She steers me through the doorway of a little boutique, which is about half the size of the bookstore, and decorated entirely in stark white, with items of clothing displayed like works of art. I wander around cautiously, too scared to touch anything, while marveling at the fact that a place like this even exists in Bramblebury; a village which, until recently, boasted an Oxfam shop and a place selling equestrian gear as its only source of ‘fashion’.
The Snow Globeeffect strikes again, I guess.
Within minutes, Paris is herding me into a changing room with an armful of clothes, which I dutifully try on, waiting for the moment when I’ll look in the mirror and think, “Yes, that’s it. That’s the woman I want to be. My life is now changed.”
But the moment doesn’t come. The clothes are all beautiful, even to my unpracticed eye, but nothing looks quite right; by which I mean nothing makes me look like Beautiful Katie Hunter — or BloodyKatie Hunter, rather, who has suddenly become the gold standard of attractiveness to me.
And meanwhile, no matter what I try on, I’m still just Holly.
“This isn’t fair,” I complain to Paris when I emerge from the changing room a few minutes later, my cheeks red from the mini workout I’ve just had struggling in and out of a selection of bodycon dresses. “If my life was a movie, this would be the moment where I take off my glasses and basically turn into another person. Like Superman.”
“You don’t wear glasses,” replies Paris, ever the pragmatist. “And your life technicallyisa movie, anyway. It’s just not the movie you want it to be.”
“Not yet, it isn’t,” I mutter, feeling like I should apologize to the sleekly sophisticated shop assistant at the door as we leave the store empty-handed. “But I’m working on it.”
Paris eyes me curiously, but whatever she’s about to say is lost as I step through the doorway of the little boutique and walk straight into something very tall, and very solid.
Something, in fact, very Elliot Sinclair.
“Holly,” he says politely, not sounding particularly surprised to find me almost falling over him for the second time in the space of a week. “How are you?”
“I’m great,” I reply, quickly scanning the street for any sign of Bloody Katie, and relaxing slightly when she fails to materialize. “Just been doing a bit of shopping with my friend Paris.”
Paris’s eyebrows almost disappear into her hairline at this, but she doesn’t contradict me, and I smile at her gratefully, relieved to be ‘showing up as my best self’, as she instructed me earlier.
“That’s nice,” says Elliot. “Is that a pencil in your hair?”
He reaches out and removes it, like a magician performing a trick — only in this case, the only ‘trick’ he manages to pull off involves my hair rapidly uncoiling itself like one of Medusa’s snakes, and absolutely no one is impressed by it.
“Oh,that’swhere it was,” I reply, pushing hair out of my eyes and reaching for the pencil. “I was looking for that earlier when I was … when I was…”
“It was when you were working on your new book, Holly, wasn’t it?” says Paris, coming unexpectedly to the rescue. “You were so into it you must’ve got distracted.”
I stare wordlessly at her, not totally on board with the direction she’s taking this conversation in, but not quite sure how to turn it around.
“Your new book?” Elliot says, his eyes flickering with an emotion I can’t identify. “So youarewriting again?”
“Oh. Um. Yes. Yes, I am,” I reply, feeling Paris’s elbow connect sharply with my ribs. “I’m working on a novel, actually. I can’t say much about it, it’s—” I stop myself just in time, before I can let the fact that I’m just the ghostwriter slip out. “It’s still just a very rough idea. You know how it is.”
“She has a publisher and everything,” says Paris, apparently deciding that now is the moment to be my wing-woman. “So it’s a real book. She’s not just saying that to make herself look good.”
I cringe inwardly, making a mental note never to get on the wrong side of her, if this is what she thinks ‘being supportive’ is like.
“But Holly, that’s great,” Elliot says, with what looks like the first genuine smile I’ve seen from him since he arrived back in town. “That’sreallygreat. I always said you should write a novel. So, what’s it called? Or can you not say?”
I start to shake my head, before Paris’s elbow changes my mind.
“It’s calledIf This Was a Movie,” I say, blurting out the first thing that comes into my head, then cringing as I realize how stupid it sounds. Then again, Elliotdidname the town in his book ‘Hollybrooke’, so maybe it’s not themoststupid thing he’ll have heard.
“I like it,” he says, his grin widening. “I really like it. It’s veryyou.”
There’s a tiny window of opportunity for me to ask him what he means by this rather than simply filing it away so I can overthink it later (Which is alsovery me, actually…), but I’m distracted by the way he’s looking at me as if we’re still close enough to chat about our lives like this — and also by the little white scar just above his left eyebrow, which proves that we aren’t, because I know it definitely wasn’t there ten years ago. Every time I see him, I notice some little detail about him that’s different, and every one of those details provides even more proof of the life he’s lived without me, and me without him.
I wonder if Katie Hunter knows how he got that scar?
“Oh! Hello there!”
The door behind us opens and Katie herself emerges from the boutique, laden with shopping bags, and looking from Elliot to me and then back again, almost as if she knows what I was thinking. That rogue memory attempts to surface yet again.
