‘Has she said anything to you, Nat?’ Ginny’s hushed voice was blatant with worry.
‘Not a thing. Keeps acting like there’s nothing wrong.’
‘It’s like when her parents died, remember? She’d always smile and say she was fine.’
‘And no one who says they’re fine ever means it.’
‘Exactly.’
Sophie poked her head over her laptop screen where she’d been emailing a potential buyer of one of the first editions. One that would see her council tax bill cleared, and any chance of Frank Fletcher hassling her again well and truly gone.
‘I can hear you. And I am fine. I promise.’ She flashed a thumbs up at Ginny and Natalie, who were huddled on the couch together, mugs of tea in hand, their brows furrowed in matching looks of concern.
Ginny set her mug down and glared at her. ‘Fine is not the same as being good, Soph. You know that. Can you tell me you’re good? That you’re happy?’
Sophie shut the laptop and indicated for the girls to get up. ‘I’ve got to straighten up these shelves. They’re still higgledy-piggledy after Lucille’s talk. How about instead of worrying needlessly about me, you help?’
Natalie folded her arms, unconvinced. ‘If we help, will you be straight up with us? Tell us how you really feel?’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’ Sophie held her arms up, palms flat to the ceiling and widened her eyes for extra honest-to-goodness-I-really-am-fine effect. ‘Promise. But if my telling you I feel nothing means tidying up this place will take one-third of the time, then I’ll tell you I feel nothing.’
‘There we go. She feels nothing.’ Ginny grunted as she pushed herself up off the sofa. ‘She’s numb. Broken. No wonder she says she’s fine. If you’re not feeling anything of course you’re fine.’
Sophie rolled her eyes as she reordered a line of books alphabetically. ‘Look, I just don’t see the point in thinking too hard about what happened. I can’t change it. He has a life to live in the city and that’s all there is to it.’ He. And that’s how much it hurt: she couldn’t even say his name. Let alone think it. But she wasn’t telling her friends that. She wasn’t telling them anything. It was too embarrassing to admit she’d fallen for the same tricks again. Instead she’d let Ginny and Natalie believe he’d had to go back to London for work.
Ginny came to stand beside her and slung an arm around her shoulders. ‘Maybe he’ll come back for you. Wouldn’t that be romantic.’ She sighed deeply and faked a swoon.
‘It would be inconvenient. I’m busy with the bookshop. The online business is picking up. I’ve had some big thriller author get in touch about a book signing after a recommendation from Lucille Devine, so I need to organise that. If he came back I’d be too busy for him.’
Tiring of the topic, Sophie left Ginny and Natalie to finish off straightening up the books and made her way back to the laptop. She pulled up the courier’s website to check the tracking on a batch of fresh books due to arrive.
Sale by sale, the bookshop’s finances were rising from the doldrums, but even that hint of success did not distract from the pain that pulsed through her heart every time Al—… he entered her thoughts or was mentioned by Ginny or Natalie, who hadn’t stopped asking after her well-being or if she’d heard from him since he’d left nearly three weeks ago.
Nineteen days ago, to be exact. Not that she was counting.
Sophie ran her hand through her hair and tried to concentrate on the courier’s tracking page. Failed. It was all too hard.
She should be happy right now. Thrilled. Instead her heart was hollow, and that feeling weaved its way through every aspect of her life. Her beloved bookshop tainted with sadness. Her home no longer her sanctuary, but a place she wanted to hide from. The beach was out of bounds, the memories forged there in recent times flooded in whenever she caught sight of the blue waters, heard them whisper as they washed over the sand. Every part of her home, of Herring Cove, pushed him to the front of her mind, when what she wanted – what she needed – was for him to be well gone from it.
Was this how Natalie felt? Was that why she was so happy to sell up? To leave?
‘Have you found a new place to buy, Nat?’
Natalie poked her head around the bookshelf. ‘Not yet. The money’s not come through. There’s been a hold-up. They said not to worry though, that it would be sorted soon.’
Sophie knew what the ‘hold-up’ was. More to the point, who it was. She was to blame. She’d dug her heels in when Frank Fletcher had returned to the shop, trying again to get her to sell. She’d even gone so far as to press her hands over her ears and sing ‘la la la’ so she couldn’t hear his emotive arguments. Eventually he’d given up with an ominous ‘you’re making the biggest mistake of your life’.
It took all her self-control not to reply with a ‘the biggest mistake of my life was falling for your son’.
The screen blurred before her as reality hit, hard.
She repeated the same mistakes with men.
She stuck stubbornly to her own safe ways, even when it was detrimental to her life.
Even now she refused to sell the bookshop, even though she couldn’t muster any joy being here. Even though it had begun to feel like an albatross round her neck, rather than her happy place.
What had been her safety net was now a daily reminder of every misstep she’d ever made.
She slumped onto the counter and buried her head in her arms.
Seconds later she was smothered in a hug by Natalie and Ginny as they shushed kind nothings into her ear.
For the first time since that fateful night, Sophie allowed the tears to flow freely. To ease the tension coiled in every muscle. To wash away her anger at putting her trust in the wrong person, the fear that she could so easily be hurt, the heartbreak at feeling so deeply for another, only to have it all be a lie.
Long minutes passed. Her shoulders shuddered one last time. Ginny and Natalie’s grip on her loosened, but they didn’t let go.
‘I’m glad you let it out,’ Natalie whispered. ‘You couldn’t hold it in forever.’
