‘Me too,’ Annie countered. ‘I’ll be on the first flight I can afford.’
‘And remember, Annwy…’ He stopped himself. ‘Annie. We’ve got our bookshop holiday to look forward to, if we ever get to the top of the waiting list.’
‘Like I’d miss that.’ Annie beamed, but seeing Paisley’s face fall, she quickly hid her excitement. ‘I should…’ she hiked a thumb towards the doorway behind her.
Then weirdly, horribly, that’s how it ended, with Annie shouldering her belongings and wheeling her cases away, her boots clomping across the floor.
Impossibly, the door clicked shut on the latch behind her and she was gone, leaving Harri with a sliver of himself missing.
Meanwhile Paisley breezily outlined their plans for the day and he really did try to force himself to listen as she reeled it off; packing, letting agents, the job centre, dinner at her family’s home in Port Talbot when she’d finished her shift at the call centre, and then an early night…
He was nodding and wondering if he was managing to smile convincingly. He liked Paisley very much; he wouldn’t have agreed to go out with her in the first place if he didn’t. She was smart and caring, she knew what she wanted and was going to achieve it all, and he’d been drawn to her certainty and confidence. Even his dad loved her. Plus, she really was the prettiest girl in Wales, and she’d liked him right from the day they met. The perfect girlfriend.
He felt himself softening again, letting her talk him round, hoping she couldn’t feel the awful tug within him that made him want to run after Annie’s taxi.
The torn-in-two feeling would probably go away soon, and he’d be left in the glow of Paisley’s warmth and goodness. He’d eat at her parents’ table tonight and they’d make plans for the rest of the summer and it would all be okay. He had to let Annie go and this was the next logical step.
Paisley kept talking as she gathered abandoned bottles and cans, pouring the dregs down the sink. The stretching, eye-rubbing, grunting figures under blankets and coats on the sofas and floor protested about keeping it down please, there were people dying in here.
Harri made his way into his bedroom, unbuttoning last night’s tuxedo shirt that’d need to go back to the rental place by five.
Against the wall leaned the flattened cardboard boxes that would soon contain the last remnants of his student life in Aber.
Something caught his eye and he made his way to the stack of books on his bedside table where he found, upon closer inspection, every cover adorned with googly-eye stickers. He smiled at first, until the weird pain welled up again.
‘What was she on about, anyway?’ Paisley said suddenly from the doorway, making him jolt round, schooling his features into a look of placidity.
‘Huh?’
‘Something about a bookshop holiday? A waiting list?’
Harri knew she was trying to look unbothered. ‘Oh, right, that,’ he said with a coolness he didn’t feel. ‘It was just this thing we put our names down for ages ago.’ By which he meant before he met Paisley. ‘A working holiday kind of thing, down in Devon. It’ll probably never happen.’
Paisley stared back, looking like a woman weighing up whether this was a potential threat of some kind. She cast her eyes into the now empty bedroom next to his and made her decision.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some day-after-graduation pancakes before we start the job hunt. My treat.’ She was already on the move, shooing groaning flatmates off the sofa so she could straighten the cushions.
‘Okey-dokey,’ he called back. ‘I’m all yours,’ and he made a silent promise to Paisley that this was true, and an even more solemn promise to himself that he’d take comfort in the fact that he had it all: a best friend in Annie Luna – even if she would be on the other side of the world pretty soon – and a loving, committed, super-smart girlfriend who he loved very much and had a future with right here in his beloved Wales. Given time to adjust to graduate life, he knew he’d come to believe it fully.
Chapter One
Clove Lore – eight years and seven months later
Devon, even in wintertime, is a mellow, bountiful county, a place where the dark water is alive with silver fishes, a place of sodden sands picked over by keen-eyed waders, a place of fern-dripping coves, mossy woodland and blustery promontories, no less beautiful in their austere winter livery. Come February, if you’re lucky, the worst of the sea storms are over, the temperatures are sneaking towards double figures and the bulbs have pushed green shoots through spring-softening earth.
Folks up country say everything bursts back into life in the South West a good two weeks sooner than in their parts of the world, but the palm trees in the gardens are still wrapped in protective fleece, the greenhouses still require heating to spur on early seedlings, and every sleeping snail, spider and ladybird dare not rouse itself from its sequestered spot too soon because, even with the hedgerows awakening with birdsong, winter lingers on.
The chimneys all down the sloping village of Clove Lore still cough smoke right through February, and the tourists are only just beginning to think of spring minibreaks and rock-pooling in waterproofs. The dark still falls across the county as the school buses whisk kids home for dinner, and no one, but no one would dream of remarking how the light nights will soon be here for fear of tempting back the frosts or, worse, another terrifying flood, all too common at this time of year.
Harri had taken in the county with dull eyes as he made his way down towards the coast, passing shuttered arcades only open in the high season, giant plastic ice cream cones appended to roadside kiosks, signs pointlessly boasting, ‘pick your own strawberries, June–August’, and surf academy lock-ups which, come beach season, would be bustling from dawn to dusk with happy customers, salted and sun-bleached from the shore.
Thinking how this probably wasn’t theidealtime for a seaside bookselling holiday, Harri stopped now in the middle of the fairy-lit, cobbled courtyard of the Borrow-A-Bookshop, flicking at his phone screen to find the bookings manager, Jude Crawley’s, text with the keycode so he could get inside the darkened shop. It wasn’t easy with his gloves on.
No messages from Paisley, he noted. It was simultaneously a sadness and a relief.
They’d never gone this long without talking. He hoped she was okay. He hoped she was beginning to forgive him.
Half-six in the evening on the first day of February, and the Devonshire sky was black. There was no point waiting out here. In the old days, Annie was always late. If she turned up at all.
