“Oh, no, you take it,” he says in an American accent, the exact provenance of which I can’t place. South Carolina? Louisiana? Somewhere else where the men sound like they’ve stepped right out of a movie? “I’ll find something else. I’m spoiled for choice here.”
He nods in the direction of the stalls closest to us, on which are laid out a selection of Christmas jumpers, and some singing cactus toys, all wearing light-up Santa hats. His eyes do that ‘twinkling’ thing again as one of the toys starts tunelessly singing ‘Deck the Halls’. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s being sarcastic or not with the ‘spoiled for choice’ thing. I mean, he doesn’tlooklike the kind of guy who’d wear a mustard yellow jumper with ‘Santa’s Favorite’ on the front, but if I’ve if learned anything from a lifetime spent with books as best friends, it’s that a man as seemingly perfect as this one has to have a fatal flaw — maybe his is a love of tacky Christmas gifts and things that smell like cinnamon?
(A man as good looking as him woulddefinitelybe Santa’s favorite, though. So that much is certainly true.)
He hands the snow globe back to me, and I’m so flustered I almost drop the thing.
“No,no, it’s yours, seriously,” I tell him, poking him in the chest with it again, then instantly wondering why I did that. “I don’t actually want it. I was just curious about it.”
I glance down at the ornament in my hand. Just as I’d thought, the scene inside is a miniature version of the very square we’re standing in right now, minus the market stalls and, well, theawkwardness. At its center, two people stand locked in a passionate embrace, the snow swirling around their heads in a way that’s oddly mirroring our current reality.
It’s romanticandfestive, and it makes me feel a bit like I’ve stepped into an alternate reality; one where Bramblebury is beautiful, and Christmas has a shot at being magical again.
No, this is crazy. It’s a snow globe, not a portal to an alternate universe.
“Here,” I insist, passing it back to the American, who has no option but to accept it this time, unless he wants to make this interaction even more uncomfortable. “All yours.”
Before he can say anything else, I turn and walk quickly away through the snow, which is falling faster now, camouflaging all the village’s imperfections with its pristine whiteness. I leave a trail of footprints as I go, my mind already replaying that moment in the square when it saw fit to blurt “It’s you,” at a tourist, instead of “It’syours,” which Iswearis what I was going for.
Not that it matters, though. It’s not like I’m ever going to see him again, is it?
The thought makes me feel sadder than it should do, given that absolutely nothing really happened. Two people reached for the same object at the same time. It started to snow. That’s it. That’s literallyit. Any connection I thought I felt between me and the man in the square was entirely imagined. It has to have been. This isn’t some schmaltzy romance novel: it’s my life — and right now my life involves opening up the store, and trying my best to sell some books, so we can afford to pay the rent this month.
Which is exactly what I’m going to do.
Tucking the memory of the man with the sparkling eyes carefully into a corner of my mind, where I can pull it out later, I let myself into the shop, and switch on the electric heater to warm the place up, before selecting a book from the shelves and settling down to read while I wait for the first customers of the day.
I’m a few chapters in, and have just reached the bit where the handsome-but-surly stranger on the plane turns out to be staying in the room next door to the heroine at her hotel, when the shop door creaks reluctantly open with a blast of frigid air.
I quickly stash my book under the counter, annoyed to be so rudely torn out of its fictional world, in which it’s sunny and warm, and anything is possible.
So, the exact opposite of therealworld, basically.
“I’ll be right with you,” I call out to the customer from under the counter. “Feel free to take a look around.”
“Sure,” says a voice with a familiar American accent. “Take your time.”
I straighten up so quickly I bang my head hard on the underside of the counter, and almost go flying right off my seat.
“Hey! It’s you!” says the American, when I finally re-emerge.
And that was when our story started.
3
Of course, in his book, it was Elliot (Or Luke, as he called himself…) who said the now-famous “It’s you” line first, not me / Evie. And it wasn’t just a stupid slip of the tongue, either, like it was when I said it in real life. No, in Elliot’s book, it reallywaslove at first sight between the two main characters; and when Luke Saunders looks into Evie Snow’s eyes and says, “It’s you,” he means it’sher— the one he’s spent his entire life searching for.
What a crock of shit, right?
That’s justoneof the ways Elliot re-wrote our story, though. Another is the fact that he set that first meeting in the bookstore, rather than at the Christmas market; one tiny change, which was to completely alter the course of our little shop’s history, and force us to start stocking shelves full of snow globes, just like the store in the book.
But I’m not thinking about Elliot this morning; by which I mean I’m very deliberatelynotthinking about him, as I leave the little cottage I bought a few years ago, when the bookstore’s success finally meant there was money to spare, and walk to The Brew to pick up a coffee before I start work.
I’m not thinking about Elliot Sinclairat all.And I’m definitely not buying my coffee from here just because that’s where we went on ourfirst ‘date’. No, Ialwaysget my coffee from The Brew — because the stuff Levi serves at the bookstore tastes like boiled socks, let’s be honest — and I’m not going to let the ghost of Elliot Sinclair stand between me and my routine. Routine is important. It’s one of the few things that stands between me and utter chaos, and so I cling onto it, like Rose clinging to that door inTitanic.
The Christmas market is already in full swing, even though it’s still early. There’s no snow this year (It hasn’t snowedproperlyin Bramblebury for ten years now, to the eternal disappointment of the tourists, who come here expecting it to look like it does in the movie …) but the village is still looking chocolate-box pretty, with fairy lights strung across the square, and a brass band playing Christmas carols off to one side.
It is, as Levi will later observe in the caption of his next TikTok video, “Festive AF”.
