Page 19 of A Wedding in Tuscany

‘Booyah?’ she teases.

I poke my tongue out at her, dropping the journal back into the box and unfolding the page. ‘I wanna see,’ she says.

I lift my gaze, having only read ‘Dear Sarah’. ‘Okay, scoot over.’ I sit next to Lins and read aloud.

‘Dear Sarah,

Congratulations, you made it. You are OLD.’

Lins laughs while I mentally slap my former self?how rude! ‘I guess when you’re nineteen, forty is old,’ she says.

‘You’re not helping. Besides, I was supposed to read it when I turned thirty.’

‘Keep going,’ she prompts through more laughter.

‘This letter is to remind you of all the things you wanted to do when you were young. Your bucket list! Hopefully by now, you’ve done them all but if you haven’t, you still have time before you die.’

‘Oh, my god! You were hilarious,’ says my soon-to-be-replaced best friend. I silence her with a withering look?well, I try but she continues to laugh at me, her body shaking. ‘Honestly, this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’

‘So! Where to start. First, (I think) I want us to get married.’

I show Lins the parenthesis and they even make me smile.

‘Mum and Dad have this incredible marriage and if you can find someone like Dad who puts up with all the weird things about us, then DO IT! And if you’re reading this for the first time at thirty and you’re still not married, then you either got weirder or you haven’t been looking hard enough.’

I drop the letter into my lap. ‘Was I really this much of a cow when you met me?’ I ask Lins. We’ve been best friends since the second year of uni but now I’m starting to wonder what she saw in me.

‘Hardly. But I’m guessing this is “inner voice Sarah”?she’s always been kind of a bitch to you.’

‘Hmm. Very astute,’ I acknowledge. As usual, Lins is bang on.

‘Are you gonna keep reading? At this rate, we’ll be planning your fiftieth before you finish.’

‘Ha-ha.’

‘I hope we follow in Mum’s footsteps and become a teacher. English, in case you didn’t already know. ;) We can shape young minds and make them fall in love with words! And I want us to travel to every continent and do and see all the things. I want us to have adventures – go skydiving and white-water rafting and hiking and sailing – just like Aunty Tessa.’

‘Aunty Tessa?’ asks Lins. ‘Have I met her?’

In an instant, tears prick my eyes.

My (honorary) Aunty Tessa had been one of Dad’s closest friends from his university days back in the UK. From the moment I met her when I was fifteen, I knew she was the person I wanted to be when I grew up. She was ‘bolshie’, as Dad would say, and so full of life. She inspired me to be adventurous and brave?me, the timid-at-heart scaredy cat who’d suffered from anxiety since childhood.

She stayed with us a few times when Cat and I were in our teens?stops on her epic trips?but the visit that impacted me most was during that first year of uni. I was all wide-eyed and soaking up knowledge?simultaneously confronted with my naivety and thinking I knew it all?and she was about to embark on a year-long trip to help establish a school in a Cape Town township.

We wrote letters during that time?hers newsy and full of the setbacks and triumphs as they battled bureaucracy and bias to get the school built and ready for the students, but tragically, she didn’t make it back to the UK. Five months into her quest, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She died not long after in a Cape Town hospice. She’d only been forty-three.

‘Um, she was one of my dad’s best friends. She was …’ Words fail me. How to sum up Tessa and who she was to me? ‘She inspired me,’ I say, battling the lump in my throat. I look at Lins, my lips pressed together as I try to steady my breath and she lifts a hand to rub my back. ‘She died. Not long after I wrote this, actually,’ I say, holding up the letter.

‘You’ve never mentioned her before,’ she says gently.

‘I know,’ I say, suddenly flooded with shame. It’s not that I’d forgotten as much as …

‘Too painful?’ she asks, understanding immediately. I nod. ‘So, what else does young Sarah have to say?’ She gently takes the letter from me and starts to read.

‘And maybe, just maybe, think about writing a book. We are brilliantly creative and clever?’

‘Aww, that’s sweet,’ Lins says and I smile, dragging the back of my hand under my nose.