Chapter Seven
Days passed, with Petra jumping every time the shop door opened. She took to scanning the streets outside too, desperate to
spot him. Why was he not turning up? He knew where she was. She only wished she could say the same, puzzling over his brief
description of where he lived. He had pointed at some roofs from the top of the hill.
It wasn’t a lot to go on.
She kicked herself that they had not exchanged cell phone numbers, but then why would they have? As far as he was concerned,
she was this mildly demented—but presumably harmless—woman who ran a bookshop and was quite possibly stalking him, given the
number of times they had randomly bumped into each other. None of those assumptions would lead him to seek her out, she could
see that. And the random bumping into each other thing seemed to have come to a halt, unfortunately. That was to say, unfortunately
for her.
But she, a literary agent—okay, an ex-literary agent—had stumbled across the most significant new writer of the decade. That
had to mean something. It was fate, right? Somehow it made sense of all the crap that had happened, because it had led her to
this town, hell, it had even led her to disembark from that train, at that moment, and in that—admittedly unconventional—way. If none of those things had happened, then . . . It was a sliding doors moment. There had
to be more to the story than “literary agent bumps into fugitive author, and then never sees him again. The end.”
If Flo thought Petra was acting strangely that Saturday, she was too tactful to say anything. Petra’s hopes that Ross might
pop up were heightened. It was market day, so, surely, he would be in town again like last week? All she had to do was spot
him in the crowds and then what? Dash out of the shop and rugby tackle him to the ground? Actually, yes, she decided. That
sounded like a perfectly legitimate plan.
In the end, physical intervention wasn’t necessary because—just at the end of the day—when Petra had given up hope, the bell
rang and in he strode.
Petra yelped, and dived into position at the register, all but pushing Flo out of the way. “You go and get yourself a cup
of tea,” she gabbled to Flo, not taking her eyes off him for fear that he might dematerialize before she had a chance to speak
to him. She need not have worried, as he made straight for her,
“I know you,” she told him as he reached the desk.
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Are we seriously going to do this every time?” he asked. “We’ve met,” he said heavily. “A
lot.”
“I know, I know—I mean I know who you are.”
“Yay! I know who I am too,” he quipped, but his face had drained of color and his voice was not entirely steady.
Petra raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “So you’re . . .” She glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot and then leaned in and murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “You’re him.”
She leaned back again, nodding emphatically.
He sighed again, but this time, his sigh seemed to come up from somewhere deep in his soul.
He closed his eyes. “Busted,” he said, hanging his head in an attitude of abject despair. He turned to go, and then—as if
he had just remembered something—he turned back. “I came to give you this,” he said, reaching into his coat and producing
a chunky, red leather, gold-tooled volume. “Jane Eyre,” he said. “You told me you collected different editions, like I do with Paradise Lost,” he reminded her.
Petra could hardly bring herself to take her eyes from his face, but she glanced down at the book he was holding out and dazedly
took it from him. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s so kind. I didn’t—”
But he was walking away, not waiting for her to finish.
“No, no, no, no,” she gabbled, running after him and grabbing his arm, just as he reached the door.
“I have to go,” he told her, not wrenching his arm away, but looking pointedly at her hand.
“Why?” she said. “Go where?”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you that, am I?” he reasoned. “Excuse me, I have to go and pack. I’ll be gone by morning, so there’s no point calling anyone. By the
time they get here, it’ll be too late.”
“I’m not calling anyone,” she told him. “Who would I call? Why would I do that? It’s not like the police are after you or anything.
You’ve made it obvious you don’t want to be found, so I’m not going to give you away to—I dunno, the book police, am I?”
“You’re not?” Hope glimmered in his eyes.
“Of course not,” insisted Petra. “But I really want to—well—talk to you. Can I do that? Will you come upstairs?” she asked, seeing Flo
unobtrusively switching off lights and turning off the register. “I’ve got tea! Wine? Chocolate hobnobs? Please don’t go . . .”
There was a pause, where Petra looked at Ross imploringly, at a loss for words at last. If only silence was something she
could muster more often, she thought.
“Chocolate hobnobs, eh?” he said at last, raising a ghost of a smile. “Okay, you’ve got me.”
They started with tea. Petra plonked Ross in the sitting room and instructed him to light the fire while she put the kettle
on. She was terrified that he would change his mind and run. Her ears were alert for any noises that would suggest he was
leaving.
