Chapter One #2
It had been just over a year since Mum and Dad had died in the car accident.
Chloe had spent the one-year anniversary a few weeks ago getting drunk, watching her favourite comfort films, the box of tissues beside her, gradually emptying a bottle of wine.
She had been too upset to even read, and had instead fallen asleep to Titanic , waking up to a disintegrated tissue clenched in her palm.
Chloe’s younger sister, Gwen, had been on holiday that day, according to posts on her social media, which Chloe was definitely not stalking under a fake name.
Gwen had been somewhere in the Caribbean, sunglasses on her face and looking stunning in a white bikini.
Chloe supposed people dealt with grief differently. Gwen hadn’t even come to their parents’ funeral. She had been in Fiji.
The hurt was still there, and she doubted it would ever fade.
A year had brought her out of her cloud of grief where all she wanted to do was sleep, but it hadn’t been easy to come back to Wellbridge, to move into what used to be her parents’ home, and to try and piece her life back together.
Already, she was regretting coming here.
She had decided, upon moving in and dealing with the legality of things, that this would only be temporary.
She would save up some money and then move back to the city.
Maybe back to her flat in Sheffield, where she had worked until recently.
Back to chaos and strangers and bright lights and unfamiliar settings, where it was wonderfully loud and busy.
It distracted from thoughts that got too deep or depressing.
It was almost a relief to fret over her non-existent love life instead.
It was a much smaller problem, one she could focus on without wanting to cry until she threw up.
Chloe had had a boyfriend or two in her time, though never anything serious.
Not for a long time. She was twenty-six now, and it was hardly too late, but her failures at finding love had led her down a slippery slope of believing all the good ones were already taken. Or worse, that she was the problem.
She closed her eyes and let loose a slow, steady breath. No, Dean had definitely been the problem tonight.
‘Clementine, what even are men?’ she asked. A low meow answered her.
She wandered along a shelf of classics. There was nothing like strolling among shelves of books to calm the mind.
Her love for literature wasn’t shared by her sister, who had declared, rather too proudly for Chloe’s taste, that she hadn’t read a book since her English Literature GCSE .
It wasn’t only in their love for books, or lack of, where they differed.
Gwen never struggled to find a date. As far as Chloe could tell from her social media, Gwen had been flitting from rich boyfriend to rich boyfriend since she’d moved out at eighteen, travelling to various sunny countries and going on spending sprees at their expense.
Good for her, Chloe supposed. But she didn’t want to think about her sister now.
She caught up to the library cat, who looked up at her with his big, amber eyes.
With the rain still drumming outside, it somehow felt like there was nobody left in the world except herself and this cute little feline before her.
‘Do you think I’ll ever find a boyfriend, Clem?’
He made a soft purring noise that sounded suspiciously like a ‘no’. Chloe couldn’t help laughing.
She wanted to grab a book, perhaps several, and find an armchair where she could bury her nose in a good story and forget her problems for a while, if only her dress would dry off first. Her house was within walking distance, but the drum of rain on the windows made her want to stay here a bit longer.
And why not? Her shift didn’t start until ten o’clock the next morning, and nobody knew she was here.
Mrs Cook hadn’t explicitly said she couldn’t come here outside her work hours.
Chloe would leave everything as she had found it and switch off all the lights before leaving. No one would know, except Clementine.
It was peaceful here, alone with the books and the cat, and Chloe found herself wide awake.
The rest of this boring town was asleep or holed up in their pubs.
Chloe couldn’t wait to leave Wellbridge.
She preferred cities. The noise, the distractions, the new faces every day.
Here there wasn’t enough to do, and whenever she wasn’t in another world, either a new place or a new story, her thoughts liked to wander.
As she browsed the shelves of classics, Chloe’s heart ached.
These mahogany shelves were home to some of the world’s greatest literary treasures, donated or sold over the decades and generations, all to find a place in this library.
Chloe ran a finger along the spines, some bound in leather, others with gold embossing.
A few were old and peeling, showing the many hands that had loved and thumbed through them.
Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hardy, even a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, thick as a Bible, graced the shelf of classics.
Chloe wandered the shelves, scanning the alphabetised authors until her eyes found her favourites: some of J.
R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, collections of C.
S. Lewis and a healthy number of Enid Blyton’s old adventure stories.
Nostalgia and joy washed through Chloe. So many characters, adventures and lessons were hidden between the pages at her fingertips.
How could anyone not love books? She felt sorry for people who couldn’t live through fictional characters, joining them in their adventures, their heartaches and triumphs.
There was so much to learn and love, even from the simplest of stories.
She stopped at one shelf. Was it her imagination, or was there a faint glow around one of the books? Perhaps the gold lettering caught the light overhead, although it didn’t seem that way.
Curious, she slowly slid it out.
A noise at the end of the shelves made her jump like a child caught with their hand in the biscuit tin. But it was only Clementine, slinking around with his tail in the air. She was so jumpy tonight.
Chloe opened the book, pinching the corner of the page with her fingertips as though afraid rougher handling might damage it.
Dad had given her a copy of this classic romance as a congratulatory present before she went to university.
She flicked through the pages, lost in reminiscence.
She had read it all in her first semester and eagerly discussed the novel with her parents as they’d carved the Christmas turkey.
Gwen, who had actually shown up for Christmas that year, had rolled her eyes and loudly declared the classics were boring, much to Chloe’s chagrin.
When Chloe had pointed out that she couldn’t know they were boring if she had never read them, Gwen had just gone back to filing her nails.
Chloe swallowed at the memory. That had been an awkward Christmas. Gwen had left first thing on Boxing Day morning, declaring she had ‘better stuff to do’. Gwen hadn’t come back the year after that. Or the next.
Stop thinking about her , Chloe silently chastised herself.
In this edition of the book, the edges were sprayed gold.
What an excellent find. Mrs Cook’s diligent cleaning showed here; there wasn’t a speck of dust on the shelves, and this tome was almost like new.
Chloe wondered how many people had read this story, had gotten lost in the pages of this charming tale that had kept her enraptured through the toughest of times.
She leaned against the opposite shelf, turning to the final page.
A happy ending. Enemies to lovers was one of Chloe’s favourite tropes in literature.
Funny to think it existed even in the nineteenth century.
‘I bet it was easier to date back then,’ she said to Clementine, who was licking his paws.
‘I should’ve been born in that era, with flowing dresses and gentlemen and horse-drawn carriages.
’ She grinned at her own musings. Were men easier to bag back then, or would she still have been hopelessly single even in a dress and corset?
She supposed people were married off two hundred years ago, but it was still fun to imagine being swept away by a handsome nobleman.
She read out some of her favourite lines to Clementine, comforted by the words that filled the space around them. To his credit, the cat stuck around, cocking his head as Chloe’s voice echoed around the upper archives.
A shuffle in the next aisle made her head jerk up.
Was Mrs Cook here, working late? Had she forgotten something and come to retrieve it?
It would be mortifying to be caught like this late at night, her wet hair still clinging to her neck, reading out loud to a cat.
Chloe didn’t want to have to explain to her new boss that her first date in ages had been so terrible she had found solace by breaking into her new workplace.
She slowly slid the book back onto its shelf, ignoring the way she thought it glowed. Maybe she could sneak out of here before she was caught. Chloe made her way towards the spiral staircase.
And crashed straight into someone.