‘If you had you’d have exploded.’ Ginny kissed her cheek. ‘And I’m not game to clean human innards off books and furniture.’
Sophie blinked away the last of her tears, then wiped damp streaks from her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘I’m so lucky to have you both.’
‘The feeling is entirely mutual.’ Ginny wiped away a tear. ‘Stupid hormones making me leak all the time. I swear they’ve gotten worse since I decided it was time to make a baby.’
‘Just you wait until you’ve actually made one.’ Natalie leaned against the counter and shook her head. ‘You’ll be begging for the regular hormones to make a return. Speaking of returns…’ Natalie turned her attention to Sophie. ‘I take it Alexander didn’t go back to London just for work?’
Sophie breathed deeply, then exhaled, long and slow. ‘He didn’t.’ She paused, unsure how to go on. Perhaps the first step to healing… to letting him go… was opening up. ‘He went because I told him to go. He wasn’t who I thought he was.’
Ginny’s eyes narrowed. ‘He seemed so nice. Like a proper good guy. Man, I wish he was still here so I could stuff fish bait into his car’s muffler. Or just dump a bucket of it over his head.’
Despite herself, Sophie laughed. ‘I wish you could too. It’s my own fault though; I trusted him. He knew about my financial problems and he told his father.’
‘That arse.’ Ginny folded her arms and glared. ‘I can’t believe he’d do that. When? How?’
‘He saw an email by accident on his first day here, an overdue bill. I guess he must’ve told him that day. His father used that information to come here after Lucille’s talk, all guns blazing, and tried to use it against me. Told me I was silly not to sell. That I’d regret it.’ Sophie hugged herself. Part of her was beginning to think Frank was right.
‘Soph, don’t take this the wrong way, but did you tell him not to say anything?’ Natalie’s words were hesitant, like she knew she was treading on shaky ground.
Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. She knew what Natalie was trying to say – that if she’d not explicitly asked him to keep that knowledge to himself, then she could hardly blame him for doing what any other businessman trying to secure a deal would do – but part of her didn’t want to hear it.
Acknowledging that would mean she acted wrongly, tossing Alexander out the way she had. That the only person she could blame for her situation was herself. That had she stopped, breathed and heard him out, she wouldn’t be walking around the shop wishing she could be anywhere but. Contemplating doing the one thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t do.
Natalie rubbed Sophie’s arm. ‘You can’t be blamed for jumping to conclusions and thinking the worst of Alex. Not after the Phillip situation, combined with the pressure of the last week and his father turning up like that and bothering you. It would be enough to make anyone do something rash.’
‘Like considering selling up and leaving? Because that’s what I’m thinking I might have to do.’
The silence was so complete you could have heard a loose leaf from a book fall to the ground.
Sophie wished she could take the words back. Not because she didn’t mean them. She did. It had been playing on her mind since Frank Fletcher, on the day he’d left the village, had slipped another folded piece of paper, with an even larger number written on it, underneath the shop’s door. But by saying the words out loud she was giving her friends the chance to talk her out of it.
Ginny’s mouth opened. Her chest inflated.
Sophie shook her head, held her hand up. Stopped Ginny just as she went to talk. ‘Don’t try to talk me out of it. My everything has always been tangled up in the place. The good and the bad. And until recently the good managed to outweigh the bad – even after Phillip did what he did. But now? After Al—’ She bit her tongue. Stopped herself from saying his name out loud.
What good was it doing holding it in, though? Perhaps if she could use it freely, she could move on faster.
‘After this thing with Alexander, well, I don’t know that the scales are weighted on the good side any more.’
‘I understand.’ Natalie threaded her arm through Sophie’s. ‘That’s why I want to move on. Sometimes you need a fresh start. But just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, okay? You don’t want to look back a year from now and wished you’d chosen another path.’
A chirpy meow came from the storeroom, and Puddles sauntered in seconds later, before plopping down in the middle of the floor for a spot of grooming.
Memories of Alexander flared in Sophie’s mind. Alexander stroking Puddles absentmindedly as they sat on the couch watching a movie. His pleading to be allowed to break Sophie’s one cat rule that meant Puddles wasn’t to sleep in her bed. His bemusement when she refused to budge, saying if she let Puddles do it once he’d want to do it forever. That he shouldn’t be encouraged. The way that he’d then picked up Puddles, held him nose-to-nose and apologised for failing to change her mind.
There was no way she could find her way back to that path. Even if she wanted to. Alexander had his place in the world. His future all mapped out. She had begun to suspect that she was still finding hers. And maybe a fresh start was the only way she’d get the clarity she needed to illuminate the path ahead.
She broke away from the girls. ‘I’ve got some thinking to do. I’ve made enough mistakes trusting others. If I’m going to sell this place I need to know that my instincts are right. That I can trust myself to make the right decision.’
Natalie and Ginny gave her one last hug and wished her good luck, before waving goodbye and heading into the late afternoon sun, which was becoming more watered down with every passing day as autumn’s chilly fingers took hold of Herring Cove.
Sophie hugged herself tight. She may not have the happily ever after she’d dared hope for, but she had her friends and she had her bookshop – for now.
Soft fur brushed her ankles. She glanced down to see Puddles weaving his way through her legs. And she had Puddles. Which meant Sophie had all she needed.
And with all of that she could distract herself to the ends of eternity pretending it was enough.