She looked up at him, her blue eyes beautiful, piercing the darkness. ‘I know.’ The uncertainty had gone, for now at least, replaced by love and trust.
‘I want to move here,’ she said. ‘But I’m not ready.’
He sensed that this was what had been worrying her, and for whatever reason she hadn’t felt able to say it earlier in the evening.
‘That’s okay.’
‘It’s taken me a long time to get my life and my business back on track, and that’s important to me.’
‘It’s important to me, too. I know we’ve talked about living on the island together. I also know that when you meet a new person, it’s normal to imagine how you can fit into each other’s lives. But that doesn’t make it anything more than dreaming about the future. I want us to dream about a future together, but for now let’s stick to concentrating on one step at a time.’
She stopped walking and hugged him. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’re in this together. Any time you feel like you’re losing control, that things between us aren’t going the way you want, talk to me.’
She nodded, leaning her forehead against his chest. ‘Same for you.’ He put a hand on the back of her head, her soft hair underneath his palm, reminding him of the first time they met when he’d longed to touch it. They’d come a long way since then, and he wasn’t about to let Lotta think that this relationship was going to end in devastation like her previous one.
25
When Lotta got back to London, the Snug campaign was all-encompassing. With the Oslo part ready to go, Clemmie wanted to get the rest of the stores underway with their own searches for collaboration partners. As part of that, Lotta had prepared a presentation that she would make at an online meeting of all the Snug store managers.
Mats was due to arrive the following day, and Lotta was looking forward to getting the presentation out of the way so she could enjoy his visit without having work in the back of her mind. They needed to connect properly. The last time they’d seen each other, two weeks ago, they’d spent the day on the island doubling the size of the cabin. She’d loved it. And it had been just what she’d needed to bring her focus back to the here and now. She loved Mats; she loved being with him, even when it was on an island in the middle of a foggy fjord, covered in dust and being drizzled on. She wanted to do this. And maybe it was okay that they weren’t together all the time because when they were, it was amazing.
That feeling had carried her through the past two weeks. That and the insane amount of work it had taken to get to this point. She sat in the meeting room at the Snug offices with her laptop in front of her, well aware that behind her, on the big screen, were around forty store managers waiting to hear from her.
‘I think we’re ready to start,’ said Harry, who was in charge of the IT side of things today.
‘Good morning from London!’ Clemmie began. ‘Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us for what we hope will be an exciting new chapter in Snug’s journey. As you know, we’ve been working with Snug Oslo on a new collaboration initiative, and today we’re joined by Lotta Jansen, the genius behind it, to explain how you can implement it in your own stores. Lotta.’
Lotta took a deep breath and smiled her widest smile, even though her heart was beating nineteen to the dozen. She looked straight into the camera and introduced herself. As she spoke, emojis began to fly up the screen, hearts and handclaps that ridiculously put her at ease so that by the time she pulled up her presentation and began telling the story of the Oslo collaboration, she felt as if she were talking to a room of friends.
‘We’ve put together a pack for each of you which has every step we followed to get to where we are now with Snug Oslo. It also has templates you can customise for your own social media channels and once we have all the information from you about your collaborations we will use those to launch an overarching campaign for the Snug brand as a whole. Does anyone have any questions?’
Harry fielded questions for her that spanned everything from stores that were concerned they didn’t have their own social media accounts to stores that were worried about alienating their makers by having to choose a favourite. Many of the questions were answered by Clemmie but Lotta found herself offering to run another session for the handful of stores that had no social media presence of their own and wanted to set some up before they started on the campaign work.
By the end of the meeting, Lotta was exhausted but felt it had gone well.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Clemmie. ‘That couldn’t have gone better.’
‘No problem. I’m glad they all seemed excited about it.’
‘To be honest, that’s exactly what I thought would happen. Unfortunately the Oslo store was a bit of an outlier on that front, but we knew that would be the case.’ She looked a little sheepish when she admitted that, but it was only confirming what Lotta had already guessed. No surprise.
‘Well it’s all worked out in the end. Oda is going to be amazing.’
‘Look, do you mind coming back in half an hour or so? We need to have a quick wrap up meeting about this but I have something else I need to talk to you about.’
‘Sure, no problem.’
While she waited, Lotta went to a nearby coffee shop and treated herself to a piece of lemon drizzle cake to celebrate. It felt like that call had been the culmination of all the work she’d done on the campaign so far. From now on, she was going to be taking more of an advisory role as well as keeping oversight of the content that stores were producing. After weeks and weeks of hard work, she finally felt like she could take a breath.
She scrolled through her emails, deleting the spam and filing stuff away, when a new message popped into the top of her inbox. From what Lotta could make out, it was from the Norwegian equivalent of Visit Britain, what used to be known as the tourist board. They had heard about the Snug Oslo collaboration campaign from the Folk Museum and via the Oslo trade association, which was probably Hanne’s husband. They wanted to talk to Lotta about running a campaign to highlight heritage crafts as part of a new tourism strategy.
It was starting. This was what she’d hoped would happen because of winning the Snug account, but she’d never imagined it would come from another country or before the Snugcampaign had even launched. It was good old-fashioned word of mouth, and even in the digital world, that was what the best businesses were built on.
She headed back to Snug HQ with a spring in her step. The email from Norway had made her day, whether or not it came to anything. Until she replied, she wouldn’t know how it would work out, so until then she’d take it as a win.
Harry was back at the reception desk when she went in, and he smiled broadly at her. ‘Go straight through. Clemmie’s in the meeting room.’
