Tears burn my nose again and I get out from behind the counter and stride into the shelves. I wonder if people can tell how much I’m shaking and how unsteady I am on my feet. I dodge around customers, who kindly give me a wide berth and a wary look or two, until I get to the Rare & Valuable shelf under the stairs. More tears spill over as I remember snuggling down here with my head on his shoulder, reading and talking and laughing. Back when he was still the person he pretended to be. I pull Pentamerone off the shelf and march back to the counter, stopping in the office on the way to grab his bag.
‘Here, take it.’ I shove the book into his chest so he has no option but to hold it.
‘Hallie, I’m not taking—’ He shakes his head, his hair drooped and flat now.
‘I don’t care how much it’s worth. You’ve earned a salary for all the work you’ve done here. Call it a fee for reorganising thousands of books with me.’ I’m shaking as I reach up and slip the strap of his bag over his head so it hangs around his neck. In any other circumstance, it’s the way I’d have reached to hug him, and that’s still the only thing I want to do.
I force myself to step back, banging into the counter and undoubtedly bruising my hip on the wooden edge. ‘And now you can get out. I never want to see you or your brother in my shop ever again.’
He hesitates for a moment, like he’s trying to think of something else to say, some other argument to put up, but I fold my arms and glare at him with the harshest expression I can muster while my face is still wet with tears, and then I turn away and stalk over to the office so I don’t have to see him leave because I will not be able to hold it together.
I down a cold cup of tea like it’s a shot and bite the inside of my cheek, and it’s a good few minutes before I find the courage to turn around and look at the empty space where he was standing, and the array of open mouths staring at me.
‘Hope you liked the entertainments, folks!’ Nicole slams her hands together and walks into the middle of the shop. A few confused claps follow her. ‘Come back next week for episode two of “People Acting Out Books In Real Life”!’
I might not always see eye to eye with my sister, but I love her for trying to cover this up and make it look like an intentional drama rather than my luck finally running out on the most important day of my career so far.
‘That was from …’ She looks at me blankly.
‘The Tale of the Loser Girl and the Gentleman, a love story that does not have a happy ending,’ I finish for her as my voice breaks and I run upstairs.
***
Even though there’s no one serving other than Nicole, I go up to the flat and hide in the bathroom. I’ve tried splashing water on my face five times now, but every time I do and take a deep breath and steel myself to go back down, I start crying again. The tears won’t stop falling, and the harder I try to stop them, the more they flow.
Every time I picture his twinkly eyes and happy smile, I can’t comprehend how he could’ve been lying all along. He always seemed so open, and even with the vague feeling that he was hiding something, I never had an inkling that it would be something so nefarious. The word makes hysterical laughter burst unexpectedly out of my mouth. How could I ever have laughed at the idea of Dimitri being up to something nefarious? How can he have stood beside me while Drake Farrer spoke and not mentioned they happened to be brothers? How can he have spoken so openly about his brother and not mentioned that he happened to be Drake Farrer? And worse still, how can I have fallen for it and for him? Why didn’t I trust my instincts and the rest of my life experience that’s always shown me that the perfect man doesn’t exist, and the only type of happy ending I’m ever going to get is in the pages of a book?
‘Hallie?’ Nicole calls up the stairs. ‘There’s someone here asking for you. You posted her book on social media? Says her name’s Esme.’
Esme! From the Les Misérables note! It’s got to be! The excitement of hearing about the perfect relationship that must’ve sprung from that romantic note is enough to stop the tears in their tracks. I splash water on my face one more time, glad my T-shirt is black today otherwise it would be see-through by now from all the times I’ve missed my face. I smooth my hair down and dash for the stairs.
