Page 64 of Slow Burn Summer

#itsallaboutthebook #LoveStoriesMatter

Kate read and reread the publisher’s statement, unsure how it helped. “I’d hoped they might mention me directly,” she said, looking from her phone screen to Charlie. They’d made fresh coffee and settled in the living room to analyze what had been said.

Charlie nodded slowly, thinking. “I guess we wait now and gauge reader reaction. It may be enough to redirect the focus of the attention away from you.”

“Onto what? Digging until the actual author is unmasked? I know they’ve asked people to respect his privacy, but I worry this is going to have the opposite effect and feed the hunger to identify him.”

“Which could take the heat off you,” Charlie reasoned.

“But I don’t want that to come at his cost,” she said, exasperated, thinking of H thrashing around Liv’s shop with his dino head in his hands.

“There isn’t an easy fix to all of this, it’s going to have to burn itself out,” Charlie said. “The author is well protected. He won’t be identified unless he decides to out himself, which is unlikely.”

“Do you think itwillburn itself out?” she said.

He considered his answer. “It isn’t going to harm the book, it’s outselling all expectations. And it won’t harm the author either, he stands to do very well from this in the background. The only person it could potentially have lasting repercussions for is you, and it’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“There’s only so much you can do,” she said. “This whole thing is starting to feel like a monster that keeps growing a new head.”

He studied her for a few quiet moments.

“Come on,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Where?”

“The whole point of coming here was to get away from all of this for a while,” he said. “Let’s go take a look down by the river.”

She glanced at the constant notifications scrolling on her mobile, then out of the window at the sun-drenched riverside scene, and made a snap decision. Turning her phone off, she placed it on the coffee table and accepted his outstretched hand to heave her up out of the low, insanely comfortable sofa.

It was beginning to feel as if Charlie was the only barrier between herself and complete disaster, but if he was prepared to live in the now just for this weekend, then she was willing to do the same.

—

“This summer has been offthe charts, hasn’t it?” she said, glad of the shade of a broad umbrella as they snagged a table outside a riverside bar an hour or so later. They’d meandered inside designer gift shops and artist galleries, browsing at a pace that belied their current lives back home. Kate had picked up a wonky coffee cup for Liv, and Charlie had bought a wide shallow porcelain bowl, midnight blue marbled with bright lava orange, from a local designer’s workshop. “There’s a vase in the same pattern in the apartment,” he’d shrugged by way of explanation.

“It’s not hard to see why stressed-out Londoners flock here,” he said.

“It gives me that same feeling as Cornwall,” she said. “Holiday escape.”

“I’d never actually been down there until the signing event,” he said.

“Not even as a child?”

He laughed softly. “Unsurprisingly, my father didn’t go in for holidays,” he said. “He had a brother in Scotland and he’d send me up there on the train for a few weeks in the summer. I guess that counted as a holiday for me in his head.”

“How old were you?”

He shrugged. “Nine? Ten?”

She couldn’t imagine letting Alice out of her sight at that age. “I don’t like to think of you catching the train alone so young,” she said.

“Different times, I guess. He always put me in first class and convinced one of the stewardesses to keep an eye on me.” Charlie took a long drink. “He was an unconventional father, but a good one.”

Kate fell silent. She was seventeen when she’d first met Jojo, and had no recollection of ever knowing he had a son just a couple of years older than she was.

“It would have been his birthday today,” Charlie said, not meeting her gaze. “The first one since he died.”

She swallowed, taken aback. “Really? Charlie, you should have said. I feel awful—did you have plans this weekend?”

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