She breathed a sigh of relief to see he was still there when she elbowed open the sitting room door and put her tray down
on the coffee table with a clatter.
“You’ve done that before,” she joked weakly, nodding her head at the enthusiastically burning fire. The logs were already
beginning to glow red beneath the yellow flames.
“The cottage I’m staying in doesn’t have central heating,” he told her. “It’s a summer vacation rental primarily.”
“Do you move around a lot?”
He nodded.
“So . . .” she announced, pouring the tea from a brown teapot into two generously sized mugs, “tell me everything.”
“Interrogation by chocolate biscuit? You’ll have to be more specific. Everything’s a lot.”
“I’m a believer in the carrot, not the stick,” she told him, holding out the plate, “and you know what I want to know about. What happened?”
He sighed, taking a biscuit, adding milk to his tea, and then staring, apparently unseeing, at the biscuit in his hand. “It’s
going to sound ungrateful,” he began, addressing the biscuit earnestly. “I know how lucky I am—but I found all the fuss over
that book a bit . . . much.” The haunted expression on his face informed her what an understatement that was.
“‘A bit much’?”
“Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t expecting it. Everyone tells you you’re going to get ignored, you won’t get an agent, you won’t get
a deal, you won’t sell even if you do get your book out there . . . and so—my whole experience was the opposite of all that.
It was just ridiculously overwhelming . . .”
“So, the whole ‘hot new writer’ thing . . . ?” said Petra and then blushed. “I don’t mean ‘hot’ as in ‘attractive,’ obviously.”
“Obviously.” He laughed. “But—yeah—I think I was just ready to be invisible—and quite right too. I thought my first book was
never going to be the best thing I would ever write. I was supposed to be learning my craft, right? Not smashing it right out of the park.”
“Nice problem to have?”
“Sure. Anyhow,” he shrugged, “it turned out it wasn’t just the ‘best’ thing, it was the only thing I was ever going to write.”
“So, no book two?”
He shook his head. There was no laughing now. Petra glimpsed the pain behind his eyes and gasped in sympathy. “Nothing?” she queried.
He shook his head, staring at his hands. He had placed the biscuit down by his mug, untasted. “Nothing remotely publishable.
At first, I just thought I needed to get away from all the noise and fuss, you know? Just go where the phone would stop ringing,
where my brain wouldn’t be being distracted by the daily bulletins from my agent. ‘These rights have sold, those sales figures
have come through. Do you want to write the screenplay yourself?’ Blah, blah . . . And yes, I can hear myself. Entitled fool,
you’re thinking, yeah?”
Petra shook her head slowly. “I get it,” she said softly. “You just needed to get back into your own head.”
“Yeah, only—guess what? I went back in there and . . . crickets.”
“Too many expectations?” Petra asked. She hadn’t really thought about it before. None of her clients had ever had stunningly
successful debuts unfortunately, but the whole “second book” weight of expectations was definitely a thing.
“Maybe. But also, maybe I’ve just said it all. Everything that was in my tiny brain came out in the first book, and now I
have nothing.” He splayed his hands, palms up.
Petra took another biscuit, thoughtfully. For a long moment, they sat in companionable silence, watching the flames dancing.
“So,” he said briskly, “what’s your story?”
“I too have nothing,” she intoned, trying to make a joke of it, but he just waited calmly. Expectantly. His unfathomable green
eyes resting on her face.
So she told him.
And, damn him, when she got to the bibulous pedophile bit, Ross threw back his head and laughed, on and on.
“Not saying you were right about the child molestation bit,” he said eventually, wiping away tears of mirth, “but—if it’s any consolation—I have heard that guy is a complete tool. But then you’d know that?”
“He wasn’t the easiest,” she admitted.
“A relief, then?” He screwed up his face.
“Yeah, phew,” she deadpanned. “I mean, who wants a career anyhow?”
“You ran?”
“I ran,” she admitted. And there it was. Ross couldn’t doubt the veracity of her sympathy over his own predicament. They were
the same. Fellow victims of fate.
“I mean, it wasn’t just that,” she admitted, remembering the exquisite feeling of what she now realized might have been relief
when Alistair suggested she might need a career break. Her eyes moistened again at the memory. “I kind of . . .” She cleared
her throat, loosely disguising an eye dab as a nose scratch. “I had already kind of lost my mojo a bit.”
