Chapter Five

‘Oh, come on, Soph,' William grumbled, staring straight ahead as he steered us out of the car park only to be stalled by a trainee bus driver having trouble with the roundabout. ‘It's not going to be that bad, it's only a party.'

‘It's not the party,' I replied, gulping down lungfuls of air that did nothing to calm me down. ‘I think I left my bag on the train.'

‘Ohhh, I've done that before, it's so annoying,' he said with as much empathy as a man gagging for a McDonald's could muster. ‘Still, hardly the end of the world. What was in it?'

‘My laptop, a load of post with my real name and address on it, a copy of Butterflies and a printout of the unfinished sequel.'

‘Ah.'

‘Tell me it's not a big deal,' I pleaded. ‘What are the odds of someone going through the bag, figuring out I'm Este Cox and telling anyone who cares? Tiny, right? Minuscule, non-existent.'

He glanced over at me with a terrible grimace hiding behind his beard.

‘The Mail is still offering a ten grand reward if anyone can confirm your identity. But since when could you believe anything you read in the Mail?'

‘I think I'm going to be sick,' I whispered into my hands, the static car suddenly whirling around me.

William patted me awkwardly on the arm and I could see the wheels of his mind turning while my dehydrated brain continued to shrivel and shrink, peeling itself away from the inside of my skull until it was the size of a peanut and ready to escape through my ear.

‘There's not much we can do about it now,' he reasoned. ‘The ticket office is closed and the train's gone. Let's get you home and I'll make some calls and please don't throw up in my car, you know you never really get the smell out.'

‘Why is this happening to me?' I wailed. ‘I'm a good person.'

‘Well.'

‘Not to you, you're my brother,' I said, sobbing freely. ‘But in general, I am. I donate to charity, I picked Mum and Dad up from the airport that time they landed in the middle of the night, and I never once complained about how much Cara at work expected us all to pay towards her hen do even though it really was a lot of money and the spa was shit.'

Another reason I'd told my brother my secret and no one else. William was very good at making it seem like everything was going to be OK, even when it was deeply untrue.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time I left my laptop on a train to Edinburgh?' he asked with encouragement before pulling out onto the roundabout. ‘Someone handed it in at Waverley and they called me before I even realised it was missing. There are good Samaritans still out there.'

‘That or they took a peek at your search history and shit themselves.'

‘Oh look, you're feeling better already.' He grinned, shifted gear and put his foot down. ‘One phone call and it will all be sorted. You're right, the odds of someone finding your bag and putting two and two together are tiny. Most likely they'll just nick your laptop and leave the rest.'

I sniffed sadly, too far gone to admit it was an uplifting thought.

‘Tell you what,' William said. ‘I'll pay for the McDonald's.'

‘OK but I'm having a milkshake,' I warned, brushing my lank hair away from my face. I couldn't show up at Mum and Dad's looking like this and expect them not to ask questions.

‘Anything you want. With the obvious exclusion of an apple pie. I'm not taking you to AE when you burn the inside of your mouth. Again.'

‘It's a deal,' I said as I stared out the window at the darkening sky, doing my ultra very best not to panic.

High on chicken nuggets, sugar and existential dread, we arrived home forty-five minutes later, a shared smile of solidarity on both our faces as we pulled into the driveway.

Until Mum got pregnant with my little sister, Charlotte, nineteen years ago, (a thrilling, midlife surprise, according to Mum who was forty-two when she had her), we'd lived in a small three bed semi in the suburbs outside London, but with a new addition on the way, they decided to sell up down south and invest further north. Dad was more than happy with the long commute and Mum only went into the office once a week for meetings so it didn't make any sense to stay in the city when they could move to Harford and live out their All Creatures Great and Small fantasies with five bedrooms, a gorgeous kitchen and a beautiful sunroom on the back of the house that opened onto a garden so huge, my dad had bought one of those ride-on lawn mowers to take care of it. The garden was so big, I sometimes felt as though I needed a staff, half a dozen sheep and a packed lunch if I wanted to go all the way down to the bottom.

After university, I moved back down south, sharing a flat with William and his husband, Sanjit, until I got my job at Abbey Hill School in Tring, and William and Sanjit stayed in London until the year of banana-bread-and-support-bubbles that we'd all agreed never to discuss again. Despite spending every second of his teens desperate to get out from under their roof, William now lived five minutes around the corner from our parents and altogether too far from me for my liking.

‘Go on,' William instructed, parked up in the driveway and already dialling National Rail. ‘I'm going to find your bag, you save your energy for Mum and Dad.'

‘And if Mum sees you eating McDonald's, she'll tell Sanjit and he'll divorce you.'

