Page 7 of The Honeymoon Affair

Which wasn’t as easy as I’d expected, given how brilliant I thought his book was. However, the trend at the time was for complicated financial thrillers, and the charts were filled with novels with black-and-red covers and silhouettes of tall office blocks at night. Charles’s was pure romance. If he’d been a female author, I would’ve brought it to a large publisher, suggested a floral cover with a breathlessly frothy blurb on the back, and marketed it as a chick-lit. But for Charles, I wanted to persuade publishers that it was a work of literature that would transcend genres.

Yet despite my relentless plugging, no one was biting. Eventually Graham Weston, the MD of Xerxes, a small independent publishing house, agreed to read it after I’d dropped him home, rather the worse for wear, from a launch party for one of Saxby-Brown’s big-name authors. An author Graham really admired and wanted to poach from his current publisher. Which he ultimately did.

Graham read the manuscript and loved it. The rest, to overuse a cliché, is history.

Winter’s Heartbreak was published in time for the following Christmas, and it took off like Santa’s reindeer on steroids. Readers loved it. Book clubs loved it. And reviewers were very, very generous with their praise. Charles ended up on every possible book programme, talking about it and sharing his insights into men with broken hearts as he wooed his audiences with his husky, mellifluous voice, his cool blue eyes and that amazing lion’s mane of hair.

He knocked the financial thrillers off the charts, we sold the movie rights, he won the Booker, and Graham Weston bought me lunch at the Wolseley.

A couple of years later, no longer an accounts manager who wrote books, but a full-time author who was published in over forty languages, Charles was nominated for the Booker again, this time for My Frozen Heart, another heartbreakingly romantic novel. It didn’t win any prizes, but it topped the bestseller lists for weeks and is currently in production with Netflix.

His life had changed by the time the movie of Winter’s Heartbreak premiered, and so had mine. I’d become an agent that authors wanted to be represented by. My inbox was swamped with manuscripts and my confidence soared along with my career. I did my absolute best for every author I took on. None reached the dizzy heights of Charles Miller, but there were a lot of successes all the same. I celebrate every single publication day and every spot on the bestseller lists with all of them.

But Charles was, and always would be, my number one.

Not only because he was a brilliant writer.

Because he was also the man I was going to marry.

Chapter 3

Iseult

Women want love to be a novel. Men a short story.

Daphne du Maurier

On the morning of what should have been my wedding day, I wake up at six o’clock. I don’t want to be awake this early. I don’t want to be awake at all. The only time I don’t feel that my heart has been ripped out and shredded is when I’m sleeping. But I’m awake now and I know I’m not going to fall asleep again, so I slide out of bed and pull on the light robe that’s lying over the back of a chair.

Celeste is out for the count, her head deep in the pillow, muffling the tiniest gurgle of a snore that emits each time she exhales. I slip on my flip-flops and gently ease the door of the room open.

There’s hardly any difference between the daytime and night-time temperatures on the island. The air is warm and balmy, and heavy with the scent of the flame-coloured Barbados lilies and pure white butterfly jasmine that fill the gardens. I can also sense the tang of the sea, and hear the gentle thud of the waves upon the eponymous white sand.

As I arrive at the wedding gazebo, which is on a promontory and surrounded on three sides by the azure blue of the Caribbean, the sun rises and saturates the sky with golden light. A lone pelican dives, arrow straight, into the shimmering water, emerging a moment later and flying off towards the other side of the bay, his breakfast secure in his enormous beak.

The scent of the flowers and the beat of the waves is calming. Getting married here would have been romantic beyond words. Steve and I made the perfect choice of location. It’s a pity we didn’t make the perfect choice with each other.

I take my phone out of the pocket of the robe. I’d intended to leave it in the room, not wanting the temptation of it with me, but I reasoned that it might ring and wake Celeste, who’d worry about me because I never leave my phone behind. I convinced myself that was why I hadn’t simply switched it to mute and left it under my pillow.

I unlock it and take a few photos, as if to further convince myself that the other reason I brought it was to photograph the sunrise. Then I check Steve’s social media.

He hasn’t posted anything since a photo at Florence airport last night (#HomewardBound #HeartInFlorence #BestTimeOfMyLife). Nothing about today. No pix of a deserted church or my returned engagement ring. No #WeddingDay #BigMistake #ShouldBeInParadise. Not that I expected anything from him to show that he knows what day today is. And not that he’d post anything even if he remembered.

I take a few more photos of the sunrise and post them to my own social media accounts. Steve still follows me, although I don’t know if he looks at my posts. I’m not sure if he simply hasn’t thought to block me from his, or if he wants me to know that he’s having a great time without me.

I know I’m being silly. I know it’s over and I shouldn’t keep thinking about him. But I can’t help it. You don’t simply switch loving somebody off. Even if they’ve broken your heart. You can be furious and devastated at the same time. And you can want never to see them again and follow their socials at the same time too. But the fact that he’s constantly in my mind makes me ask myself if I’m still in love with him despite everything. And if I’d take him back if he asked me.

I can understand why he got cold feet. It had all spiralled out of control a bit in the last few weeks before our split. Our conversations were entirely about weddings and houses – I was worried about where we’d live in the future, he insisted we’d find somewhere; I was juggling the constant emails from the White Sands, he was telling me he couldn’t care less what kind of flowers were on the table; I wondered if we could livestream the wedding . . . actually he was quite into that and took it on himself to liaise with the IT guy at the hotel. Anyhow, there’s no denying that planning the wedding meant romance had flown out the window and we were already bickering like an old married couple.

Maybe we could have fixed it.

Maybe it was never worth fixing.

I wish I knew.

I wonder will he look at my photos (#ParadiseIsland #FeelingBlessed – I know, I know, it’s complete bollocks, I’m feeling stressed more than anything!) and think he made a terrible mistake. I hope so.

I thought I’d be alone at this hour of the morning, but I’m not. I know everyone gets up early here, because Celeste and I have been out of bed by 7.30 every single day, and we’ve never been first down for breakfast. I didn’t realise so many people were already out and about at dawn.

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