She reminds me of someone. I just can’t remember who it is.
“Katie! Um, this is Holly,” Elliot says, looking uncomfortable; as well he might, I suppose. “Holly, this is Katie.”
“Oh, yes!Holly! Of course!”
Katie says my name in a tone that suggests she knows significantly more about me than I know about her. I’m not planning to hang around to find out exactly what Elliot’s told her about me, though. I’m not that much of a masochist.
“Right, well, we better be going, Paris,” I say briskly, linking arms with my surprised assistant manager. “Books to sell, books to write. No rest for the wicked. Nice to meet you, Katie! Come on, Paris.”
I set off down the street at a quick march, dragging Paris along behind me, and feeling quite proud of how… breezy… I managed to be.
Yes. Breezy. That’s how I’ll be from now. I’ll be brisk and breezy, and that way Elliot will never know just how much it hurts me seeing him with someone else, in the place that used to be ours.
“Holly, let me go,” Paris squeaks, as I almost knock her off her feet in my haste to get away from them. “You’re beingreallyweird, by the way,” she adds. “Even for you, I mean.”
Oh.
So, maybenot-so-breezy, then. Maybe I’ll just be “really weird” instead.
That sounds more like the old me. I know Paris would agree.
But ‘the old me’ isn’t going to write this book, ignore her ex, and change her life, is she? No, she isn’t. Which is why, as soon as we’re safely back at the bookstore, I thank Paris again for her shopping help, then head into my office and open up my laptop.
Iwillwrite the book I just told Elliot about. And, one day, I might even forget the reason I wrote it, or the man who inspired it, the way he seems to have forgotten me.
One day.
“HiHarper,” I type, opening up the email chain I have going with her. “What do you think about this for a plot…”
16
DECEMBER, 10 YEARS AGO
It’s one thing for Elliot and I to decide we want to stay together, rather than breaking up on Christmas Eve, like some kind of fairy tale in reverse, but it’s a completely different thing trying to figure out exactly how we’re going to make that happen. Especially when the clock is ticking down to the date of Elliot’s planned departure, and our relationship is about to hit its deadline.
“Okay, so you just moving to America obviously isn’t feasible,” Elliot says, as we walk hand-in-hand between the two rows of scraggly fir trees that pass for Bramblebury’s Christmas tree farm, which is located in a muddy field just outside the village. “Or not right away, anyway. There are visas to think about, work permits … probably all kinds of other things we don’t even know about yet.”
I nod, finding it reassuring the way he’s speaking about this as if all that’s preventing us from being together is a bit of an admin issue, which we’ll one day work our way through.
But, of course, it’s so much more than that.
There’s Dad, for one thing. There’s the bookstore for another. And then there’s the small matter of my entire life until now having been spent here in the U.K.; a fact that makes the idea of me suddenlymoving to America with a man I’ve only just met seem every bit as ridiculous as I know Dad will say it is if I ever work up the courage to tell him I’ve been thinking about it.
“You could stay here,” I suggest, stopping to inspect a particularly pathetic looking specimen of a tree. “You did say you like England.”
“I do like it,” agrees Elliot, just as I knew he would. “But you know my visa’s about to run out. I’d have to go back, even if my mom wasn’t determined to have the usual Sinclair family Christmas, with every single member of the family in attendance.”
“So, we do long distance, then,” I say, as we move on. “Just for a while. Just until we figure out what our next step should be. We can do that, right?”
I already know Elliot’s going to say yes to this, because it’s a conversation we’ve already had at least twice since we decided the end of his trip wasn’t going to mean the end ofus. But I also know thatsayingsomething isn’t the same as actuallydoingit; which is why I’m already starting to worry that we’re being hopelessly naïve to think we can keep a relationship alive across two continents and God only knows how many miles.
(4,350, to be exact. I Googled.)
This is not how you keep yourself safe.
This is not how you protect yourself from heartbreak.
“Hey,” says Elliot softly, watching the emotions play out across my face. “Don’t do that. Don’t talk yourself out of it before we’ve even tried.”