‘It's not my fault he's got high cholesterol,' my brother mumbled through a handful of fries. ‘But feel free not to mention this to him ever.'

I kissed him on the cheek, ignoring his theatrical show of revulsion, then climbed out of the car, grabbed my suitcase and rolled it awkwardly down the gravel driveway. It would be all right. Everything would be good. William would talk to the right people, find my bag and get it back. There was nothing to worry about.

‘Hello?' I called loudly, letting myself in the front door. ‘Anyone home?'

‘Sophie, is that you?'

Mum's head popped around the kitchen door and right away I felt a million times better than I had in the car, but that could've had less to do with Mum's soothing presence and more to do with the way William had sped down the country lanes at seventy miles an hour, driving one-handed while housing a Big Mac.

‘I think so,' I replied, flashing back to one particularly hairy head-on challenge from a double-decker bus. ‘Can't quite say for sure.'

‘Come here and give me a hug, I've got my hands full.' She beckoned me into the kitchen with a head toss. ‘I'm icing the cake for your dad's party.'

Well, maybe there was still one thing to worry about.

Pandora Taylor was not known for her abilities in the kitchen. She was known for being one of the fiercest and most well-respected literary critics in the business, cutting the greats down to the bone if she saw fit, ending careers and creating stars overnight. When she wasn't busy intimidating the literary crowd, she took time out to terrify everyone in her children's lives. My teachers never looked at me the same way after she took my primary school to task for ‘failing to challenge young minds' when I came home and performed what I thought was a very impressive rendition of ‘I'm a Little Teapot'.

‘The cake is fine, it's red velvet,' she said, piping bag in hand. ‘I'm having some trouble with the buttercream.'

‘Some trouble' was an understatement. The entire farmhouse kitchen, sage green cabinets, grey slate floor and white quartz countertops, was covered – covered – in brown buttercream icing.

‘I don't want to alarm you,' I said from the safety of the doorway. ‘But it does look a little bit like someone's had an accident in here and not with buttercream icing.'

Mum groaned and pushed her glasses back up her nose with the crook of her elbow, the only part of her not smeared with sugar, butter and brown food colouring. ‘I don't know what happened. I followed all the instructions. It's supposed to be the Sorting Hat.'

I stared at the brown mound in front of her and drew my lips together tightly.

‘It doesn't look like a hat, Mum.'

‘I know what it looks like,' she said with a dissatisfied grunt. Her signature silk scarf slipped off her head, releasing her silvery grey hair and floating down to her icing-sugar-speckled shoes. ‘Charlotte is going to be so disappointed.'

‘Charlotte?' I replied. ‘Isn't it Dad's birthday?'

‘Yes but your sister saw it on one of those "is it cake?" shows and she loved it so much I said I'd have a go.'

Not that my little sister was spoiled in any way. Not that I didn't love the bones of her, she was clever and funny and very resourceful, but she was also impatient, stubborn, had an answer for everything and that answer was usually ‘you're wrong'. I still hadn't recovered from the withering look she gave me at Christmas when I asked how she felt about the latest Marvel movie. People had died from less severe injuries.

‘Obviously I wasn't about to put more money into Rowling's pockets by paying an arm and a leg for an official one.' Mum wiped off her hands and picked up a length of black fabric. ‘Do you think, once I put the ribbon on …?'

‘Mum, let it go, the patient cannot be saved,' I said, tipping my head from side to side to consider every angle but each one was more horrifying than the last. ‘If Charlotte loved it so much, why isn't she making it?'

Throwing up her hands in defeat, my mother shoved the cake across the counter where it wobbled precariously before slumping sadly to one side. It needed to be sorted into the bin.

‘She's out. I've hardly seen her all summer, she's so busy.'

‘New love interest?'

‘No.'

‘Did she start another dog-walking business and lose all the dogs again?'

‘That only happened twice,' she replied with an unconcerned tut that reminded me why we'd never been allowed pets as kids. ‘She's working. You know she's very big on TikTok.'

‘I did not know she's very big on TikTok.'

My father and my sister on the clock app. This was a concerning development. I pulled out my phone and searched for her name but nothing came up.

‘Don't bother looking for her, she's got the whole family blocked,' Mum said as though this was perfectly acceptable even though I wasn't allowed to buy a diary with a lock on it until I was fifteen. ‘One of the girls in the office follows her and sends me any videos she thinks I ought to see.'

‘I dread to ask but what exactly is my eighteen-year-old sister doing on TikTok?' I asked, immediately and reasonably anticipating the worst. Dancing? Make-up tutorials? ASMR? Please, I prayed, please let it be ASMR.

