“Maybe I will one day,” I say, as if the thought of leaving doesn’t occupy my every waking thought. “Right now, though, we have this book of yours to think about.”
I pick up the pages again, signaling that this part of the conversation is at an end. Elliot watches me for a few moments longer, then gives the tiniest of shrugs, before reaching out and picking up the photo from the pile on the bed.
“Okay,” he says thoughtfully. “So, what are we thinking? Who is she? How does he meet her?”
I rest my head on his shoulder so I can look at it with him.
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who she was in real life,” I say. “But it doesn’t really matter if it’s fiction you’re writing. You can just make something up.”
“It wasn’tgoingto be fiction,” Elliot says, still looking at the photo. “I had it in my head that it would essentially be a biography. But I get what you mean about it needing a sub-plot. I guess it’s a bit dry without one. And I kind of like the idea of turning real life into a story. That could be fun.”
“Real lifeisa story,” I protest. “But you could still make this a true one, if you really want to. You could still write it as a biography, I mean. You’d just need to find out who she was, first. If that’s even possible.”
“Oh, it’ll be possible,” he says. “Maybe noteasy, granted, but still. It’s notthatlong ago, really. I found tons of records going back to the war when I visited Fort Stafford — that’s the military base he was stationed at. It’s a museum now, though, so that made it easier.”
I nod, remembering visiting Fort Stafford on a class outing when I was a kid. It’s just a couple of miles from Bramblebury, and the soldiers would apparently frequent the village pubs and dance hall on their time off. It’s strange to think Elliot’s great-grandfather was one of them; that he might even have sat at the bar below us at some point, or visited the bookstore — or whatever it was back then. To Elliot and me, itisjust a story, but to him — to the man this book is about — it was very real. It was his life, and he was the main character; just as we all are, in our own stories.
“I like that way of thinking about it,” Elliot says, when I share this thought with him. “I like the idea that we’re all busy writing the story of our life, even if we never put pen to paper. And he never did;which makes me all the more determined to do it for him. Find out the truth. Tell the full story. And I guess that means starting with Mystery Woman here.”
Our heads touch as we peer together at the photo, but the woman in it remains frustratingly indistinct, almost as if she’s a ghost who got caught in the act of disappearing.
“And you’resurehe didn’t leave any letters or diaries?” I ask again, thinking longingly of how amazing it would be to solve the mystery of the woman in the photo by poring over some decades old journals, found in a musty old attic. Like one of those old adventure stories I used to love so much as a child, brought to life.
But Elliot shakes his head.
“Nope. Or, if he did, no one bothered to save them. Like I said, his house was sold years ago; these photos are all that were left. I guess I could go back to the military base and see if there’s anything I missed,” he goes on. “But I doubt there’d be anything useful. They kept records of the men who stayed there, sure. But there’s nothing about their actual lives.”
“No, I guess there wouldn’t be,” I reply, saddened by the thought of all those lives being reduced to simply the known facts: that all that’s left is a start date and an end date, and none of the really important stuff that happened in between.
“I suppose we could try the library?” I go on, not feeling particularly hopeful. “I haven’t gone in there in years, but I guess they might have a local history section. Or I can ask Dad if he has any ideas; he’s pretty into anything involving the war.”
“Maybe his parents knew my great-grandpa?” Elliot says, his eyes lighting up. “Or his lady friend? Shit!” He slaps a hand over his mouth, a look of horror on his face. “What if she’s your great-grandma?”
“Relax,” I reply, laughing. “Neither of my parents were from here. Mum’s family moved down from Scotland when she and Lorraine were just toddlers, and Dad grew up in London. He met Mum at university. So it’s okay; we’re definitely not related.”
“Well, thank God for that.” He pulls me closer. “I’m still not sure you should ask your dad about this, though. I’m pretty sure he hates me.”
I glance up at him. He’s smiling, but his eyes are serious. Also: he’s not exactly wrong.
“He doesn’thateyou,”I tell him, struggling to find a way to explain the hard looks and endless questions Dad fires at Elliot every time he comes into the shop with me. “He’s just a bit over-protective, is all.”
He’s just scared I’m going to run off to America with Elliot and never come back, would be closer to the truth here, but I don’t want to have to admit that this is a possibility that’s so much as entered my head, even in the context of Dad and his paranoia about it, so I let it go.
“I guess that makes sense,” Elliot says, kissing me softly on the top of the head. “You’re all he’s got. I can’t blame the guy for being afraid of losing you. You would be a very hard person to lose, Holly Hart.”
Is it just my imagination, or is there a wistfulness to his tone that suggests it’s not just Dad he’s talking about now?
For a split-second, I consider asking him; of breaking the unspoken promise that we’re not going to talk about anything as serious as ‘us’ — because thereisno ‘us’. Not really. Not after Christmas Eve, when he’ll fly back home to Florida and his family, and that’ll be that.
So, I just reach up to kiss him, and I don’t think about how every single kiss takes us one step closer than the one that will be our last.
I don’t think about that at all.
Instead, in the days that follow, I pour all of my energy into helping Elliot try to figure out the identity of the woman in the photo.
We visit the library and the war memorial. We go back to the barracks, and even wander among the graves in the snowy churchyard, holding hands and feeling like characters in a movie who’re about to stumble upon the answer to a decades-old mystery.
But, of course, we don’t.
