Chapter Seven

‘It's not my fault you don't understand.'

I paused outside the kitchen, the sound of my sister's voice cutting through the morning air like a cheese grater. Whatever she and Mum were arguing about, it was too early for it and I did not want to be dragged in the middle. But my desperate need to caffeinate was stronger than my instinct for self-preservation, so I quietly opened the door, keeping my head down as I crept inside.

‘Are you genuinely trying to tell me I don't understand a book?' my mother said, ignoring me as I skulked across the room. ‘Charlotte, sweetheart, you do realise my entire career is based on my understanding of books?'

My sister, all five foot two of her, sat on a stool at the kitchen table, spine straight, eyes bright and hair an interesting shade of peach. The only way to describe Charlotte was adorable, with her button nose and impossibly long eyelashes, but she didn't look adorable right now. She looked thoroughly pissed off.

‘Sophie, can you back me up?' Mum asked as I dumped a third teaspoonful of sugar into my mug. ‘Your sister seems to think I'm an imbecile with no taste.'

‘Mum's not an imbecile,' I replied robotically. ‘And Reese Witherspoon once told her she had excellent taste.'

‘All right, no need to name-drop,' she said as though she didn't bring it up at every possible opportunity. ‘But I do think thirty-five years of experience ought to count for something. I'm only trying to help you.'

I took my first sip of coffee and waited for it to work its magic.

‘You're not trying to help,' my sister replied. ‘You're trying to tell me which books I should be stocking in Charlotte's Bookshop.'

‘Is that the name or have you started referring to yourself in the third person?' I asked, immediately regretting the decision to open my mouth.

She hit me with a glare that woke me up faster than any cup of coffee ever could.

‘Yes, it's the name, and it's perfect. Clear, concise, easy for social media, it'll look great on merch and it centres everything around me.'

‘Naturally.'

‘Which works for the PR angle,' Charlotte finished, glowering at me from her stool.

‘I don't have a problem with the name,' Mum said in her most cajoling tone. ‘All I'm asking is that you reconsider your purchasing strategy. It's all well and good buying things that are trendy now but what happens six months from now when you're stuck with a stockroom full of flash-in-the-pan nonsense you can't shift?'

‘I send it back to the publisher?' Charlotte's smooth forehead wrinkled momentarily as she gave Mum a look of complete disgust. ‘I know how returns work.'

Mum slid off her own stool and stalked across the kitchen, refilling her own coffee, and I stole her seat, observing their back and forth. Aside from the conservatory-window-dirt-bike incident, me and William had been the best-behaved children on the planet, at least as far as I could remember. I would never have spoken to my mum that way when I was eighteen, I wouldn't even speak to her that way now, and I was equal parts horrified and deeply impressed.

‘It's not as easy as simply returning the books,' Mum explained, stirring one half-spoonful of raw sugar into her coffee. ‘You've got to think about cashflow. Publishers don't refund you immediately, the money doesn't appear back in your bank account overnight, and your stockroom is tiny. You don't have space to hold that many returns.'

I peered into Charlotte's mug and saw her coffee was black and strong. God help us all, the last thing she needed was more energy.

‘But there isn't going to be any extra stock because I'm going to sell everything,' she insisted.

‘And how are you going to do that?' I asked.

She didn't miss a beat. ‘By getting all my friends on BookTok and Bookstagram to promote me, and I'll be holding virtual and IRL events with loads of authors.'

‘I'm not trying to be an arsehole but lots of other bookshops do that,' I said as gently as I could. There were an awful lot of weapons within arm's reach.

‘But they don't have my secret weapon,' she replied, her tone victorious.

‘Which is?'

‘I'm going to reveal the identity of Este Cox.'

Spitting my own coffee across the kitchen table was probably a bit dramatic but I couldn't exactly take it back once I'd done it. Silently, my mother handed me a wad of paper towels to clean up my mess.

‘Well said,' she commented as I dabbed at the mess on the old wooden tabletop. ‘My thoughts exactly.'

‘How can you reveal the identity of Este Cox?' I asked with only mild hysteria in my voice. ‘No one knows who she is. She doesn't have social media, she hasn't done any interviews.'

‘Please, I'm eighteen, me and my friends can find out anything on the internet if we really put our minds to it,' Charlotte scoffed. It was a terrifying and believable thought.

‘But you don't actually know who she is right now?' I pressed, fingernails biting into the palms of my hands. A sullen look came over her pretty face and she scowled.

