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‘Do you think it will have started already?’ Hannah asked worriedly as she pressed the pedestrian-crossing button.
‘Probably,’ I said, my eyes going once again to the glossy photograph in the bookshop window. Below Finn’s face, a banner had been pasted, which read:Book Signing Here Tonight.
Like a portrait in a scary movie, Finn’s eyes seemed to follow me as we waited for the green man to allow us to cross. I could still feel them on us as we stepped on to the crossing.
‘William got held up at work,’ Hannah explained apologetically, ‘which meant I missed my train, and nowyou’vemissed the start of the event.’
‘It’s really not important,’ I assured her, because she was already doing me a favour by swapping our monthly girls’ night out of pizza and Prosecco (which she loved) to attend an author talk by Finn Douglas (who she most definitely did not love).
‘You want to go to his book signing?’ she’d asked incredulously, several weeks earlier, when I’d shown her the screenshot on my phone advertising the tour.
‘Erm… yes,’ I’d said, bracing myself for what I knew would surely come.
‘For a man who has effectively ghosted you for the last two and a half years?’
I shifted uncomfortably on my chair. ‘I think it’s fair to say I ghosted him every bit as much as he did me.’
Hannah gave an angry snort. ‘He could have kept in touch. At the very least he could have messaged you after your mum died.’
I swallowed the mouthful of coffee from the cup I’d been enjoying until that moment. It tasted suddenly bitter. ‘Finn wouldn’t have known anything about Mum unless he was following me on social media – which he wasn’t.’
With a vicious tug, Hannah tore a strip from the Danish pastry on her plate. It felt symbolic of the strip she’d quite like to tear off the man who’d disappeared from my life and shown no interest in re-entering it.
‘Okay, I’ll come,’ she said, chomping down on the sweet pastry. ‘But for the record, I would like it noted that a man who walks away first from a great job, and then a successful business, and finally from the best woman he’s ever likely to meet, is most definitely not a keeper. He’s a bloody idiot.’
‘You be sure to tell him that at the signing,’ I said, giving her a grateful hug.
*
An old-fashioned bell tinkled above our heads as we eased open the bookshop door and slipped inside. Almost immediately, a woman appeared out of nowhere, carrying a clipboard and looking important.
‘Are you here for the Finn Douglas event?’ she asked in a stage whisper that seemed unnecessary, as the shop appeared to be completely deserted. Was the event over so soon? Or had no one bothered showing up? If so, it was probably the first time Finn had ever been stood up.
‘I’m afraid you’ve missed the bit with the wine and the canapés,’ the woman whispered regretfully as she led us past tables displaying all the latest bestsellers.
‘So people did turn up?’
She looked at me as though I’d said something totally crazy.
‘In their droves. Mainly women, of course, but then it’s been that way at every stop of the tour. There aren’t too many thriller writers with such universal appeal, and of course it helps that Finn’s great in front of a live audience.’
He’s pretty amazing one on one, too, a tiny voice in my head piped up. I ignored it, the way I’d taught myself to do very effectively over the intervening years.
‘His latest book is brilliant,’ continued the woman, who I guessed must be his publicist. ‘It madeThe Timesbestseller list this week, you know.’
I did know. And I also knew how good it was, having blagged an early proof copy fromGlow’s book editor several months ago. I’d read it three times. Finn’s career was clearly on the ascent, and in a way that made his decision to prioritise it over a potential relationship with me slightly more bearable. Finn had followed his heart, and you really couldn’t blame someone for doing that, even though my own might have sustained some collateral damage as a result.
‘There should still be a couple of spaces in the back row,’ the publicist whispered as she ushered us towards the rear of the shop, where I could now see how ridiculous my question about poor attendance had been. There had to be at least twenty rows of chairs set out, and pretty much every one was occupied.
I hunted along the back row until I found two vacant seats. It was only when we were settled on them that I finally allowed myself to look towards the front of the room, where on a raised dais sat the man I’d come there to see.
Finn was sitting on a wing-backed armchair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He looked relaxed and confident and so achingly familiar that my mouth immediately went dry, while my eyes threatened to do the exact opposite.
He was dressed entirely in black, which made him look intriguing and also a little bit dangerous. I ignored the part of my brain that wanted to add ‘sexy’ to that description, even though I knew it to be true. Finn was smiling at the female interviewer sitting diagonally opposite him on the stage. She introduced him with an abundance of compliments and a squawk of feedback from the microphone. With gentle self-mockery, Finn thanked her for the warm welcome and politely declined the offer of a microphone.
‘Can you hear me okay at the back?’ he asked the audience. I sank a little lower in my chair, desperately hoping he wasn’t looking our way. ‘I prefer not using a mic if I can avoid it. It feels more intimate without one.’
The notion of being ‘more intimate’ with Finn seemed to go down a storm with the largely female audience. Under cover of the crowd’s laughter, Hannah leant closer towards me.
