Page 103 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

‘You’re the perfect combination then.’

The perfect combination. And you’re going back to London.

‘Are you missing Maddie?’ he says.

‘Like crazy. She left without saying goodbye.’

‘Oh no. That’s awful.’

‘She’s always hated goodbyes. She left me a letter though. In Narnia.’

‘You’ve seen Narnia?’

‘Yeah, it blew me away. But then all the book nooks are incredible. I don’t think there’s another bookshop anywhere in the world that has anything like them. The trouble is, I’ll always look at them and remember you.’

‘And that’s a bad thing?’

‘Yeah, I’ll miss you all the more.’

‘I’ll miss you too, Luisa.’ Across the room, his eyes meet hers.

She closes her eyes. The thought of him leaving Applethwaite is unbearable.

‘I reckon it’ll be brewed by now,’ he says.

She watches him pour the tea. His hands are strong, calloused from all the work building her book nooks. She remembers those hands lifting her down from the ladder. How those fingers feel when they make contact with her skin.

‘You know, I can visit.’

‘I guess you’ll come up to see your dad.’

‘I’ll come to see you,’ Jack says. ‘And, if you’re lucky, I might even build you another shed.’

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper.

‘My artwork isn’t quite up to Maddie’s standards, but you’ll get the idea. It’s for the gardening books.’

He hands her the paper. He’s drawn a wooden potting shed, painted in a delightful shade of pale blue, its large window crowded with plants. It’s gorgeous, like something from a bygone era. A second picture underneath shows the interior of the potting shed with bookshelves along one wall. The shelves are all labelled with little wooden markers, the kind you’d see in an old-fashioned allotment garden, with subsections of gardening books. Garden Design. Vegetable growing. Horticulture.

I was thinking we could put real plants in there,’ he says, ‘and some gardening props like twine and a little fork.’

We.

There is no ‘we’ anymore.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.

‘It’s my promise to you. I will come back to Applethwaite and build this for you.’ He hands her a mug of tea and sits down on the sofa beside her. ‘Now I heard there was a bit of a confrontation in the bakery today. That some customers were thrown out and barred for life.’

Louise shakes her head. ‘If you mean Miss Anderson and her friends, that’s not quite how it happened.’

‘Manhandled out of the door is what I heard,’ he laughs.

‘Honestly, the gossip round here. I just did what I should have done ages ago and stood up to her. Told her she was a bully.’

‘Well, good for you,’ Jack says.

‘And I didn’t throw her out. She walked out of her own accord.’