup de foudre is used to mean love at first sight. Has Catriona experienced this? Certainly, she is stirred up, exhilarated, intrigued. Later, she regrets the way this first encounter with the budding composer turned out. She is unable stop thinking about “her disturbingly attractive neighbour”, and her first thought upon waking the next day is of him. Intoxication, we might say.

But is intoxication love? It is the beginning of it, perhaps, the connecting of souls – a flash, electrifying and dramatic. But flashes are brief – and so is Catriona and Umberto’s affair, as the morning after their night of passion, Umberto ends it with her.

What is more beautiful, in fact, than the coup de foudre is what can come next. This is falling in love, and the ‘falling’ part is everything: surrendering, letting go, giving oneself to the other person completely. While the lightning bolt is dramatic and arresting, this is gentle – this is beautiful.

Falling is hard, though. Frightening. It requires strength and courage and maturity. When Catriona and Umberto cross paths again, years have passed and each has grown up. Catriona is a mother now with her own psychology practice, and Umberto has had to rebuild his life as a blind man, having lost his sight in an accident. This time, there will be no coup de foudre; that is in the past. But now that Catriona and Umberto are older and wiser, now that they understand more about life and what is really important, will they feel once more the intoxication?

In the darkness after the lightning bolt, will they find each other – and fall together?