‘But you don’t actually know who she is right now?’ I pressed, fingernails biting into the palms of my hands. A sullen look came over her pretty face and she scowled.
‘Not yet. But I’m close. If I have to, I’ll get Dad to find out.’
I breathed an internal sigh of relief, safe for now.
‘Dad doesn’t know, she’s at a different imprint, and even if he did he wouldn’t say. You know how seriously Dad takes his job.’
‘Then I’ll ask Uncle Mal. Or CJ.Someonemust know.’
It was hard to say which part of this I hated the most. The sour look on my mother’s face, my little sister unknowingly trying to crack my secret identity, or the mere mention of my ex-boyfriend. It was deeply unfair of them both to make me deal with all of this before I’d had at least seven coffees.
‘You know there’s one theory that it’s Taylor Swift,’Charlotte said. ‘It would make sense, right? With all the Swiftie Easter eggs inButterflies?’
‘Or maybe the author was listening to her a lot while she was writing,’ I replied, mentally locating my phone, still charging upstairs on the bedside table. My Spotify Wrapped would out me in a second.
‘There’s one girl I know who’s convinced it’s another author and that’s why she doesn’t use her own name. Like it’s Maggie O’Farrell or Donna Tartt. My friend, Indhi, thinks it’s Colson Whitehead.’
‘Give me strength,’ Mum whispered to the heavens. ‘You think Colson Whitehead is writing secret romance novels?’
Charlotte nodded.
‘He probably gets bored writing all that wordy, literary stuff.’
‘Sophie, please leave the room and take your sister with you,’ our mother croaked. ‘I don’t want my daughters to see me cry.’
‘It doesn’t matter who she is,’ Charlotte said, burning with single-minded determination. ‘As long as she is my first author event. She’s the key to everything. If Este Cox does her first ever event at my bookshop, it’s guaranteed to be a success.’
Across the room, Mum glared at the both of us.
‘The only thing that her attendance will guarantee is a gaggle of overly hormonal young women who wouldn’t know a good book if it fell on their head. I’m sick of hearing about that book and I’m sick of hearing about its author.’
‘In case you couldn’t tell, Mum’s not a fan,’ my sister drawled. ‘Even though she hasn’t even read it.’
Mum glared at her, disgusted. ‘No, I haven’t read it.Why would I waste my time when I know exactly what it is? Predictable, badly written, misogynistic nonsense.’
‘Ow,’ I breathed. ‘Don’t hold back.’
It was exactly what I’d imagined she might say about my book but hearing the words come out of her mouth hurt in a way not even I could have predicted.
‘It’s offensive, all this “good girl” nonsense,’ she went on. ‘If a woman were to say “good boy” you would assume she was talking to a dog. Don’t tell me you’ve read it?’ She looked aghast at the very thought. ‘Sophie, I thought better of you.’
‘I skimmed it?’ I offered, high-pitched with embarrassment she happily accepted for the wrong reasons. ‘One of the other teachers had it in the staffroom, it’s not as though I bought my own copy.’
Not technically a lie but not technically the truth. I hadn’t bought my own copy and I had skimmed it in the staffroom, but not because one of the other teachers had it –allthe other teachers had it.Butterflieswas the Abbey Hill Primary staff book club pick for July.
‘Mum doesn’t know. She hasn’t read a single page.’ Charlotte held her coffee mug in one hand, her phone in the other, sipping, scrolling and arguing all at the same time. ‘The irony of you accusing a book of misogyny when you haven’t so much as scanned a word.’
‘I don’t need to read erotica to know it perpetuates harmful ideals against women. Let me guess, she’s sad and single, meets a man, it’s love at first sight, the sex is orgasmic from the beginning, then the couple break up for some absurd reason, most likely a tedious miscommunication that was entirely unnecessary andwraps up with them getting back together when the man makes a grand romantic gesture.’ Mum was almost ranting. I hadn’t seen her take against anything in publishing with such vehemence since Brooklyn Beckham’s photography book. ‘A denouement that traps the protagonist in a patriarchy-approved, heteronormative relationship, takes away her agency and denies the woman any room for growth.’
Not even Nadine Dorries’s books had raised this much ire in her and in all honesty that did not seem entirely fair.
‘You’ve got it all wrong,Butterfliesdoesn’t have a miscommunication trope,’ Charlotte challenged as I searched the kitchen for a hole to climb into and hide. Maybe the oven? It would be a tight fit but I’d be able to get all the essential bits in there.
‘It’s a strangers-to-lovers, forced-proximity, he-falls-first, small-town love story,’ my sister sniped. ‘And it’s romance, not erotica.’
‘Lottie, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck,’ Mum said with a sigh. ‘Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think there’s anything romantic about extremely graphic sex scenes. I lived a good long while without knowing anything about pegging.’
‘Please don’t say that word ever again,’ I begged, the oven looking more and more inviting by the second. Could you off yourself in an electric oven? Where was Sylvia Plath when you needed her.
