There’s a good chance I could go on like this forever, in short, staccato sentences that come out sounding more like accusations than statements.
Luckily, though, Elliot steps in to stop me.
“Katie,” he says, his ghost smile fading. “Her name’s Katie. Katie Hunter.”
He looks at me as if this should mean something to me, but it doesn’t, so I simply nod, not knowing what else to do with this information. He’s not denying that he was coming out of this ‘Katie’ woman’s house so early that it suggests he must have spent the night there. Then again, I don’t want him to think Icareabout who he spends the night with. Because I don’t. I definitely don’t. It’s nothing to me. It’s…
“How’s your ankle, by the way?” Elliot asks, in a change of subject so abrupt that it almost gives me whiplash. “That’s the main reason I came in.”
“It’s fine, thanks,” I reply. “It was just a sprain. I put frozen peas on it.”
“Peas. Right.”
Elliot isn’t listening. He’s stepping a little further inside the store now, gazing around and ignoring the three musketeers over there, who are lined up on the sofa gaping at us over their giant mugs of coffee.
“This place is looking great,” he says, sounding like he means it. “Really. It’s different, but the same.”
“We have you to thank for that,” says Dad, ignoring the warning glance I shoot at him and getting up to join us. “This is still our biggest seller.”
He reaches out and picks up a copy ofThe Snow Globefrom one of the displays. There’s a long and very painful silence as we all stand there looking at it.
This moment should have come with a trigger warning.
Elliot Sinclair should come with a trigger warning.
“Well, great,” says Elliot unconvincingly. “I’m glad it’s helped.”
“Oh, it’shelpedalright,” I hiss, unable to stop myself. “If by that you mean it’s helped me become the village laughingstock.”
Elliot’s head jerks backwards as if he’s been slapped. Dad silently places the book he’s holding back on top of the pile and backs away slowly.
“A laughingstock?” Elliot says, frowning. “How so?”
I stare at him incredulously.
“You wrote a book about me?” I tell him slowly, amazed I’m having to explain our personal history to him. “About us? It got turned into a movie?”
There’s a moment when it occurs to me that I might have got it wrong; that maybe he based the love story in his book on someotherEnglish girl he met in someothersmall town, in some other December. But then he nods, and I’m an annoyed mixture of emotions once more.
“I did,” he confirms solemnly. “I did do that.”
We hold each other’s gaze; me wondering how it can possibly be the case that he looks so the same, when everything else about him is so different.
“I knew it,” I hear Levi mutter from position on the sofa, followed by a softwhump, which I imagine is probably Paris hitting him with a cushion.
I don’t look around to confirm it, though. I’m too busy watching Elliot and wondering what he’s going to say. How he’s going to defend himself.
“You didn’t like the book, then, I take it?” he says, shrugging in an ‘aw, shucks’ kind of way that fails to mask the hurt I can see in his eyes.
I open my mouth and then close it again. In the imaginary versions of this conversation — and there’s been quite a few of them, over the years — I’ve always known exactly what to say to Elliot on the subject of his book. But now that the opportunity has finally presented itself, I find myself suddenly struck dumb.
It’s stupid, but I don’t want to hurt him.
Even after all this time, I can’t bring myself to hurt him.
“It’s not so much thebookI didn’t like,” I mutter, even though it definitely is the book. “It’s more… well, the attention I’ve had because of it. I don’t like the attention. You know I don’t like attention.”
“The attention?” Elliot’s blue eyes scan the store, which is, of course, currently empty of customers, for what has to be the first time in days. “I saw the globe thing, outside,” he goes on. “Is that what you mean?”
