39
As the late evening summer sun slanted through the windows of her father’s house, they were all sitting around the living room with only the ticking of the grandfather clock breaking the silence.
Aurelia and Oliver had arrived just an hour earlier with Biscuit and Fezz in tow, and hadn’t wasted much time before sitting her father down to share the news.
“Well,” her dad said at last. “That seems to have shaken a few loose pieces into place.”
“How do you mean?” Aurelia asked.
“Let’s see,” he said, shifting into the register Aurelia always imagined he’d used when lecturing his philosophy students. “When you first took over the shop, it seemed like an annoyance, but one day it was as though a switch had flipped and you were quite happy to spend all your time there.”
“Maybe I just resigned myself to it?” Aurelia suggested.
“It was much too sudden a change, and you were too eager for it to be resignation.” He shook his head, smiling.
“Then, you began writing sequels for quite random characters. You’d never written anything like those stories before, so it was something of a departure.
I suppose you met those characters in the shop? ”
“Yes!” Aurelia couldn’t believe how well her father was taking it. “I wrote Vronsky’s story, but I only started Harriet’s. She wound up writing her own.”
Harriet was a character from Little Dorrit that Aurelia had met soon after Oliver had moved into the flat with her. It was another secret that felt liberating to share with him.
“She wrote her own story?” Oliver asked.
“She did. She hated what I’d written for her just as much as you did,” Aurelia laughed.
“Do you have her version? Can I read it?”
“Definitely,” she said with a smile.
“It took me a little too long to figure out that meeting the characters must have meant she’d met Vronsky,” Oliver admitted to her father.
“Yes, well… I’ve known her since she was little, when she thought she was better at hiding secrets than she was.”
Julia laughed and Aurelia shrugged a shoulder.
“You’re not saying you suspected what was happening?” Antonia asked, disbelief lacing her voice.
“No, certainly not,” her father admitted. “But I suppose I sensed there was something to do with the shop that she wasn’t letting on.”
“I think the next question is, who else do we let in on that something?” Oliver said.
“I want to tell Dad,” Julia said immediately. “And my friends?” she added hopefully.
“No,” the adults all said at once.
“Okay, alright,” Julia said, holding her hands up defensively.
“Julia, everyone here loves you and has had a chance to… verify what you’ve seen,” Antonia said. “But the more people you tell, the less we can control it.”
“That’s right,” Aurelia cut in. “Having all of you come to the shop to hear the characters is manageable, but I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to stand at the door night after night while a parade of people come through to have a go.
And… I like my life. I like running a shop and having my flat with Oliver without being ‘that lady with the weird shop.’ It’s a choice you can make when you take it over, but while it’s mine I’d like to have it my way. ”
Julia looked disappointed but didn’t argue, seeming to understand that Aurelia’s point was a valid one.
“There are a few other things to consider,” Aurelia’s father added kindly.
“For one, people don’t like feeling left out.
It tends to make them mean and sometimes angry.
Add to that, people don’t like feeling the fool.
Telling them that only you can see fictional beings, and that only you can really hear them, might make some people think you’re playing a game at their expense. ”
“Which is likely to lose you some friends,” Antonia said.
“Look at me,” Oliver said ruefully. “I thought Aurelia was taking a joke too far.”
“We also have to think about the possible publicity,” Antonia added. “A story about you telling tales about the shop would follow you for a long time, even at university or a future job.”
“But I’ll be working in the shop after uni,” Julia declared.
“Maybe not,” Aurelia said, then at a look of protest from Julia, she continued.
“The shop will definitely be yours one day, but you might want to be a doctor or something. I’m not going to check your references, but someone else might find an article reporting that you’d got carried away with your imagination and wonder how reliable you were. ”
“I’m not going to be a doctor. I’m going to run the shop,” Julia said, her tone just as determined.
“You should keep your options open, Julia. You have time to have a career or two before taking over. I was lucky—I wanted to write and I can do that in the shop.”
“Aurelia’s right,” Antonia said, adding a brief eye roll when she saw her sister’s smug look. “If you wanted to be… I don’t know… a barrister, you couldn’t exactly argue cases from inside the shop.”
“So I can never tell anyone?” Julia asked.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Aurelia said. “But for now, maybe talk to me and your mum before you tell anyone outside of this room.”
“And Dad?”
“Max should know,” Aurelia said to Antonia. “I think that’s only fair.”
Antonia nodded.
“I’ll tell your dad when I get back to Paris, okay?” she told Julia. “But I think your brothers are too young. They won’t be able to keep it to themselves, even assuming they believed us. We can think about whether and when to tell them, but not yet.”
“One of their daughters will be taking over the shop one day,” Aurelia said with a smile. “You can make sure your brothers find out before then.”
“Oh, yeah…” Julia drew the word out as a delighted smile lifted her face.
It was contagious, and soon everyone in the room was smiling along with her.