Page 4 of Love Walked In

CHAPTER THREE

Leo

“Where are you going?” Mum asked, her voice still soft with sleep.

I sighed with my hand on the brass doorknob of our front door.

I thought I’d successfully crept down the stairs from my bedroom in my stocking feet so as not to wake anyone up, but my luck continued to be abysmal.

“I’m off to meet Vinay,” I said, keeping my voice down so I wouldn’t wake my father or the girls.

She glanced at the grandfather clock in the hallway. “At half six?”

“It’s the only time we’re both free.” It had also been the time that Vinay had informed me I couldn’t possibly be busy.

I’d been making excuse after excuse for six months, pleading tiredness, distraction, busyness.

Never saying the real reason, that I didn’t want him to see how every day for the last year had felt like pushing a massive boulder uphill.

Mum nodded eagerly. “I’m glad. I’m glad you’re seeing him. You should ask him and his wife round for Shabbos again. He always makes things livelier.”

I grimaced. My misery didn’t love company. My misery wanted to be curled up in a corner, facing a wall. “Sure, I’ll ask him.” I turned back to the door, hoping and praying she wouldn’t ask what I knew she wanted to know most.

“Have you eaten?”

Of course she couldn’t resist. “Mum,” I groaned.

She put her hands up. “I know I shouldn’t ask, I’m sorry, but you look haggard.”

She thought I hadn’t looked in a mirror lately? Hadn’t seen how knackered I was? “I’m fine, ” I snapped. “We’re meeting at a caff, there’ll be food there.”

“All right. But I’m your mum, and I worry.” She reached into her dressing gown pockets, took out a glossy red-and-green apple and a protein bar. “Just take these with you to eat on the way? Please?”

I couldn’t repress a sigh at the sight of the emergency rations.

I’d spent enough time in hospital as a small child because of food, and I didn’t like being treated like a patient again.

But I reached out and took them anyway, to see my mother’s face relax, her shoulders drop.

“Thanks, Mum.” I bent down and pressed a kiss to her cheek.

“I’ll be back after dinner. Don’t wait for me. ”

And I tried to eat on the walk to the Tube, I did. I managed one big bite of the apple and half of the protein bar before my stomach cramped. I shoved the bar in the outside pocket of my backpack and left the apple where the local squirrels could find it.

Half an hour later, I was sat across a table from my best friend, nursing a milky coffee while he waited for his veggie fry-up. Thankfully he’d only given me raised eyebrows when I hadn’t ordered food.

“What have you been up to?” he asked, leaning forward a little.

I felt my shoulders go up an inch. “The usual. The shop, home, shop again.”

“Sounds thrilling.” He paused, then said, “Sonali and I saw Bex…”

“No,” I said automatically.

Vinay sighed. “She didn’t bloody evaporate when you split up. She’s the same as she ever was, except she…”

I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear how well she was doing without me, I would scream .

“What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” A surge of frustration twisted in my chest as I remembered Mari’s frank assessment of the state of the shop.

“Why is everyone suddenly acting like they know best and I don’t? ”

“Because you look like week-old shit? So forgive me if I think you’re a bit of a walking disaster.”

I had nothing useful to say in response to that, so I put my head on my arms and groaned instead. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to sleep through the night. And I don’t want food.”

He nodded. “I know. You were always like this during exams, a ball of stress. But that lasted a week or two. It’s been months, Leo.

” He hesitated, his mouth moving silently, before he said, “You know you can talk about things with me?” He played with a sugar packet, staring at it instead of making eye contact.

“I know we were a foursome, Sonali and I and you and Bex, but I thought you’d still be my friend after it all ended.

The breakup was what you both wanted, wasn’t it? ”

If you could say Becca begging me to let her go because she had fallen in love with someone else was mutual. I’d been a rubbish husband in every way that counted, and the least I could do was let her be happy.

But if I had to explain to my friend exactly how I’d been to blame for my marriage ending, there wouldn’t be a hole deep or dark enough for me to crawl into.