Nicole’s obviously had a crash course in using the till because she’s serving customers like her life depends on it, and I spontaneously hug her in the middle of putting money into the till. There’s no sign of blood and she’s still got the same number of fingers as before so it’s obviously behaving itself. She has no idea how much I appreciate that, even though she’s not a book lover and doesn’t like shops in general, she’s still willing to step up when I really need her.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she whispers back. ‘We’ve all had bad break-ups, Hal, and I do know he was special. I don’t know who’s more upset – you or Mum. Apparently she’s been keeping in touch with him since he came for dinner and she’s really going to miss his texts.’
‘Yeah. He kept showing me photos of weird knitted things her group had been making. He had—’ The idea of how lovely Dimitri’s been to my mum makes my voice crack again.
‘Esme’s over there,’ Nicole says quickly and nods towards a fifty-something-year-old woman standing by the window and thumbing through the copy of Les Mis.
Mum intercepts me on the way and pulls me down into a hug, before saying, ‘Plenty more fish in the sea, and we’re going to find them all!’ She’s got a clipboard with a printed spreadsheet on it, and she’s approaching all the men in the shop and asking them to fill in their age and relationship status.
She’s going to be disappointed. I’d had enough of dating before I met Dimitri, now I never want to see another man again for the rest of my life. I might become a nun. It could be fun to live in a convent and sing songs like ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?’ all day. I bet nuns get a lot of time for reading too.
‘Esme?’
The woman closes the book and taps the cover with a long fingernail as she turns to me. ‘That’s something I haven’t seen in many years.’
‘I’m so glad we found it for you.’ I give her my best smile.
‘Found it?’ Her face screws up in confusion. ‘You think I want this crap?’
I can’t hide my surprise. ‘But … the note inside it …’
‘Exactly. I’d have kept the book if it wasn’t for that note.’
‘So you didn’t … date Sylvester then?’
‘Oh, unfortunately, yes. I married him. I spent ten years with him – five of those believing we were gloriously happy, and another five believing he’d changed and wasn’t going to cheat again. And again. And again. If you look closely enough around your shop, you’ll probably find twenty other such “heartfelt” messages to twenty other girls he was trying to seduce. There’s something about notes in books and being given books as a gift that makes it feel like so much thought and consideration has gone into it. It’s something old-fashioned and inherently romantic, and it makes you feel so valued and important that you lose sight of what’s right in front of you.’
Oh, tell me about it. Books erode a lot of common sense when it comes to men.
‘And what was right in front of me was my husband sleeping with anything that had a pulse, including but not limited to, just about every colleague in his office both the female and male ones, our child’s school teacher, one of my best friends, our regular taxi driver, and the florist who sold him the guilt-flowers he bought me every time he’d shagged someone else. I found that exact note, personalised to other poor, unsuspecting women, in many copies of many different books. He was churning them out like a factory line.’
Oh God. How can I have been so wrong? About so many things, but about this in particular? I was so convinced this was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. Dimitri tried to tell me, but I couldn’t comprehend that the dreamy note inside this book could’ve ended anything but happily.
‘Anyway, I only came because I saw your post onlin
e that said you wanted to find me. I don’t live far so I thought I’d drop by to let you know you can stop looking.’ She hands Les Mis back to me. ‘I assure you, I don’t need any reminders of that relationship. I threw the book away for a reason.’
I stare open-mouthed after her as she whisks out of the shop.
This is not how I expected that to go.
I open Les Mis and read the inscription again, and it looks totally different now the rose-tinting is off my glasses.
I close the book and clutch it to my chest. All I want to do is tell Dimitri. He was right about it. I wouldn’t even mind being wrong. I just want things to go back to how they were on the night we found this. Innocent. Flirty.
Not related to Drake Farrer and working for Farrer and Sons.
I realise that I’m standing here in a daze while the shop is so busy that Nicole’s rushed off her feet and Mum’s still accosting male customers with her clipboard and biro.
I take over from Nicole and go back to serving people, not managing to strike up my usual enthusiasm for selling romance books. Even books are different when you believe the stories in them might have a chance of coming true.