‘Not yet. But I'm close. If I have to, I'll get Dad to find out.'

I breathed an internal sigh of relief, safe for now.

‘Dad doesn't know, she's at a different imprint, and even if he did he wouldn't say. You know how seriously Dad takes his job.'

‘Then I'll ask Uncle Mal. Or CJ. Someone must know.'

It was hard to say which part of this I hated the most. The sour look on my mother's face, my little sister unknowingly trying to crack my secret identity, or the mere mention of my ex-boyfriend. It was deeply unfair of them both to make me deal with all of this before I'd had at least seven coffees.

‘You know there's one theory that it's Taylor Swift,' Charlotte said. ‘It would make sense, right? With all the Swiftie Easter eggs in Butterflies?'

‘Or maybe the author was listening to her a lot while she was writing,' I replied, mentally locating my phone, still charging upstairs on the bedside table. My Spotify Wrapped would out me in a second.

‘There's one girl I know who's convinced it's another author and that's why she doesn't use her own name. Like it's Maggie O'Farrell or Donna Tartt. My friend, Indhi, thinks it's Colson Whitehead.'

‘Give me strength,' Mum whispered to the heavens. ‘You think Colson Whitehead is writing secret romance novels?'

Charlotte nodded.

‘He probably gets bored writing all that wordy, literary stuff.'

‘Sophie, please leave the room and take your sister with you,' our mother croaked. ‘I don't want my daughters to see me cry.'

‘It doesn't matter who she is,' Charlotte said, burning with single-minded determination. ‘As long as she is my first author event. She's the key to everything. If Este Cox does her first ever event at my bookshop, it's guaranteed to be a success.'

Across the room, Mum glared at the both of us.

‘The only thing that her attendance will guarantee is a gaggle of overly hormonal young women who wouldn't know a good book if it fell on their head. I'm sick of hearing about that book and I'm sick of hearing about its author.'

‘In case you couldn't tell, Mum's not a fan,' my sister drawled. ‘Even though she hasn't even read it.'

Mum glared at her, disgusted. ‘No, I haven't read it. Why would I waste my time when I know exactly what it is? Predictable, badly written, misogynistic nonsense.'

‘Ow,' I breathed. ‘Don't hold back.'

It was exactly what I'd imagined she might say about my book but hearing the words come out of her mouth hurt in a way not even I could have predicted.

‘It's offensive, all this "good girl" nonsense,' she went on. ‘If a woman were to say "good boy" you would assume she was talking to a dog. Don't tell me you've read it?' She looked aghast at the very thought. ‘Sophie, I thought better of you.'

‘I skimmed it?' I offered, high-pitched with embarrassment she happily accepted for the wrong reasons. ‘One of the other teachers had it in the staffroom, it's not as though I bought my own copy.'

Not technically a lie but not technically the truth. I hadn't bought my own copy and I had skimmed it in the staffroom, but not because one of the other teachers had it – all the other teachers had it. Butterflies was the Abbey Hill Primary staff book club pick for July.

‘Mum doesn't know. She hasn't read a single page.' Charlotte held her coffee mug in one hand, her phone in the other, sipping, scrolling and arguing all at the same time. ‘The irony of you accusing a book of misogyny when you haven't so much as scanned a word.'

‘I don't need to read erotica to know it perpetuates harmful ideals against women. Let me guess, she's sad and single, meets a man, it's love at first sight, the sex is orgasmic from the beginning, then the couple break up for some absurd reason, most likely a tedious miscommunication that was entirely unnecessary and wraps up with them getting back together when the man makes a grand romantic gesture.' Mum was almost ranting. I hadn't seen her take against anything in publishing with such vehemence since Brooklyn Beckham's photography book. ‘A denouement that traps the protagonist in a patriarchy-approved, heteronormative relationship, takes away her agency and denies the woman any room for growth.'

Not even Nadine Dorries's books had raised this much ire in her and in all honesty that did not seem entirely fair.

‘You've got it all wrong, Butterflies doesn't have a miscommunication trope,' Charlotte challenged as I searched the kitchen for a hole to climb into and hide. Maybe the oven? It would be a tight fit but I'd be able to get all the essential bits in there.

‘It's a strangers-to-lovers, forced-proximity, he-falls-first, small-town love story,' my sister sniped. ‘And it's romance, not erotica.'