She felt his gaze. She felt seen, and also—for the first time—able to perhaps articulate a feeling she had hardly dared even
acknowledge until now. “I had started to struggle,” she went on. “I . . . stopped being able to read.”
“You can’t read?” He was incredulous. “Why? Galloping myopia? Late onset dyslexia?”
Petra smiled wanly. “I don’t know . . . Picking up a new manuscript, every time, the weight of expectation, the stress of
finding I had overlooked a unicorn—like yours—the even bigger stress of taking on some material and then not being able to
place it, or placing it and then watching it fail, not because of the work, but because of something I’d done, or something the publisher failed to do, and I couldn’t make them, because I wasn’t good enough . . .”
She glanced up and was affronted to discover that Ross was silently shaking with laughter again. “What now?” she demanded.
“That’s funny? Listen, I’m pouring my heart out here.”
“You have to admit, it is a little bit funny,” he said, trying and failing to stifle his mirth. “I mean, look at us! We’re a writer who can’t write, and an agent
who can’t read . . .”
Petra giggled reluctantly. He was right. It was absurd.
Ross was now so amused that he was wiping tears from his eyes. There was something so contagious about laughter. God knows,
she’d barely raised a smile since she had left London. Whenever they had nearly managed to suppress their hilarity, they caught
each other’s eye and set each other off again.
There was a near hysterical component to it, Petra felt. And then something even more ridiculous struck her. “Plus,” she contributed,
“we’re stuck, in an actual bookshop!”
“Oh, the irony,” he agreed, clearing his throat and trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the laughter bubbling up again.
It had felt good to laugh. If there was any remaining awkwardness between them, the hysteria had melted it away. Afterward,
they chatted for a couple of hours about everything except their former work: families (minimal on both sides), hobbies (same),
aspirations (confusingly nonexistent). They were both—they agreed—in a liminal space where the future they dared to expect
had disappeared and not yet been replaced by anything else.
So . . . same.
Petra smiled as she got ready for bed. It was a relief to have gotten past the ridiculous breathless wanting to giggle all the time at how devastatingly handsome Ross was. Now, thankfully, what came out of his mouth felt more important than the distractingly kissable appearance of his lips.
Friendship. That was what it was now. Thank goodness. Romance was the last thing she needed.
She slipped into bed and, sitting up against the pillows, opened Jane Eyre with reverence. It really was a lovely edition, printed in nineteen fifty-three, she saw. There were color plates with beautiful
watercolors of key scenes and—better than that, even—settling in to read, Petra was immersed instantly into the life of ten-year-old
Jane and the horrors of the red room.
Gripped by the familiar tale, Petra read until the early hours, waking the next morning to find the book still open on the
bed.
Tears pricked at her eyes as she got up and put the book reverently on the chest of drawers beside the bed, ready for nightfall.
She already couldn’t wait. Ross didn’t even know what his thoughtful present had done for her. It was a tiny first step—but
she was reading . . .
One of the things on Petra’s “Ask Flo” list next morning was the entry about the Portneath Book Club. It was in the shop diary
for the coming Tuesday evening.
“I think it would be good if you were there,” Flo told Petra. “Things are getting a bit fraught, and people behave better
if there is a guest.”
“Not sure if I like the idea of being a United Nations peacekeeping envoy,” admitted Petra. “What do you mean ‘fraught’?”
“Insurrection,” Flo offered darkly. “You’ll see . . .”
Petra was intrigued, but the day turned out far too busy to interrogate the older woman more thoroughly.
She barely had a chance to get through the list of “need to knows” in between serving customers and putting book orders through their antiquated computer system.
The day flew by pleasantly, and Petra was weary when she came to shut up shop, although she was pleased when Ross arrived for a chat.
“Handbags at dawn,” joked Ross when Petra told him about the book club. “If you’re there to keep the peace, I’d arrive armed
if I were you. Those little old ladies can be vicious when they fall out over protagonist motivations.”
“Will you come?”
“No way,” he said unhelpfully. “I value my life. Anyhow, what excuse would you make for me being there?”
“You could be helping me set out the tea and biscuits. Or you could say you were joining the club.”
Ross scoffed. “No thanks,” he said.
“You could recommend your own book?” Petra teased.
“Because that wouldn’t be monstrously egotistical at all,” he replied, but his face clouded over, and Petra regretted prodding Ross’s only
sore point.
“Sorry,” she said. “Tactless.”
“Nah, you’re fine,” said Ross, but he was frowning and failing to meet her eye.