Because that’s it, isn’t it? That’s all love will ever be – a fairy tale. Something to read about in books – because it never, ever happens in real life.
Chapter 17
‘What an amazing start,’ Nicole says. ‘You’ve cleared loads of stock, you’ve earned more than enough to cover the business rates for the next few months, and can even go on that distributor’s website you’ve been coveting – and you’ll still have money to deposit into the bank this week.’
It’s Sunday morning, the day after the day before, and because there were so many customers that I couldn’t chuck them out at closing time, it got too late to clean up, so Nicole and Mum have come over to help me before I have to reopen again tomorrow.
The phone’s been ringing off the hook with customer enquiries. The shop’s gone viral but not because of the notes – because of the juxtaposition of me yesterday morning, talking animatedly about love, romance, and books, to me yesterday afternoon, my face red and my eyes swollen in the pictures as I try to summon up some enthusiasm for the notes again, and sandwiched between the two are photos of me shoving Pentamerone at Dimitri and throwing him out. The ‘real-life heartbreak of romantic bookseller’ posts have gone online far and wide, and the comments all say the same things about plenty more fish in the sea and being better off without him.
I don’t want to be without him. I want this all to be a mistake, a misunderstanding. Every time I pick up the shop phone, I feel a little fizzle of excitement that it’s going to be him, phoning with a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Could he have had a concussion or something and simply ‘forgot’ he was related to Drake Farrer after a terrible accident?
Could they have been separated at birth and he didn’t even know until it was too late?
To be honest, I’m one step away from believing he was abducted by aliens and had his memory wiped by little green men – that’s how badly I want this to be untrue.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Mum says for the 48,528th time as she plumps up cushions on the reading-area sofas. ‘What’s so bad about being related to a property developer? He can’t choose his family.’
‘The point is that he lied about it, Mum,’ I say through gritted teeth. It’s not the first time I’ve explained myself this morning. ‘The point is that he inserted himself into my life, into my shop, and I thought he was helping me, but what he actually did was get an inside look at my plans for the business and my accounts, and report back to his own firm whose sole purpose is to buy me out. Well, maybe not their sole purpose, I don’t think I’m that important to them, but I’m certainly one of the key properties they want to acquire. He isn’t who I thought he was.’
‘What I don’t understand is why no one knew,’ Nicole says, also not for the first time. ‘In a village this size, you can wave to someone in the street and they turn out to be your cousin. How did no one recognise him? Why didn’t any of your customers know he was a Farrer brother?’
‘I don’t know,’ I mutter, because it’s also far from the first time I’ve asked myself the same question. ‘I know he went to boarding school. I think they were both sent away at a really young age and Drake came back but Dimitri didn’t. He said he never came back here until his mum died, and since then, he’s … spent a lot of time indoors,’ I finish lamely. Even after this, I still don’t want to gossip about the things he shared with me in private. I don’t even know if any of it is true now.
‘But he’s so nice,’ Mum carries on. ‘And so funny. Do you know he offered to buy a hat from every single member of my knitting club for the charity sale next month? I’ve never even seen him wear a hat, let alone twelve. And the dick pics are hilarious.’
I don’t think my head’s ever spun round so fast before. ‘Dimitri’s been sending you dick pics?’
Either there’s some miscommunication here or Dimitri is a very different person than I thought he was.
‘Yes, look.’ She gets her phone out and starts scrolling through it, and I hide my face behind a book because I’m not sure what on earth she’s going to hold up. ‘See?’
I peek over the cover of The Book Thief. ‘Mum, that’s … an Oxford English dictionary.’
‘Yes! Isn’t he wonderful? I was telling him about all the men who send me dick pics and he said it wasn’t fair I had to see them so he’d send me something much better. Dic-tionary pics!’
‘Oh my God.’ I shake my head. I don’t intend to laugh, but she holds up another photo of a Merriam Webster and then a Collins, and I can’t stop myself. ‘That’s so Dimitri.’
