After Ever After

Chapter 1

‘I’ve been thinking about the book,’ Sam says to me, as she runs her finger down the wine list. It’s the one thing I respect the most about Sam, she doesn’t mince her words.

Her colleagues call it a ‘Sam special’, the kind of needs/must communication that has helped secure her Editor of the Year three years in a row.

Even her email inviting me for dinner this evening was brisk.

It contained all the information necessary in the subject line: ‘La Brasserie. Seven PM tonight’.

Signed off with a warm and courteous EOM.

I think with anybody else she may have flowered it up a little, given them more notice perhaps, but Sam knows me; she has been my editor and almost-friend for just over a year and she knows that I very rarely have any evening plans.

Sam briefly shows me the menu, pointing to some forty-five-pound-bottle of red halfway down the page.

‘This do?’ she says briefly. It’s all in French, italicised to make it look fancy, and I feel the tug of familiarity.

Three years ago, I would have understood almost every word, enjoyed the cadence and flow, loved how I could fit into two worlds.

The words are gone now, locked up in a place in my brain that can only be accessed by a key that I have hurled off a bridge.

‘Yeah,’ I nod, swallowing down the tightness in my throat.

‘Great. We’ll take this one.’ She manages a tight-lipped smile in the waiter’s direction, hands over the menu and then crosses her forearms on the table.

‘So, the book…’ she tries again, bringing us back to the reason we’re here. To talk about The Book. The book about grief that we’ve been working on for a year and a half. My book.

‘It’s missing an ending.’ Her face tries its hardest to stay neutral but I notice how she stops blinking.

‘An ending?’ I repeat.

‘Yeah, like a destination. Right now it’s brilliant and modern and totally heart wrenching of course… but we need some sort of resolution, a post-script kind of thing.’

‘A resolution…’ I try the word on my lips, ‘to grief?’ I can’t help but smile into my wine.

‘I hate to break it to you but you haven’t read it properly if you think he’s coming back.

’ I bring my face in line with hers. She winks at me.

We have had many conversations about grief over the past year and a half; she has seen me at my rawest and my best, she can’t be put off by my bad idea of a joke.

‘Save the gallows humour for the page, eh?’ The smile that radiates off her face disappears as quickly as it arrived and instead, she returns to professional Sam.

‘It needs something more, otherwise why read it? People can just scroll through your blog for free, we need something to signify that there has been progress, that others in your situation might find it too.’

‘Right…’ I draw it out, the universal sign to let her know that I am not sure she is indeed right.

‘I have an idea.’ She proffers an olive on a cocktail stick in my direction. ‘Don’t worry, I think it can all be easily resolved.’

I feel a prickle of frustration, that her ‘easily resolved’ will probably mean many more nights staring hopelessly at yet another Word document. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘Go back.’ She waves her hands a little as she says it, leans her body over the table, eyes wide.

‘Back where?’

‘To France!’ I feel a heat that comes with such intensity it makes me choke. ‘To where it all began, to the village…’ The waiter interrupts, delivering the wine and pouring out two glasses.

‘Monpazier?’ I say the name of that village, the place that I had spent seven of the most important years of my life, a place that was, at one time, my home. Sam picks up her glass and starts swinging it around enthusiastically.

‘Ava, you’ve come so far I think it would be the thing that makes this book fly, that homecoming.’

I pull at my sleeve. I feel entirely at her mercy again, the way it felt when I was on submission, thinking I would sell my soul if someone wanted me. ‘What does everyone else think?’

‘In all honesty?’

I don’t respond, instead I nod apprehensively. I have never been one to take criticism on the chin.

‘I just get the feeling they want more. The premise is great, and you have the readership in all those followers, but right now it’s just a lot of stand-alone blog posts. I spun the team a line about you coming up with this idea and they’re on board.’

‘And if I don’t go, I don’t have a book?’

Her silence answers the question. It’s strange, how bereft I feel at the thought of it.

If anyone had asked me when I was a little girl what I wanted to be, a writer would never have been top of my list. Instead, ‘the bug’ got me slowly: a good grade in secondary English, a great teacher at Sixth Form, a very persuasive sales pitch at a university open day and suddenly it mattered, words and experiences, and cadence and vocabulary, they all mattered.

The thought of the last three years resulting in nothing seems too cruel to comprehend.

‘We’d pay of course. Treat it like a holiday…’ Sam cuts across my glazed silence.

‘A holiday?’ I scoff.

‘A break then, away from your parents? I’ll make sure we spare no expense! What do you want? Luxury hotel, B those pages had remained completely empty until the ninth of May, three years ago.

The day Etienne Grenaud, my husband, died.

The door to the restaurant opens and I can see Sam cutting through the tables towards me. I close the page, go to slip my diary back into my bag, but it’s too late.

‘What’s this?’ She gestures to the book I am now hiding under the table.

‘It’s nothing.’ I try to play it off but the look on her face tells me that she doesn’t believe me.

I shrug. ‘Just a diary.’ It’s not a lie.

Inside this cover is every single thought, idea and revelation I have had about losing Ettie since the day his heart stopped.

It isn’t the blog I started a few months after he died that has racked up enough followers to lead Sam to signing me; it isn’t even coherent in places, it is just a companion.

I put it back in my bag gently and then when I note Sam’s raised eyebrow I smile softly at her.

‘When you upload every single one of your weaknesses to an ever-growing following you have to have a place for everything else to go.’

She leans forward, eyes sparkling. ‘Now that’s something I’d like to read.’

‘And I’d like it noted that it is to be burnt before that ever happens.’ I place it safely back into my bag.

‘Fair enough.’ She raises her glass to mine and we clink them together before taking large sips and I know she’s waiting for my answer.

I try to think of an excuse – that if she could just give me a month, I could bring about an epiphany right here in London; I could find God, go on a retreat, start meditating.

But it’s useless because I know she’s right.

As much as it pains me to admit it, she has managed to find the glaringly obvious plot-hole in my life.

That despite the blog and the book detailing every part of my grief process, I’m not even close to getting over Ettie.

I swig back the rest of my wine, take one last fleeting look at my diary and nod. ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’