‘Lottie, if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck,' Mum said with a sigh. ‘Call me old-fashioned but I don't think there's anything romantic about extremely graphic sex scenes. I lived a good long while without knowing anything about pegging.'

‘Please don't say that word ever again,' I begged, the oven looking more and more inviting by the second. Could you off yourself in an electric oven? Where was Sylvia Plath when you needed her.

She gave me The Look, a patented signature expression that all mothers kept in their back pocket and only pulled out when it was time for their child to shut up immediately.

‘The very fact you could boil this book, any book, down to a list of tropes tells me everything I need to know about it. It's frivolous at best, genuinely harmful at worst.'

‘You are so out of touch,' my sister huffed. ‘Do you know how successful Butterflies is? How many women will have a happier life because they read a book that showed a healthy relationship with boundaries and communication, and encouraged them to expect the same? That sounds like the opposite of misogyny to me, Mother.'

I should've known The Look didn't work on Charlotte.

‘Is that really what you thought when you read it?' I asked, an unexpected smattering of surprise cutting through my overwhelming shame.

‘That's what everyone I know thought when they read it,' she replied, still defensive as though I needed to be talked around like Mum. ‘It's a book that teaches women to ask for what they want out of life instead of accepting what they're given.'

Mum clucked dismissively.

‘Only if what they want is to know about pegging.'

‘There's no pegging in Butterflies!' I yelled at the top of my voice.

Both of them stared at me, Charlotte with a Cheshire Cat grin and Mum with a recognisable look of disappointment.

‘So you have read it,' Charlotte crowed. ‘Super-swot Sophie, curled up at night with her smut. I love it.'

‘And she's too embarrassed to admit it as she should be,' Mum said with a superior smile. Both of them were claiming this as a win but there were no winners, just one big loser. Me.

‘Maybe you should read it again,' Charlotte suggested when my shoulders sagged. ‘You're so uptight, sissy, it could do you some good.'

‘Thanks,' I said, scraping back my hair and knotting it around itself. I'd been awake for less than half an hour and I was ready to go back to bed. ‘I'll consider it.'

‘Let me know if you need more recommendations,' my sister called as she sailed out the room. ‘Or if you want me to do something with your hair.'

‘She's a monster,' I muttered into my mug. If there was room for me in the oven, Charlotte would certainly fit.

‘But she's right about one thing,' Mum said on a long, frustrated exhale. ‘You do need to do something with your hair, love.'

An untethered strand fell down in front of my face on cue and I tucked it behind my ear. When was the last time I'd had it cut? I couldn't remember. I really had been very busy for a very long time and personal care hadn't exactly been a priority. No point in wasting time getting haircuts when all you ever did was work.

‘Mum, do you really hate Butterflies that much?' I asked, even though I knew she wasn't about to do a complete one-eighty on the most fervently held opinion I'd heard her express since she reviewed the TV adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry. Hopefully Brie Larson missed it and never had to endure the pain I just had.

‘I don't hate it,' she replied easily. ‘I don't respect it.'

‘Oh,' I replied. ‘That's much worse.'

‘There's a reason the author doesn't want anyone to know who she is,' she continued, blissfully ignorant. ‘Pseudonyms might be common but complete anonymity isn't. Whoever she is must be deeply, deeply ashamed. Books like this and the women who read them set back feminism a hundred years.'

‘Good to know, sorry I asked,' I said, sliding off my stool to refill my coffee. It wasn't like I'd ever be able to sleep again anyway, might as well give myself a caffeine headache while I was here.

‘Not as sorry as Charlotte will be if she doesn't drop this nonsense,' Mum replied, nudging her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist when the doorbell rang. ‘Can you get that? It'll be your aunt and uncle, they said they were getting here early and I need to have another stab at this cake.'

‘Stabbing it would be a mercy,' I assured her, Mum pulling the abomination out the fridge as I schlepped down the hallway. They weren't exactly my favourite people and our feelings about the world didn't always align, but at least Aunt Carole and Uncle Bryan wouldn't denounce me as a global disgrace and after what I'd just been through, I was prepared for anything they could dish out.

Or at least I thought I was until I opened the door to see a tall, rugged man on our doorstep, a huge smile on his handsome face.

‘You've got to be joking,' I said as he took in my cat-print pyjamas, fluffy bunny slippers and the much-maligned state of my hair.

There was one other thing I wasn't prepared for and it was standing right in front of me.

Joe bloody Walsh.