“Plus, you know who else lives in London,” says Jools, meaningfully.
“Who?” I say innocently, even as my mind is whispering,Max.
“Max.”
—
Max?”my sister says a few minutes later as I’m downstairs getting breakfast, her eyes going wide as a deer’s in a torch beam.
Tash has never been a Max fan, ever since he broke my heart.
“I know, I know. But he was lovely, last night. He seemed... pleased to see me.”
“What was he doing in Shoreley?”
“Just passing. A work thing,” I say, opting not to fill her in on Max’s self-confessed trip down memory lane.
Tash hands me a coffee. While I’m shoveling Coco Pops at her immaculate kitchen breakfast bar, she’s prepping for a gym session, head to toe in Sweaty Betty, a giant canister of water in one hand.
I moved in with Tash and her husband Simon two years ago. It was part of a big idea—hers more than mine, at the start—to help me save money and eventually get on the property ladder. As it happens, I hateliving on my own, and I was craving the company anyway after splitting up with my ex, so it worked out pretty well.
It’s not as much of a sacrifice on Tash and Simon’s part as it sounds. Their converted farmhouse has six bedrooms and two actual wings, plus I’m a live-in unofficial babysitter. It’s about ten miles inland, surrounded by nothing but vast arable fields, with no near neighbors. The depth of the quietness here can sometimes feel eerie, making me crave the agitation of crashing waves or the commotion of enthusing tourists roaming Shoreley’s cobblestone streets.
“Jools thinks I should move to London,” I say, through a mouthful of cereal while Tash bounces up and down from her ankles. “There’s a room going spare at her place.”
The furrow on Tash’s forehead deepens. She stops bouncing. “Luce, just because you’ve bumped into Max, you can’t just up and—”
“It’s not that,” I say, because really, it isn’t. I mean, yes—my horoscope did happen to mention bumping into my soulmate yesterday, and it does seem ridiculous to think it could have been referring to anyone other than Max. But it did also hint I was about to embark on a new career path. Jools has a free room, and Ihavehad that message from the ad agency recruiter: maybe all the signs are pointing in the direction of London.
“I’ve got a better idea,” says Tash.
“Go on,” I say, suspiciously, because—let’s face it—I am talking to a person who enjoys a prebreakfast workout.
“Why don’t you use the opportunity to write? That’s always been your dream.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking—trying to get a writing job at an ad agency.”
“No, I meant...” Tash hesitates, then breaks into a smile. “Look what I came across at the deli yesterday.” She leans over to the fruit bowl, slides a flyer out from underneath it.
WRITE THAT NOVEL! ALL LEVELS WELCOME.
WEEKLY WORKSHOPS. £5 A SESSION.
RUN BY PUBLISHED NOVELIST RYAN CARWELL.
I look up at her. “Write a novel?”
She reaches across the breakfast bar, takes my hand. “You know, just before you went traveling, you read me that short story you’d written, and I was... blown away. Honestly, Luce. I’ve been thinking ever since that you should do something with your writing. Well, maybe this is your chance. To get back to doing what you really love. Didn’t you say you’d had an idea for a novel?”
I swallow. In many ways, she’s right: writing fictioniswhat I love to do. It was born out of being a voracious childhood bookworm, I think: I would always turn to books in times of uncertainty or when I needed an escape, or to lose myself for a while—like when Dad got made redundant, or there was that spate of burglaries in our street, or our beloved grandmother eventually succumbed to stomach cancer. And the books I sought solace in were, almost without exception, stories about love. The kind of books my parents had always had lying around the house, timeless old romantics that they were. So during holidays and weekends, and on school nights by torchlight beneath my bedsheets, I lost myself inWuthering HeightsandPride and Prejudice,Anna KareninaandDr. Zhivago. The stories were not always cheerful, of course, and love didn’t always prevail. But I liked what they had in common: that they put love center stage, that universal, all-encompassing emotion with the power to either complete or destroy us.
As I got older—and especially at moments of disappointment, heartache, or trauma—my passion for reading turned into a desire to write, a longing to see if I could make other people feel the way I felt when I read: moved to tears, inspired, comforted.
So I began to write the kind of fiction I understood best: lovestories. At uni, I joined a creative writing group, entered competitions, even had a couple of short stories published in the student magazine. Writing became my form of self-expression, a way to try to make sense of life. Even when I dropped out of my English literature degree, I told everyone it would be okay, because I was off to become a writer as I traveled the globe. And at that point, I’d had an idea for a novel—I had the premise, characters, and rough chapter plan sketched out, had filled half a notebook.
But then came Australia, when the world stopped making sense to me entirely. And I no longer wanted to express how I felt. I simply shut down. Back then, merely glancing at my own words on the page was enough to bring bile to my throat.
I’ve not so much as looked at that novel again since.
