Change My Mind (The Love You Want #2)

Chapter 1

One

ADDIE

“Ineed you.”

If there was one thing I had learned from a lifetime of knowing Rebecca Harris, it was that she never admitted when she needed something.

She was more of an ‘I will fix this problem by myself’ kind of girl.

So, her calling me for help was already a big deal.

For her to do it with a complete disregard for the time difference between the two of us was an even bigger deal.

It was three a.m. my time.

I paused before responding. Partly from confusion, and partly because I needed to get my brain to think in English, given that I spent ninety-five per cent of my time these days speaking French.

Becky waited for me. By this point, she was used to the pause.

They had become a mainstay of every phone call I had with people that I didn’t share a surname with—and therefore the same first language with—in the twelve years I had lived in Montreal.

I fell onto my sofa, the brown leather squeaking underneath my bare legs as I tucked them underneath me. “I don’t know how much help I can really be from Canada, Becky. Can’t you call Clo?”

“I can assure you, I’ve called the right Henry sister. Unless Clara has become a qualified English professor in the last twenty-four hours without me realising?” Becky replied, her words almost eating into one another with how quickly she was talking. She was in peak panic mode.

“Okay, fine. You’ve got the right sister. But what do you need so urgently that you’ve called in the middle of the night?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. My evening was starting to catch up with me now that I was back in the comfort of my own flat.

“It’s not the…Oh shit. I am so sorry. You probably thought something awful had happened.”

Surprisingly, I hadn’t. The Henry family had a protocol for any and all emergencies. A call from Becky was far down on the list. It was on the list, but not high up enough for me to jolt into a panic at the fact that she had called me at three in the morning.

“You’re fine, Bex. I wasn’t sleeping. I only got in about five minutes ago.”

“Oh, wild Thursday night?” Becky sounded less panicked and more intrigued now, which I supposed was a good thing. Except that I wasn’t in the mood for a debrief of my night. I wanted a shower and my bed.

“Not really. You remember Johannes?”

“Your current bed fellow?” she replied immediately.

That was one way to refer to Johannes. I mean, there weren’t a lot of instances where we actually made it to a bed.

Johannes was very keen on highlighting that he could hold my six-foot-two frame up against a wall.

Or a door. Anything vertical. It was fun at first. In fact, it was still fun.

My issue with Johannes had nothing to do with his refusal to have sex horizontally.

“Soon to be ex-bed fellow,” I said as I shifted to lie down on the sofa.

“What could he have possibly done to get the boot?”

“The same thing they always do, Becky. They insist on trying to make things more complicated than they need to be.”

A pause.

“You mean they catch feelings?” She sounded sad on Johannes’s behalf.

My sigh was accompanied by an eye roll that no one saw, but I hoped she could sense it all the way in London. “It’s the one thing they’re not supposed to do.”

“It’s the one thing you don’t do. You can’t be mad at them for daring to feel romantically about you. It’s a pretty normal response from people who are regularly engaging in physical intimacy with one another.”

“You sound like Rachel. And I’m not mad at him for catching feelings.

A little bit disappointed, sure, but it is what it is.

I’m just confused how he managed it. I am always confused as to how they manage it.

I’m not remotely forthcoming with anything that they could use to get to know me better.

We don’t go on anything that could be considered a date.

Not even tenuously. It’s literally just sex. What are they falling for?”

“The potential of you?” Becky said simply.

“It’s sounding very ‘I can fix her, no really, I can’.”

“Maybe you could give one of them a chance one day.” I could see the shrug of her shoulders.

Could practically feel it jogging the phone up against her ear.

This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation.

I’d had it with every one of my sisters for years.

Although Rachel didn’t tell me to give it a go all that much because she didn’t think that was fair, considering the state of her dating life. Or lack thereof.

It never mattered. I stayed firm with my one rule in life. Don’t fall in love. It was that simple. I had no interest in romantic love. I wasn’t built for that one.

Becky continued, “I know I just said that, and this is now going to sound very contradictory, but the one you give a chance can’t be Johannes.

Or, I mean, it could be. But I somehow doubt it would be a good idea for you to give a relationship a try for the first time and then immediately turn it into a long-distance relationship. ”

I frowned.

“Becky, Johannes and I live ten minutes from each other. I literally just did the walk. What are you talking about, long distance?”

“Why are you walking—no, it’s fine. I know you’re at home. I don’t need to worry about that. The reason I am calling you with no regard for time zones… Well, two reasons, actually. Firstly, do you still want to finish your PhD?”

I had been planning to finish my PhD for the last three years, but the thing about making plans is that usually, the universe would rather laugh at your intentions instead.

I took one week off to go to Becky’s wedding two summers ago, and by the time I came back, the English department at the university I worked at was in total disarray.

Somehow, I ended up being the most senior person left in the team, which meant a lot more responsibility on my shoulders out of nowhere.

I promised myself I would pick up my PhD again when things died down.

They had yet to die down, and I had given up hope that my plans to finish would ever come to fruition.

“Yeah, the plan is to finish it. It’s on a list, but it’s not exactly at the top of it.”

It was basically at the bottom.

Becky hummed. “Good. That leads me to my next question. Do you want to come home?”

I thought about this a lot these days. My sister didn’t ask me to come home as often as she used to, but she still floated the idea whenever I had gone on a particularly passionate rant about how much I hated my job and everybody I worked with.

I knew she wasn’t wrong, but I had always been hesitant.

I liked living in Canada. I liked where I lived.

I mostly liked my job, once I had gotten all the ranting out of the way.

Except it was increasingly becoming the case that work was all I lived for at the moment.

And the more that became the case, the more I grappled with the fact that my job was the only thing keeping me tied to Montreal now.

Over the years, my social circle had narrowed to one actual friend, Tori, and a bunch of acquaintances who were mostly colleagues that I didn’t bother getting all that attached to because the English department was going through staff members at an alarming rate.

Was that really a good enough reason to stay?

It was starting to feel like it wasn’t.

I missed my sisters and the ease of being around those four women because we had known each other forever.

I still knew what was going on in their lives, but I didn’t really know.

I got all my information secondhand, and sometimes, so far after the fact that it was already old news to them.

A few weeks ago, Clara had mentioned in passing that she was thinking of proposing to her partner, Jesse, and the possibility that I might miss my actual sister plan her wedding just so I could try and keep a nearly sinking ship afloat wasn’t sitting right with me.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and took a deep breath. “What do you need?”

“I need you. More specifically, I need a professor who knows Shakespeare better than she knows the alphabet.”

That would be me.