She scrolls to another one of a Scrabble dictionary and then a thesaurus until Nicole and I are laughing so hard that it’s a struggle to stay upright.
‘How do you have Dimitri’s phone number? I don’t even have Dimitri’s phone number.’
‘He gave it to me. Said I could call him if I ever needed anything and that he wanted to hear all about how my allotment progresses.’
I suddenly feel more bereft than I have until now. He was the most amazing man. How can anyone have such a fun, childlike sense of humour, but still be the most perfect gentleman and treat my mum with such respect and kindness too? How can he have been so different to the person I thought he was? How can I have lost him?
Even Heathcliff looks devastated. His favourite greyhound has trotted past twice since yesterday and he hasn’t even given it a glance.
Dimitri brought something to this shop. His easy cheerfulness calmed me when things were mad. His positive attitude made me feel like I could do even the most daunting of jobs. His sense of fun made every day whiz past in a blur of smiling eyes and cheeky grins. How can I open up the shop tomorrow morning and face the week without him?
No. This will just be another underhanded tactic. A way of getting my mum on his side and using her to get to me. ‘Well, you can’t. Don’t ever call him, Mum, please?’
‘Well, I haven’t got much choice now you’re so ticked off with him,’ Mum grouches, sounding like an Enid Blyton character with her old-fashioned turn of phrase.
‘Someone who does that can’t be bad, can they? The dictionary pics, and that.’ Nicole points to Mum’s phone. ‘You’d have to be a nutter to voluntarily give your number to our mum, and that was after The Dinner Incident. He knew what she was like.’
Mum pokes her tongue out at her. ‘He was even complimentary about that. And he was the only one of you brave enough to try my pizza.’
‘That wasn’t pizza,’ Nicole and I say in unison.
‘And his oven cleaning tips were spot on. I never thought that cheese was going to come off, but it did.’ Nicole goes back to slotting Fantasy books into the shelf alphabetically. ‘I don’t even mind about the ruined dress because he danced with you, knowing how clumsy you are. That’s even braver than trying Mum’s
pizza.’
‘Oh, don’t remind me. Of the dancing or the pizza.’ I think back to the day at his house. Dancing in that amazing ballroom, feeling like a princess. Feeling special and important and like it was the start of something wonderful. Like it must’ve taken a lot for him to let me see that side of him and share his secrets … I can’t connect the fact that that Dimitri is also the Dimitri who’s been reporting back to Drake Farrer about my shop. ‘Maybe I should give up now.’
‘Nope, you lick your wounds and climb back on the horse. Metaphorically speaking. Well, unless the new man likes horses. But not too much. It’s creepy when they like horses a bit too much.’
What kind of men is my mum meeting? Are they all sending her weird horse porn or something? ‘I wasn’t talking about men. I meant everything. The shop. The flat. The books. Sell it on to the Farrer brothers and be done with it. Cut my losses and get out.’
‘You can’t do that. Yesterday was an amazing day. Look at all those people who came. And look at all your followers and people who’ve signed up to be notified when the website opens. Look at how many comments there are on your pictures of the notes. Look at how many people are sharing them. Look at your Facebook group where people are finding books all over Buntingorden and hiding their own. It’s become a real people’s movement.’
‘But it won’t always be like that. There won’t always be this many customers. There won’t always be people hiding books, but there will always be people like Drake Farrer ripping them up. And how long until the wolves are door-knocking again? Both the wolves this time?’
‘You can’t do it anyway. Your old bloke said you had to pass it on to someone who wants it. Didn’t you sign some sort of agreement to that effect?’
‘I’ll do that then. I’ll have another raffle. I’ll pick a winning ticket and maybe next time the winner will be a lot more capable than me. Somebody who’s got a clue about how to run a business like this. Somebody who can see the property developers off.’
The Little Bookshop of Love Stories: A gorgeous feel good romance to escape with this summer! Page 30