Page 129 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Nory massaged her temples. “What’s he said?”
“Nothing. That’s just it. I can’t get anything out of him. Whatever went down with you two has messed him up proper. You always do this; you swoop in like a whirlwind and then you leave.”
“Why am I always the bad guy? You only ever think the worst of me. Maybe it was Isaac’s fault.”
“Was it?”
Nory sighed. “No,” she said quietly. “None of this was Isaac’s doing. I messed everything up.”
“Like I said.” Thomas sounded triumphant.
“I’m hurting too, you know.” Her voice broke.
“You’ll come up smelling of roses. You always do.”
“What did I do to you, Thom?” Her voice was brittle, rusty even to her own ears. “Why do you hate me?”
There was a pause.
“I don’t hate you!” He sounded hurt.
He was offended?She raised her eyes to where a damp patchbloomed shades of sepia and brown across the ceiling, something else she needed to find a budget for.
“You’ve been carrying a me-shaped chip on your shoulder for the last twenty years!” The exasperation in her voice rang out in the small room. “You hated me when I went to Braddon-Hartmead, because you thought I was getting an advantage that you were denied, and then when I didn’t use my advantage to make millions, you hated me for that too. I can’t win with you.”
“That’s not— I never hated you for it, Nory, I just... Everything’s so easy for you. I’ve had to struggle for everything I’ve achieved.”
“And you don’t think I have? I had a private education, but it didn’t magic me into an easier life.”
“Yeah, well.”
This was Thomas’s stock phrase for when he didn’t have an answer.
“I know I was lucky in lots of ways. But it’s not fair for you to keep punishing me for it.”
Nory remained silent then, waiting for the final barb.
But instead he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to... I guess I’m just used to us being this way with each other. It’s how we are. It doesn’t mean...”
“I don’t want this to be the way we communicate anymore, Thom. I’m tired of it. I’ll see you at Christmas, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Thom agreed. “See you at Christmas.”
Nory was thankful that business continued to be unrelenting in the shop. It meant she didn’t have time to think about Thom or Isaac, or her broken heart. For now, it was enough that she could throw herself into her work, seeking out perfect matchesfor her customers, sending them on their way with the Christmas presents they’d come in for but also a gift for themselves: a book they hadn’t known they’d needed or missed until Nory had placed it in their hands and they’d felt the rightness of it. Some books wrote themselves into people’s hearts as children and lived there, all but forgotten, until a bookseller recognized the spark and reunited them. Other books held their words close, waiting on the shelf to ignite a passion in someone who hadn’t even known they were wanting, until a bookseller introduced them. Booksellers were matchmakers of sorts. Too bad Nory wasn’t as good at reconciling herself with the people she loved as she was at rehoming books.
Forty
It was two days before Christmas, and after a morning so busy (Nory hadn’t even had time to lament the selling of a vintage edition of Shirley Hughes’sAlfie Stories), Serendipitous Seconds was quiet. Most of the offices in the surrounding area had closed at lunchtime and wouldn’t be open again until January 4. The last of the online sales had been express delivered yesterday morning, and now it was time to take stock and batten down the hatches before they closed for the holidays.
“Should we take the decorations down now? So we don’t have to come back to it in January?” Andrew asked.
“No,” said Nory, looking lovingly around her shop. She loved her shop all year round, but never so well as when the days were dark and every shelf glittered with frosted leaves, red glitter berries, and fairy lights. “Let’s leave them up. Let’s keep the magic going for a little longer.”
Nory remembered when she was a child and her dad would bring her and Thomas up to London on one of the dead days between Christmas and New Year’s to look at the shop window displays. It had felt magical, like the Christmas picture books she read. For those hours in the quiet city with the sparklingwindows, it had felt like she was living inside one of her books. Now, she liked to think of someone else’s child out for a cold afternoon walk, stumbling across her little shop with the jolly Father Christmas in the window and the twinkling lights within.
“Did the nanas decide who would be cooking the turkey yet?” she asked Andrew.
“Seb is going to do it. It all got rather out of control, and we very nearly had another trifle incident on our hands.”