I stared into my coffee as the server delivered Vinay’s breakfast, and he ate a forkful of beans and hash brown before he said, “I actually wanted to chat to you about something for work.”

I blinked. “What about work?” He’d worked for a commercial real estate firm for years, but he’d always waved away any polite questions about what he did, saying that it was too boring to talk about when there was football and telly and books.

“My bosses are looking for buildings to turn into flats,” he said now. “Particularly for wealthy students coming from abroad. One of the higher-ups went for a walk around Bloomsbury and saw Ross and Co. Was talking about what good bones it had.”

I half choked on my drink. “They want to buy the building? Tell them they can fuck right off.”

Vinay put his hands up and shook his head. “No, listen, listen. I’m just meant to see how you’re all feeling. Now I know about you, so it’s fine. I’ll just tell them no. David and Judith are on the same page, yeah?”

All at once I was grateful my father wasn’t here for this conversation.

But he couldn’t do anything about it on his own with his 45 percent share, and Judith said she was with me.

“As good as,” I lied. “And we have an American consultant who’s just arrived; she’s going to help us turn things around, come back from the losses on the Covent Garden shop. ”

His eyebrows rose. “A consultant? One of those suited types? I’m surprised you can afford one, or that they’d work with just one bookshop, as prestigious as Ross and Co. is.”

I snorted involuntarily. Mari, with her wild chestnut hair, worn jeans, and floral tattoos, was about as far from a “suited” type as we could have gotten.

“Not quite. Mari’s more of a… bookshop whisperer, I suppose.

Wanders around, observes things, makes suggestions.

” More like constructive criticisms, but Vinay didn’t need to know that.

Now Vinay’s smile brightened. “Mari, hmm? Is she pretty?”

Involuntarily I remembered hair that shone with auburn lights, deep hazel eyes, a smile that promised mischief. I shook my head at myself. “She’s temporary. Going back to America in April.”

Of course he saw right through that. “So yes, she’s pretty.”

“She’s… cheerful,” I conceded. “But mouthy. Confident, to the point of arrogance, the way that Americans all seem to be.”

He whistled as I took another sip of my coffee. “Mouthy and arrogant? You sound like you’re about to complain about her being overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

My spit take sprayed brown droplets everywhere. “Fuck, don’t say things like that.”

“Wasn’t that the phrase, though, back in the day?

” His smile fell away, and he leaned forward.

“If keeping the shop’s what you really want, that’s what you should do.

Even if it means dealing with an obnoxious American.

” He tilted his head. “But if you might want to do something else, you’d tell me, right? ”

I blinked at him. “What else would I want to do?”

He rested his chin on his hand. “You’re still drawing, yeah? I think you’d be shit hot at art college.”

I winced a little as he hit the bull’s-eye.

Art college had been sixteen-year-old me’s idle dream, before Alexander had sat me down and explained that I could always make art as a hobby, but that if I really wanted to secure the future of the shop, I’d go to uni and read something useful like accounting instead. Which is exactly what I’d done.

“Even if I wanted to do that, I’m far too old to study again,” I said now. Any dreams I had, of traveling the world, of going to art college, were just that, fantasies, insubstantial and meaningless. My cause now was to preserve what Alexander had left me.

Vinay glared at me. “Mate, you’re thirty-one . You’re not decrepit, unless something happened to send human life expectancy back to the Stone Age.”

I knew I was only thirty-one, but I’d been working in the shop for half my life, already been married and divorced. Every morning when I looked in the mirror, I found new gray strands in my hair. “Fine, but I’m still not selling.”

Vinay checked his watch. “I knew you wouldn’t want to, but I had to ask. And now I can tell my boss I did.” He stood up, reached over and patted my cheek lightly. “Next time you take a day off, text me, yeah? I’d like to think we’re not boring old men who can only talk about our jobs.”

I wanted to object to being called “boring,” but instead I smiled wanly. No wonder Judith had wanted to call in bright and chirpy Mari. Who’d want to buy books from me?