In what seems to Tilly like remarkable speed he flits around the shop, pulling down titles here and there, until he has a small stack of books in his arms, their spines a colourful rainbow of pink.
‘Oh wow. You really do know your romance novels,’ she says with a small laugh.
‘Men can read romance novels too, you know,’ he replies a little gruffly, his jaw tensing and his brown eyes flashing at her.
‘Of course. I didn’t mean –’
‘Especially when they need to keep up on recommendations for their customers,’ he says, the tips of his ears turning pink.
She pulls her gaze away from his to leaf through the pile of books.
‘Oh! Georgette!’ she exclaims as she picks up a copy ofVenetiaby Georgette Heyer. ‘It all makes sense now. You named your cat after Georgette Heyer.’
His cheeks turn the same shade of pink as his ears. ‘Well, I told you before she’s not really my cat …’
Although she remembers him also saying he bought not-his-cat the fancy kind of cat food. And she has never seen acat look quite as at home as Georgette does this morning in the basket in the middle of the cat-themed window.
‘I’ll take all of them,’ she says, sliding the books across the counter.
Alfie’s eyebrows raise and he rubs his jaw. ‘I didn’t mean you had to buyallof them, they were just some suggestions.’
‘Hey, aren’t you running a business here?’ she teases.
But his face immediately drops. ‘Don’t forget your April book too,’ he says somewhat stiffly, passing her the brown paper parcel along with her bag of books.
As Tilly reaches out for the packages, Alfie’s fingers nudge against hers and her breath catches, her eyes meeting his.
Shehadalmost forgotten. The book had been at the front of her mind when she headed to the shop, but then she’d seen the window full of cat books and somehow it had been pushed to the back. She pulls her hand away quickly, running it over the brown paper.
‘Any guesses what it might be this month?’ he asks.
‘No idea.’ She thinks back to the satisfaction of leaving the office for the last time, stepping out into a golden morning with no plans and no agenda, just the future stretching out in front of her like a blank page. ‘But something out of my comfort zone might be good. I think I feel ready for a reading adventure.’
When she arrives home later and unwraps her parcel a slim volume falls out, the cover showing a black-and-white photograph of a man sat outside a café on a street that could only be Paris.
‘A Moveable Feast… Ernest Hemingway,’ she says in the direction of Joe’s urn, the light making the blue ceramic shine. ‘Isn’t that about Hemingway’s time living in Paris?’ She has heard of the book but never read it.
As she flicks through the pages, a letter from Joe falls on to her lap.
A lump rises in her throat as she reads. She just about manages to hold it together but as she slips the letter back inside the pages of the book an idea forms in her mind. A wild kind of idea that she never would have let grow in the past – not with work to consider, and a million other self-imposed things holding her back from dreaming big.
But what does she have to lose now? Whynotbe the kind of person to make a decision inspired by something as simple as a book?
‘You know what, Joe?’ she says out loud to the empty room. ‘Maybe I can do even better than justreadingabout Paris …’
18
‘Soixante et un, Rue Lepic, Montmartre,’ Tilly says through the taxi window, clutching the handle of a suitcase filled with spring dresses and romance novels.
The driver asks her to repeat herself three times until she eventually hands her phone over, showing him the apartment’s address on the screen.
‘Ah, soixante et un, Rue Lepic, Montmartre,’ he repeats, nodding and pressing a button that releases the car’s boot.
Tilly hauls her case inside, then climbs into the back seat, giving one last glance back at the imposing building of the Gare du Nord, not quite believing she is actually here.
As the taxi sets off down the busy street Tilly winds down the window to better take everything in, listening to the sound of horns honking, scooters zipping past, and feeling a pleasant breeze against her face. The city flashes by like a montage from a film: bustling bistros where people eat and drink on pavements; tall, ornate Haussmann buildings with wrought-iron balconies and silver roofs; wide, tree-lined avenues and little squares dotted with benches and statues. Through the window of the taxi as it winds its way through the city, Paris is exactly as she had imagined.
Her phone pings with a WhatsApp message.