‘She reviews books.' An echo of undeniable pride swelled through the kitchen. ‘I can't say I completely understand all the videos but she's got thousands of followers. One of them had a virus.'

‘You mean it went viral,' I replied and she shrugged in response. Her refusal to get on board with social media was infamous. How she was coping with Dad's sudden conversion I did not know but at least that made more sense now.

‘She's not shy with her opinions,' she said, positively glowing. ‘One of the editors at Hawkshead called her scathing.'

Perfect. Another sibling merrily following the rest of the family down the approved path of literary greatness while I taught primary school by day and wrote secret smut by night.

‘She's quite astounding, your sister,' Mum added over the sound of running water as she rinsed her hands clean of what I had to keep reminding myself was buttercream. ‘At the beginning of the summer she came to us with a proposal and honestly, Sophie, she put together a very accomplished and ambitious business plan. Your father and I were both incredibly impressed.'

‘A business plan for what?' I asked, almost certain I didn't want to know the answer.

She turned to look at me, her cheeks flushed and her eyes alive. She couldn't have looked more thrilled if she'd just found out Hanya Yanagihara had written a prequel to A Little Life.

‘A bookshop.'

‘This is Charlotte, the eighteen-year-old who just finished school?' I spoke very clearly to make sure I hadn't misheard or inadvertently slipped into an alternate dimension. ‘Mum, please tell me you haven't bought her a bookshop.'

‘Don't be silly,' she replied with a laugh. ‘We haven't bought a bookshop.'

I shook my head at myself. Of course they hadn't, what was I thinking?

‘We've rented one.'

I suddenly longed to be back in William's car, having a breakdown over my lost laptop and facing certain double decker bus death.

‘Do you remember Gwendoline?' Mum asked, chatting away as though she hadn't just said the most insane thing I'd ever heard. ‘She ran the greengrocer's across from the post office? She wanted to retire so we've taken a one-year lease on her place. Lottie has done all the research, there's a young girl out in California who opened her own shop and she's doing tremendous business. I talked to some people at the paper and your father had a word with publicity at MullinsParker, they're all keen as mustard to work with her once she gets going. She's even designed all her own merch. That's tote bags, T-shirts, that sort of thing.'

‘Yes, I know what merch is,' I replied, steadying myself on the one remaining inch of counterspace that wasn't smothered in shit-coloured frosting. ‘But how is Charlotte going to run a shop? Has she ever even had a real job?'

Mum looked far less concerned about this than I felt and, for a brief second, I wondered if she was joking. Or drunk. I hoped she was drunk.

‘The business plan was very comprehensive,' she answered as she dried her hands. ‘One of the girls who worked for Gwendoline is going to stay on to work the till but your sister is selecting the books, running the social media, the marketing, the online store, all of that. She's been taking business classes online.'

‘And she's going to run the shop remotely from Durham, is she?'

For a split second, my mother's shoulders seized up then she opened the fridge and pulled out an open bottle of white wine, refilling a glass hiding behind the KitchenAid mixer.

Ah-ha.

‘She's taking a year out.'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. There was just no way. My parents were obsessed with education. Obsessed. The pair of them had such a fearsome reputation, my GCSE English teacher actually hid on parent-teacher night and when William got an A in English language and not an A*, they insisted on reviewing the school's curriculum to ‘ensure the same travesty didn't impede the future of any other children'. Now Charlotte was taking a year out to run a bookshop across from the post office. I couldn't make it make sense.

‘All right, I'm on to you. First you're baking cakes and now you're letting Charlotte defer uni for a year?' I said. ‘Who are you and what have you done with my mother?'

After adding more wine to the glass she set the bottle down with a shaky hand.

‘It's only one year and I'm completely on board.'

I wasn't sure who she was trying to convince, me or herself.

‘The only thing is …' She leaned against the sink, nursing her wine. ‘I can't say I'm entirely supportive of the books she's decided to sell.'

‘Which are?'

‘She's focusing on YA.'

‘That makes sense,' I replied. ‘Since she is a YA.'

‘YA and …' My mother took a large mouthful of wine to give her the strength to complete her sentence. ‘Romance novels.'

A sob escaped the back of her throat as I considered grabbing the glass right out of her hand. My need was definitely greater than hers.

‘All because she's obsessed with this one godawful book,' she went on, shaking her head. ‘The bloody thing is never out of her hands.'

‘What book?' I asked, really not wanting to know the answer.

Mum sharpened her eyes and summoned all her venom for the book that had corrupted her precious youngest daughter.

‘Butterflies.'