He was as alone in the world as Annie now was, and ifhecouldn’t be fulfilled and carefree on this holiday, he’d damn well make sure Annie could. He’d pour his whole heart into making her feel safe and secure. That’s what friends did for one another.
So, he sat by her side reminiscing about their uni days until the embers in the grate cooled to an ashy white, and they took themselves off to separate beds; Annie upstairs and Harri in the little bedroom just off the shopfloor, where he repeated his promise as he drifted off to sleep.
If Annie Luna ever suffered again, it would not be for the loss of their precious friendship.
Chapter Three
Annie’s Secret
Annie woke shivering, long before her alarm, and quietly set about figuring out how the heating worked. She’d forgotten about the curiously British phenomenon of under-heating their buildings in winter and leaving them airless and stuffy in summer.
She wiped the pooled condensation away from the shop’s window ledges with one of the cafe’s tea towels. The sky was still dark and starless. She let her tired eyes rest on the rain-soaked cobbles in the little square outside. The cold was getting into her bones.
She’d thought about going back to bed and trying to read but she’d been carrying the same novel around with her for weeks and still hadn’t brought herself to open it.
This was unusual for Annie whose Goodreads account charted a couple of hundred books finished every year since forever. She used to devour books like Valentine’s candy. Now though, she couldn’t get past the first page. So, she examined the contents of her suitcase instead.
Clothes always interested her, but dressing for this holiday was going to be a challenge.
She’d brought all her winter dresses, and picked out the warmest one this morning. It had a colourful book print against a black background of thick cotton. She’d worn it to work a hundred times and her sixth-grade girls had complimented her on it.
The thought of her library and her students so far away sent a pang of longing through her. It was mixed in with some anger too, reserved especially for that one parent who’d made the complaint about that one, perfectly innocent, book her kid had taken home.
She shook her head as she sharply knotted her belt. That complaint had snowballed into the whole awful thing that had sent her running to England.
This vacation could not have come at a better time.
She pulled her crocheted cardigan closed across her ribs and tried not to let the feelings of rage and shame overtake her.
This was her much-needed break; her first in years. She’d thought through her plan back at home. It would be her drawing-a-line-under-it-all trip. She’d left the past behind her and was set on beginning a new life when this excursion was done. Though how exactly her new life might look, she had no clue. If anyone had been born to be a school librarian, it was her, but how was that an option now?
No Cassidy. Possibly no job to go back to. Her community fractious and split.Ugh!She forced the thoughts away as her stomach churned and the bookshop reeled around her.
In the bedroom just off the shop floor Harri was stirring. She’d better pull herself together for his sake. She couldn’t burden him with what was happening at school. Her parents’ reactions, especially her dad’s, had been bad enough, and she’d faced it all without Cassidy too. She hadn’t reached out, even though there was no way she could have missed it on the local news stations.
She already knew what Harri would say about it anyway. He’d be indignant. He’d call that parent a ‘moaner’ and an ‘arsehole’. He’d try to make her laugh about it, say it was a molehill not a mountain. He’d encourage her to go back and face it, or to find a new job in a new school. He couldn’t understand what it’s like, being publicly shamed and shut out.
Harri had enough to worry about. She was big enough and tough enough to get through this by herself. Shehadgot through it.
One of the worst things to come out of it was that ever since the complaint, since she saw the shock on the faces of her colleagues and the consternation on Principal Johnson’s face, she’d found she couldn’t read. Not her favourite anime, not the lightest rom coms, nothing so much as a magazine article. The reading part of her brain was blocked off to her and as much as she couldn’t understand why it was happening, she didn’t dare try to investigate it. For now, her lifelong love of escapism and imagination was bundled up in the same airless, dark place as her motivation to fight back was hiding. No. She couldn’t look at it any closer, in case it all started unravelling, taking the last of her happiness with it.
Decidedly, she jabbed at the power button on the shop’s laptop, accidentally switching it on then immediately off again. Her hands had been shaky lately, but she was determined to ignore that too. She held a firm finger to the button and breathed.
The till display and Visa card reader blinked awake. Automatically the stock system appeared onscreen.
‘All right,’ she told herself. ‘You got this.’
She set herself the challenge of mastering the whole system before Harri, who must have rolled over and fallen asleep again, appeared. Good. He needed to rest; he’d looked so worn out and pale last night.
She’d found the tech all pretty intuitive and a lot like the school library catalogue system back home. This one was designed to track sales and could be used to help any Borrower uninitiated with the shop’s holdings locate books on the shelves if a customer turned up asking for specific titles.
By eight, she had moved on and tidied the already very tidy shelves and picked out a few favourites to display in the empty wall racks behind the till, pullingNaughty Amelia Jane!,The Twins at St. Clare’sandSwallows and Amazons, just three of the beloved childhood books responsible for young Annie’s budding Anglophilia.
She’d cultivated her love of British things as a tween reading Fay Weldon, Julia Donaldson and Anne Fine, before moving on to Jane Austen and Dylan Thomas at Aberystwyth, along with all the other canonical British and Irish authors of the uni English syllabus.
Now here she was in England, surrounded by books in an adorable, quirky, little building by the sea. She had to make the most of this opportunity; it would never be open to her again. If she worked hard enough to make these two weeks a success, she might be able to get back into her own good books. She wanted to feel proud of herself; something she hadn’t felt since the ‘temporary suspension’ from library duties while her and her senior colleagues’ ‘conduct and suitability for school librarianship’ was investigated.
She’d decided to steer clear of the coffee machine until Harri got up, instead pouring orange juice from a carton that read ‘with orangey bits’. She’d smiled at the adorably English quaintness of it. Then she’d toasted the last two scones, assuming they’d been left for them by the previous Borrowers and not intended for selling in the cafe. Nobody would pay for day-old scones, surely? Not even in England. She carried it all through to the shop on a tray.
