‘Oui,it cost very little because of the condition it’s in. She’s asked a friend to deliver it to us.’
‘What a find. There’s cash in my top drawer, just use whatever you need.’
‘I know where your cash is, and your diary.’
I tut. ‘And I presume you’ve read it?’
‘Oui, I tried but it’s so boring! You and all your talk of feelings. It really is a bit much, all that lamenting.’ At least my secrets are safe. ‘So I’m making an index for the library. Although, I didn’t factor in how time consuming it would be. Won’t it be fun for guests to rifle through the catalogue drawers and search for books the old-fashioned way?’
‘It’s a book nerd’s dream. I can help later.’
‘Where are you off to?’
I wave my hand in the vague direction of outside.
Manon waits me out with a look that implies she can wait all day.
‘To the Marché de Noël Notre Dame.’
Manon claps her hands in delight. ‘Ooh, the Christmas fair! This can wait. Let me get my gloves and coat.’
‘Ah,non, non,we can go together another time.’
‘But we always… oh. You’re going out with Noah!’
I try and tamp down her excitement about me going out with a man who isn’t my ex-husband by acting completely disinterested as I rummage in my handbag for my beanie. ‘It’s not like that. It’s to discuss our findings about the author from the secret library.’
She holds up her hands in surrender. ‘OK, OK, don’t let me stop you. Go find Noah and talk about dead people.’
I roll my eyes, wave goodbye.
I tap on the window of The Lost Generation Wine Bar and Noah jogs over to open the door. ‘Come in, come in. I’ll just be a minute. I’m setting a few things up for tonight. Drink?’
‘Sure.’
He pours me a robust red wine as I take a seat at the bar before excusing himself to change into warmer clothes. I take my glass of wine and walk around the bar while it’s closed to customers, enjoying the freedom of having the place to myself to take it all in. After all, I don’t exactly remember much from my last visit, except maybe the drunken tango, and that I avoided the Christmas movie quiz Noah held the following evening because I was suffering from a bout of pure embarrassment and a hangover from hell.
There are booths along one side and bookshelves at the back that I didn’t see the night of the infamous death metal band. Like any good bookworm, the first thing I check is what’s on the shelves.
There’s an entire collection of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Don Passos. And Oscar Wilde, whoseA Picture of Dorian Grayis one of my favourite novels. Gertrude Stein, Colette, Henry Miller, Proust; all the usual suspects. I run my finger along them before crouching down by a lower shelf that has a range of more colourful spines. I gasp when I see a collection of my own novels that stand out in their absolute pinkness among the more subdued covers. I take one from the shelf. Did he just purchase these? I thumb throughTheBillionaire’s Runaway Wifeto find it’s well loved; some pages are dog eared, others are bent as if it travelled in someone’s knapsack.
‘Sorry, I had to…’
I stand with the novel in one hand and glass of wine in the other. ‘What’s this?’
Colour creeps up his cheeks. ‘It’s your eleventh book, if I remember rightly, and it became your first global bestseller, but I could be wrong.’
‘Ah – how?’
‘I’m a fan, always have been.’
‘But you said…’
‘When you were on the phone to your agent, the day Manon had that horrific incident with the very heavy bookshelf’ – now it’s my turn to blush – ‘you said you were a romance writer, but I didn’t put two and two together and realise you werethatromance writer.’
‘Your face fell though, I saw it as soon as I said I write romantic comedies.’
‘That was nothing to do with your writing.’
