Chapter 46
46
‘London? How? What? Why?’ Random words were coming out of my mouth, making no sense at all.
‘I clearly didn’t hear him right when he told me where he was going. He’s not in Canada after all.’
Even though it was great news that he wasn’t hundreds of thousands of miles away, he was still not in Driftwood Bay, although at least London was on the same island as me.
Rash thoughts entered my head. Could I? Would I? No. It would be ridiculous. Wouldn’t it?
‘I know you won’t ask me how he is, because you’re both as shitting stubborn as each other, but he’s sad, Nancy. I can tell. My boy is sad and he won’t bloody do anything about it.’
‘Do you think he’ll come back?’
‘Well, I asked him to come home for Christmas but he said he didn’t think he should. Thought it would be best if he stayed away.’
For the next week, I could think of nothing else. Truro was the furthest I’d been for years and even going there gave me severe anxiety. The thought of travelling to London literally gave me palpitations, but the idea would not go away. I dreamt of trains coming off tracks. I read articles about the threat of terrorists, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. But there was still a tiny little bit of me that felt like I had to go. Owed it to myself and to us.
A knock at the shop door was unusual. If we were open, people normally came straight in. I went to the door and opened it but the street was empty, however on the step was a bag full of second-hand books. I’d started to get more and more of them recently and it was getting harder to find somewhere to display or store them. I’d have to speak to Dan about building me some more shelves.
As I put the bag into the storage cupboard, I noticed the book on the top was described as an uplifting second chance romance. Sounded just what I needed right now to take my mind off things, and as the weather had turned colder and the shop had gone quieter, I decided to grab myself a cup of coffee and settle down in the armchair and have five minutes reading time.
Reading did two things. Firstly, it was helping me to push all the thoughts of Dennis and London from my mind, and secondly, it was giving me a place to escape to. Books as they said, really were portable magic and could transport you away from the world as you knew it to a place where you’d rather be.
Five minutes turned into hours as the pages turned themselves and the book ended before I’d realised that I hadn’t done a thing apart from sit and read. I smiled for what felt like the first time in a while. There was still a part of me who was like the little girl I once was, who wanted her own bookshop and thought that you just got to sit and read books all day long. Another dream come true. Sadly, that was not the case and owning a bookshop is not about reading books day in, day out. Although with my Dennis hat on, I could just hear him saying, ‘A shop full of customers would have been more profitable, Nancy.’
I thought about the plot of the book. The description had promised a feel-good read and it definitely delivered. I thought about the protagonist who, instead of waiting for a man to come and fix things for her, took the bull by the horns and went out there and did everything herself. It was nice to read something that reflected the world we lived in. These days women were more forthright and just cracked on with stuff.
It was that book that gave me the inspiration for what I knew I was about to do. Maybe in this day and age, a girl didn’t have to wait for the hero to come and rescue her. This girl knew then exactly what she was going to do. She was going to go and get her man!