‘You know,’ Natalie says, and here, flicking a strand of her long black hair over her shoulder, she deviates unexpectedly from the script. ‘I can’t help noticing he is very good-looking. And I’ll betheknows there’s more to running a bookshop than sitting around reading.’
And then, as if she and Lexi weren’t in the middle of a conversation, Natalie walks away, closes the door, and leaves Lexi furiously tapping the end of her pencil on a notepad, aghast at what Natalie is suggesting. Sam is everything that is wrong with the book world, and quite possibly the world more generally. It doesn’t matter how good-looking he is. She’d never bethatdesperate.
Chapter Three
It’s 9p.m. by the time Lexi is stumbling home to the town house she shares with Erin, the childhood friend she reconnected with when she moved to DC six years ago. It’s been dark for hours, but she doesn’t feel unsafe walking on Capitol Hill. The neighbourhood is sleepy at night; truth be told, it feels sleepy most of the time except at weekends, when residents wander around Eastern Market with handcrafted lattes in hand, browsing handmade jewellery, fresh bread, and watercolours of DC, mingling with tourists on the stretch of 7th Street that’s free of cars on Saturdays and Sundays.
At 9p.m. on a Thursday night, kids are tucked up in bed, and if political interns are out partying, they’re doing that in other, hipper parts of DC, like the Wharf or Union Market. Older staffers are no doubt working late, in the name of impressing a boss and moving up that all-important power ladder.
Lexi isn’t much of a political type herself. She landed here somewhat randomly when her grandmother passed away and left her the bookshop– in addition to the curvier build and the Irish pale skin, freckles, and red hair she’d inherited from her at birth. She’d never lived in the US since she was unexpectedly and prematurely born here thirty-two years ago, and it seemed like a good opportunity to discover her American roots and honour her grandmother’s memory.
It’s not like life was going brilliantly in London. Lexi was treading water in temporary admin jobs while she figured out what she actually wanted to do with her life, feeling increasingly left behind by her university friends as they moved higher up the ladder in the banking and management consultancy jobs they’d sworn they were only taking for a couple of years to build up some savings before they moved on to some worthier cause. And while it was lovely to cuddle her baby niece, it seemed like, with new motherhood, her sister didn’t have as much room for Lexi in her life anymore. The opportunity for a new start couldn’t have come at a better time, along with the realisation that yes, of course! Books. Books were what she was meant to do with her life. They had always been her refuge, through the loneliness of her childhood and the grief of losing her dad to cancer in her teens and then her mum to a senseless car crash not long afterwards. She’d just never thought of books as a potential career.
Up until the move to DC, her US citizenship had been a little theoretical, something she hid at school so she wouldn’t be bullied for being different, and then, in adulthood, something she wheeled out at parties and work awaydays when she needed a fun fact about herself, but nothing more meaningful than that. But when she showed up here, DC set about winning her over as it had in her summertime visits as a child, with its elegant monuments and its pastel row houses and the smell of ambition in the air, which, despite herself, she’s always found very attractive. And now it’s six years later, and Lexi can’t imagine living anywhere else.
She can’t imagine livingwithanyone else other than Erin, either. It had seemed like a miracle to find on social media that her childhood friend was living in DC. When Erin had left London– so long ago, on the cusp of the new millennium– she and Lexi had kept in touch for a while, but the time difference and Erin’s new, busy life and, later, the demands of secondary school, had widened the distance between them until it seemed unbridgeable by Instant Messenger.
Bumping into Erin again in this newer version of cyberspace was another sign that Lexi should embrace the move to America for the bookseller life, one of the biggest points in the ‘pro’ column of her list, the one that tipped her over the edge. Of course shewantedit, but there was also the matter of leaving behind her baby niece and her university friends, in particular her forever crush Scott. Yes, he had a new girlfriend, but Lexi was forever hopeful he’d eventually realise that none of these other women were right for him. She’s grateful now that her new life meant moving on. She hadn’t quite realised how exhausting the pining had been.
‘Hey,’ Erin calls from the kitchen as Lexi dumps her bag heavily on the floor and flops onto the sofa.
‘Hey yourself,’ Lexi says. ‘Good day?’
‘Another day at the coalface of American democracy. So, by definition, yes.’
‘But in actual practice?’
Erin throws a tea towel on the table and perches on an armrest next to Lexi. She pulls a face. ‘Same old spreadsheets. Same old annoying coworkers.’
Lexi’s heard some good stories about Erin’s job and the nerds who work for the Federal government. She’s heard about the colleague who’s always trying to recruit people into the legging-selling business. She’s heard about the guy whose desk is so overrun with plants you can barely find his face among the foliage. She’s heard about the days, a decade ago, when Erin had to put in night shifts around report time, babysitting the printer, refilling paper and ink as necessary while it churned out line after line of reportable expenses. And she’s also mildly afraid of all the maths that goes on there.
In contrast, running a bookshop seems like a picnic.
‘You?’ Erin asks.
‘Same lovely books. Same lovely coworkers.’ It’s been a good day: she brings to mind the deep, warm laugh of Marcus, whose job it is to unpack all the boxes and scan them into the inventory in the office next to hers, and who loves nothing more than a good dad joke. A chat she had with Hazel aboutClara Reads Proust, a short novel she’s just finished and can’t wait to press into the hands of everyone who likes books about books. Elijah and Tessa running around the shop, filming TikToks, bringing energy and vigour and a little chaos in their wake. ‘We’re rearranging our romance section, making more space for it. Considering whether to experiment with shelving them by trope: enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, only one bed, that kind of thing.’
‘But don’t some romance novels have more than one trope? Like, can’t friends take a road trip and find there’s only one bed and mayhem ensues?’
Lexi has recently read a book with that exact plot point. ‘Yeah, that’s one of the things that makes it tricky. Not as tricky as real-life romance, though.’
‘Uh-oh.’ Erin searches Lexi’s face, clearly figuring out if this is the beginning of a long conversation. ‘Should I boil some water for tea?’
‘Nah,’ Lexi replies. ‘There’s nothing to say, really. Except that I’ve given up. There are officially no good men left in DC.’
‘I’ll boil some water,’ Erin says. After all this time living with Lexi, she knows when a conversation is likely to escalate into a moment that calls for tea. From the kitchen, Erin calls out, ‘I don’t think that’s true, though. What about that guy you went on a couple of dates with just before Christmas?’
Lexi shakes her head. ‘Not DC. The suburbs. Arlington. And it took forever to get to his house, remember? The Blue Line was single tracking, so I took an Uber along with everyone else dating people across the river and the traffic cost me an arm and a leg in surge fees.’
‘But he was otherwise nice?’
‘Yeah, I liked him a lot. But it was never going to work.’
Lexi braces herself. She knows what’s coming along with the tea that Erin is handing her: the lecture about her pickiness.But, come on. There’s alwayssomething. Even when you think you’ve met someone, they turn out to have a five-year plan to move back to Texas, or to be so busy with grad school and networking that they can barely squeeze you into their diary, or to be so obsessed with work that they can’t talk about anything else and can’t stop checking their phone for important emails.
‘Do you think maybe—?’
Lexi shakes her head to cut Erin off. ‘No. The guy before the Arlington guy wanted to lecture me about Brexit and got very annoyed when I turned out to know more about it than he did. The one beforethatwas very disappointed that I hadn’t gone to Oxford or Cambridge.’ She switches into her terrible impersonation of an American accent, whiny and nasal and not at all flattering. ‘What, like, you mean you didn’t even apply? Why would a person not even apply?’
