Page 35 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

“Oh, and don’t forget Black Beauty,” declared Petra, advising a woman who was buying birthday books for her soon-to-be-ten-year-old, pony-mad granddaughter. “We’ve got a beautiful new edition, just came in last week, hang on.” Petra scurried off and came back triumphantly with a clothbound hardbacked book, flicking through to show her customer the lovely color plates. “Only—trigger warning—you know it’s seriously sad, don’t you?”

“Gosh, it really is,” said the lady, handling the book reverently. “I remember sobbing over it myself as a child. Such a wonderful book, but I don’t like the thought of her reading it alone. We’ve always got a book on the go that we read together, and this can be that one. I’ll have a second copy, if you have it?”

“Talking of sobbing, she’s read War Horse?” queried Petra over her shoulder, fetching another copy of Black Beauty and adding it to the stack. There was a substantial pile of books building up on the checkout table now.

“Ah, War Horse,” reminisced the lady. “We read it, and we saw the stage show with the puppets! Magical . . .”

“It was,” said Petra, tearing up at the memory. “What a story.”

“And then, of course, there are the endless pink, little girl pony series books, which all look the same to me,” admitted the lady. “I think it’s so important to have something undemanding to read along with the challenging stuff.”

“I totally agree,” said Petra, positively adoring this woman and thinking what she wouldn’t have done to have a grandmother like this. “So . . .” Petra thought a moment. “We risk giving her something she’s already read, but has she had the Katie Price books?”

“That woman with the boobs?” queried the lady. “I think her mother vetoed those.”

“Oh no, honestly, they’re fine,” Petra reassured her. “I mean, she is genuinely keen on horses, Katie Price. She might not have written them herself, of course. I couldn’t possibly say,” she added with a wink.

“Go on, then,” said the lady. “I think it’s important for the child to see her grandmother subvert her parents’ wishes occasionally.”

Petra giggled.

Fat chance she would ever become a naughty grandmother, Petra thought with fleeting sadness as she went to collect the Katie Price books, or even that her own mother would take the slightest interest if she ever had a daughter of her own. And that was equally unlikely, she told herself, momentarily subdued, although she perked up when she saw the total, after whizzing the lady’s books through the scanner.

“You are so good at this,” Flo told Petra, when the customer had left. “And I consider myself pretty decent at recommendations myself.”

Petra flushed, pleased to have impressed Flo, who she increasingly regarded with awe. What with Jess making her feel important earlier and Flo bigging her up now, she was going to have a head the size of a planet by the end of the weekend.

It felt good. All she wanted to do was share her minor triumphs with Ross, but he was still absent.

She could message him, of course, but pride stopped her.

“By the way,” Petra said to Flo, remembering Jess’s comments about storytelling, “tell me about the Saturday Stories thing?”

“Ah,” said Flo. “I regret we haven’t done that for a while. It used to be me, when I had Jules helping to run the shop.”

“I could do that!” piped up Petra. “By which I mean, I could run the shop, not that I could read the stories . . .” she added hastily.

“The thing is, my eyesight really isn’t up to it anymore,” said Flo sadly. “When I read for myself, I do it either on Kindle with the font size up high or—at a stretch—with the large-print books. Reading aloud, and not knowing whether I am going to read something wrong, or not be able to make it out at all? Too stressful, my dear, I’m sorry.”

Flo looked very sorry, Petra saw, and not just because she was letting Petra down. Getting old must be brutal, even though Flo made it look easy most of the time.

“I loved it, though,” Flo went on, smiling at the memories. “Doing all the voices, acting it out . . . the best fun in the world.”

That set Petra thinking. Who was it who was producing all the silly voices the other day . . . ? And then she realized. It was Ross, playing their daft “opening lines of books” game. Now he would be a brilliant children’s story reader. And he needed something to do. She would ask him.

If she ever saw him again.

Throughout the following two weeks, four days, and sixteen hours—if anyone was counting, and she was—Petra was checking her phone obsessively. Now that she had deleted all her social media apps, drifted away from all her friends, and essentially “estranged” herself from family, as her mother liked to point out in her rare texts to her daughter, there was no one who would be contacting her.

This left Petra feeling anxious, lonely, and adrift. She played over in her mind her last conversations with Ross and remembered the lost look in his eye when he sought, with brutal honesty, to articulate his position: He was a writer who—like Icarus—had flown too high and come crashing down to earth. He had carefully skirted the specifics—precisely what had happened between him and his editor, for a start—and concentrated instead on how the hideous unraveling had made him feel. And she had struggled to know how to react. She had let him down. Despite her own experience of failure, she had been unable to comfort him, rally him, or even let him believe she understood him.

She had failed him.

And then, one Saturday, when she had Flo helping in the shop, her phone pinged just as the last customer had left the shop for the day. Far too quickly, Petra reached over to check, trying to give the impression to Flo that it was no big deal. She was fooling no one, especially not that particular sharp-minded old woman.

It was Ross.

Fancy a beer after closing? the message said.