Page 81 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

Jess had been nervous about chairing the discussion, Petra knew, but she was doing an excellent job, to the obvious pride of Aiden, who was sitting next to Petra at the back of the room.

“What the hell’s going on with Ross and that bizarre woman?” he hissed to Petra under cover of a burst of laughter at Gordon’s latest story.

Petra just shook her head numbly. Gazing at Ross, she was reminded of hostages paraded publicly at gunpoint: stoic, rigid, and dead behind the eyes. Desperate to run to the front and rescue him, she could do nothing to intervene. Nothing. And—in any case—she told herself, flinching with the pain, who was to say he even minded? Did she honestly feel she knew him well enough to be able to tell? In that moment, she doubted she even knew him at all.

There was a break for coffee after the panel discussion, and people drifted to the coffee table, chattering.

Henrietta—Petra saw with a sinking heart—was making a beeline for her: “You’ve seen the pre-empt then?” she asked Petra coldly. “I take it we can proceed with the formalities?”

“Actually, Ross and I were discussing it earlier,” said Petra, relieved to hear her voice coming out sounding cool and collected. “I have recommended, and Ross has agreed, to proceed with a best bids auction,” she told Henrietta. “We have interest from a number of publishing houses, as I am sure you can imagine.”

Henrietta’s eyes bulged, making her look rather like a cod fish, Petra decided, suddenly realizing she was staring, fascinated. Coughing into her fist to distract, she looked away as Henrietta collected herself, freezing Petra with an icy stare. “In that case, my pre-empt is withdrawn,” she said, dangerously quietly. “You have just lost your client a superlative deal. I do hope you know what you’re doing,” she spat, making it perfectly clear that she was certain Petra did not.

And maybe she didn’t, to be fair, thought Petra as she scuttled off, trying not to whimper audibly, seeking a quiet place where she could put a call in to Alistair.

“Hold your ground,” he told her. “We’re busy here, just about to send out the instructions for the best and finals.”

“How many?”

“Six,” Alistair told her. “All the big ones, plus Hamilton House, plus a couple more.”

Petra made him list them, and her spirits rose as he went through. The biggest publishing houses in the world had all taken the bait. Ross’s book had gone right to the top echelons. And now—by the end of the day, when the bids had to be in—they would see the result. One thing was already for certain: This was a book that was going to sell, and sell wide. For agents and editors across the industry, it would be one of those “it was this big” tales they told each other at parties.

Petra nearly smiled, in spite of it all, remembering the immortal line from Dustin Hoffman’s agent in Tootsie, informing his client that his job was not to find work for his client but to “field offers.” If this was the “fielding offers” end of submissions, then Petra liked it. If only all agenting work was like this. If only it wasn’t Ross. If only Ross wasn’t being so weird, she reminded herself, the boulder in her chest returning,

Petra duly introduced Jemima to Ross, and she could tell Jemima found him hard work. She hoped it wouldn’t put her off from trying to acquire the book. Jemima and her team would provide a good home for him, and they would care for him too. Or was it just that she desperately wanted the gig to go to absolutely anyone else in the world but Henrietta? That could also be it. Partly.

In the flurry of mini-problems requiring solving, along with the in-person, phone, and email chats with the editors who were planning to bid, and the journalists who were rushing to cover the story, the day flew by without Petra having time to sit down, eat, or even go to the loo. She welcomed the distraction but was constantly refreshing her email inbox for updates.

With her pre-empt declined, Henrietta had disappeared in a huff, and Ross seemed to have disappeared too. Petra assumed he was in the cottage. Possibly not alone. She did not feel confident enough of her role in his life now to just turn up there at the end of the day. Instead, she went back to the flat and collated a professional email to him, listing the bids received—they were all in, every single one—and sketching out what needed to happen next.

Surprisingly and depressingly, Henrietta had rallied from her pre-empt rejection and submitted a bid too. Rather than putting in a lower offer, punishing them for declining the pre-empt, Petra was disturbed to see that she had now bid even higher. As promised, all the other publishing houses, including Jemima’s, had submitted punchy bids as well. Jemima’s came with a full and detailed marketing and publicity commitment. It was impressive. But Henrietta’s bid was the highest by some margin. These were telephone number figures, extraordinary for the UK market, thought Petra.

She dithered over how to sign off her email. “Love” felt presumptuous. Even “yours” was problematic. Petra settled on “best wishes” and deleted the kisses that appeared after her name without her volition.

Petra pressed send on the email and then spent another long, lonely, largely sleepless night, mainly sitting in the little window seat reading nook, resting her head against the glass. For hours she gazed up the darkened street, toward his cottage at the top of the hill. She couldn’t see it, of course, but she could imagine him there, restless, like her. Or maybe he was fast asleep, thrilled to go for the highest bid, with the bonus that Henrietta was back in his life. He was, as Petra sat there, probably dreaming happily of working together with Henrietta to make his book so brilliant it would surpass his first.

She kept her phone against her heart so she could not miss a text from him.

There was nothing.

Chapter Thirty

Ross got up stiffly to chuck another log on the fire. It was a mild August night, but he couldn’t get warm. Of course, he could always go upstairs to crawl under the duvet, but being in bed alone made Petra’s absence feel even worse. He was desperate to speak to her but had no idea what he would say and didn’t think he was entitled to contact her, not even to reply to her email. What would he tell her? I just thought I would wake you up in the middle of the night to ask your advice as a friend, about the utter mess I’m making of my relationship with the woman I love, who is—incidentally—also you.

God knows what she thought about Henrietta coming back so obviously to claim him. He wished he knew what he thought about her turning up, this woman whose presence was indivisible from those heady days when his first novel was published. There wasn’t a memory of those giddy months that didn’t have her in it. She was like a metastasizing cancer, strangling the life force from his body while pretending that this parasitic relationship was actually symbiosis. But was that even abnormal? Surely all writers realized that—on some level—the publisher and the writer formed an uneasy alliance. Introducing emotions—romance—into the mix had made it even more toxic.

And then, when it ended—when he ended it, that evening—she had been incredulous at first, and then angry. Very angry. He had sat on the emerald green velvet sofa in her flat—their flat—sinking into a dark abyss in his head as he listened to her tell him that without her he would not survive one week—that his writing, his sales, his place at the epicenter of the literary firmament were all entirely due to her gifts. And that she would destroy him just as quickly as she had made him, elevating him above all the other talented writers. The chosen one.

He had believed her.

And now, desperate to explain to Petra but unable to even begin to articulate his own thoughts, he stayed silent.

“You look appalling,” remarked Flo to Petra, when she came to open the shop the next morning. Jules, Petra, and Flo had all agreed Flo would run the shop for the duration of the festival. “How’s it going?”

“Festival? Great,” replied Petra. “Life? Terrible.”

Flo sighed, looking at her appraisingly. “He’s a good man,” she told Petra. “You are good together.”