They stared at each other for a moment as this new clue fell into place.
“I do wish you’d told me. I understand why you didn’t,” Antonia added quickly, seeing Aurelia open her mouth to protest. “But I still wish you had. There’s been this giant thing happening in your life and I had no idea.”
“I hated keeping it from you.”
“And Oliver?”
“I knew I needed to tell him, but it’s a scary thing—not knowing how he’d react, what he’d think, what he’d do. Look at what happened when we told you.”
Antonia gave a grimace in acknowledgment.
“I’d planned to do it before the wedding, after Julia’s back with you. I knew he might be upset or not believe me. Seeing how hurt you were, how you thought I was lying or that something was wrong with me… I’d imagined all that, but going through it was so much worse. I was scared before, but now…”
“Now you’ll just have to push through,” Antonia said bracingly.
Aurelia nodded, trying to find the courage she’d been lacking.
“When does he get back?”
“Not until Sunday.”
“That’s today,” Antonia reminded her.
Aurelia looked at the clock on the wall, which read two in the morning.
“Today, then,” Aurelia said firmly, again feigning the courage she wasn’t yet feeling.
“Should we leave, let you two talk it through?”
“Maybe. No? I don’t know… Maybe it’s better if you’re here and you can tell him what you heard and saw, see if that helps him to believe me?”
“Why don’t we stick around until you tell him, then we can head up to Yorkshire to see Dad until things cool down here.”
“‘Cool down’? Right… because he might be upset. Or angry or sad or—I have no idea what he’s going to say. Tonia…” Aurelia’s eyes filled with tears as she could barely put into words the thought that she’d been refusing to let surface. “What if he—what if he doesn’t—”
“He loves you. Just hold on to that, okay? He loves you, he wants to be with you, and you’ll find a way to work through it. I mean, there are worse things. It’s not like you’ve had an affair or lost his dog.”
“I did lie to him, though,” Aurelia whispered. “And it’s a pretty big lie.”
The weight of her admission hung in the air, and neither of them was able to shift it for a good long time.
32
Eventually,AntonialeftJuliawhere she’d fallen asleep on the sofa and went in to sleep in the guest room. Aurelia got into bed but stayed up for a while, wishing she could see clearly how the next twenty-four hours would go. Soon, however, she could hardly keep her eyes open and had to leave behind her worries in order to get some rest.
Oliver was due to arrive home later in the day, which gave her the morning to come up with a more solid plan. She asked Antonia and Julia if they could leave the flat for the afternoon to give her a chance to speak with Oliver one-on-one. Then, in the evening, they’d return so that Antonia could sit with him in the stairwell and he could hear the evidence of what Aurelia had told him. As plans went, it was better than any she’d come up with before, since she’d have two other people to back her up.
By two o’clock, Antonia and Julia had gone to meet one of Antonia’s friends from university for a few hours and Aurelia was in the flat waiting for Oliver’s arrival. Before they left, Antonia and Aurelia had sat Julia down and made her promise not to tell anyone else about the shop. Julia seemed to understand the need for secrecy now, after seeing how angry and scared Antonia had been, and readily agreed.
Grey clouds materialized in the sky and a light rain started falling, promising a break in the heat at last. Aurelia stood in the living room, looking through the windows and watching for Oliver to appear in the street below. She’d had about an hour alone in the flat, giving her time to both tidy up and obsessively work through what might happen next. Her careful planning had Aurelia growing more anxious by the minute. She assumed Oliver would be upset, but for how long? Would he forgive her? And if so, when?
She’d come close to telling him before, but it had always been accidental, like mentioning something a character had told her or what she thought about a character in comparison to how an author had described them. But each time Oliver had written it off as evidence of Aurelia’s deep love of books and fiction, just the product of someone who got a little too invested in something that was both her passion and her work, rather than someone who owned a magical bookshop that defied explanation.
And that was the problem: again and again, Antonia had asked Aurelia to explain why the shop did what it did, but again and again Aurelia had to admit that she couldn’t. Yet Antonia had known Aurelia her entire life—and Julia, too, of course—so that believing her unbelievable story may have come a little more easily to her than it would to Oliver.
Oliver, whom she’d known for nearly three years, who thought he knew her, didn’t have the store of trust and experience that Antonia had. And he and Aurelia had promised to share their lives with one another, a promise that carried with it certain expectations. Like knowing each other—the good and the bad—sharing your thoughts, experiences, and feelings about everything that happened to you.
Now, Aurelia was flipping the script on him, a man who had asked her for honesty and openness from the start. She was almost beyond emotion; she couldn’t fully digest what it would feel like to hurt him, let alone how she would feel if she lost him. All of her joy at planning the wedding, taking him to have and to hold forever… It had seemed so definite, so absolute, that to face the possibility of a life without him felt too absurd to contemplate.
