Page 76

‘Morning,’ said Theo, clearing his throat.

I still couldn’t look at him.

‘So I read your chapters as soon as you pinged them over yesterday morning,’ she said, pausing for effect.

‘And?’ I said, eager to know, even if it was bad. I hoped it wouldn’t be, but notes were notes and they weren’t always what you wanted to hear but they were almost always for the good of the book.

‘It’s phenomenal!’ she gushed. ‘The two of you have done an outstanding job of starting this book with a bang. I couldn’t stop reading it, turning page after page with no idea where the story was going but knowing I needed to find out and fast.’

I smiled to myself. The plotting had worked.

‘And character-wise, what an interesting dynamic between the wife and the sister! One minute I believed everything one of them was saying, the next minute, I was totally behind the other. So multi-layered and realistic – after all, life isn’t black and white, is it? We all have good bits and bad bitsand you’re really ensuring this comes across. Seriously guys, I’m majorly,majorlyimpressed.’

My eyes flickered to Theo’s. I couldn’t be certain of course, but I was sure he was looking at me, too. I smiled. He smiled back.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of sending the first three chapters out to the list of UK and US editors I ran by you a couple of days ago, hoping to get the ball rolling. And suffice to say, a couple of them have already been in touch to say they want more of it. I think we’re going to be talking about an auction here, or at the very least a lucrative early pre-empt.’

A pre-empt meant that somebody believed in it so much they wanted to offer a high advance to take it off the table. An auction involved publishers bidding each other, again pushing up the advance, sometimes by a huge amount. It was what I’d dreamed of for the last few years but hadn’t quite known how to achieve.Little Boy Lostwas acquired for a modest amount that, don’t get me wrong, we’d been ecstatic about at the time. And then things had kind of exploded thanks to early word of mouth about the book and we’d ended up paying off our advances very quickly by publishing standards. But I’d always wanted the high of having a book sold at auction, and an announcement in the infamous trade magazineThe Booksellerto shout from the rooftops about. With both of my solo books, I’d hopedthiswould be the one to get the industry excited about me again, but then the first one came out and it sold a reasonable amount, but it didn’t blow my publishers away and my royalties remained average at best. And I was only assuming that sales forThe Mother-in-Lawwould be much worse. But this felt different – Carla was never this enthusiastic and, more importantly, the editors she’d sent it to seemed to love it, too.

‘That’s great news,’ said Theo. ‘No pressure writing the rest of the book, then!’

‘I don’t care what you’ve been doing to create work this good. Perhaps it’s even the couples retreat the two of you ended up on . . .’

‘It’s not,’ I stuttered.

‘But whatever it is, keep doing it,’ said Carla. ‘It’s working! Don’t change a single thing.’

I chewed my lip, wondering whether that was going to be achievable now. Had too much been said? Had I ruined everything by bringing up the past in such detail? If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have stayed quiet until the bloody thing was written. It was just that despite my protestations to Carla, being here on the retreat, sampling therapy for the first time,hadbegun to change something inside of me. It was like I’d found my voice and suddenly I wasn’t quite so afraid to use it.

‘We’re going to have another bestseller on our hands and it’s going to be even bigger than your debut!’ enthused Carla. ‘I can feel it.’

Once the call had ended I didn’t know what to do with myself. I paced up and down the room, feeling like I wanted to celebrate but not sure where I stood with Theo. I stared at the door between us, wondering what he was thinking, desperate to talk to him more than anybody else, but also scared to hear what he had to say. And then, as if he’d been standing on the other side of the wall, thinking much the same thing I had been, a note slid under the door right in front of my eyes. I swallowed hard, tentatively picking it up. Underneath my message about having a talk, he’d replied:

Sure. Fancy a walk on the promenade?

I grabbed a pen from the side and wrote back, attemptingto make my not-particularly-neat handwriting as legible as possible, so there could be no confusion.

See you downstairs in ten mins.

Cannes was beautiful in the early morning sun. I wondered whether that was why film stars had loved it so much through the ages, because the light was exceptionally flattering and would probably look amazing in photographs.

We walked downhill from the hotel into the centre of town, passing every shop you could imagine in Rue d’Antibes:Zara, Fragonard, Massimo Duttiand – my personal favourite –Ladurée,for macarons (I’d tried no less than five different flavours so far and wasn’t intending to stop there). We made it to the beach in about fifteen minutes, turning left to walk along the front, past the back entrance to all the beach bars, including the one we’d pitched up at a few days earlier. Seagulls swooped and cawed above our heads as staff members set up for the day, placing tables and chairs out on the sand, ambient dance music already creating a breakfast beach-club scene. To our left was La Croisette and on the other side, the grand hotels I could only dream of staying in: Le Majestic, the palm-tree-flanked Carlton.

‘So it went well with Carla,’ I said as we passed a particularly glamorous couple wearing matching Balenciaga tracksuits. Who knew leisurewear could look so chic?

He nodded. ‘You never know, really, do you, how well it’s going to be received when you send it out there?’

‘And Carla’s tough, right? She’d tell us if it wasn’t good enough.’

‘There’s no way she was saying any of that just to be nice. She must have meant every word,’ he said, as though he was still a little bit in shock, as was I.

We walked in silence for a little while, the two of ussporadically looking out to sea. A boat carrying some scuba divers was coming in and there were various yachts bobbing on the water further out. I wondered what kind of life these rich people had. Were they happier than I was? Would it really make my life better if I was more financially secure, like I thought it would? Or was it other things that made you truly happy? Like maintaining personal boundaries, and a good work/life balance and having fulfilling relationships in which everyone supported each other so that it wasn’t just one person supporting the other time and time again.

‘Looks like I might not have to urgently update my CV after all,’ said Theo. ‘I was beginning to worry I’d have to go back to my day job. Not sure if you remember, but I was working in a kitchen showroom when we met, and let’s just say I’m not a natural salesperson . . .’

I smiled to myself. ‘Oh, come on, you can’t have been that bad.’

‘Want to bet? But on the other hand, I worked on commission, so there was some motivation to close the sale, but it was coming from a massively skewed place. I found it quite soul-destroying.’