Page 95 of The Secret Christmas Bookshop
‘May left it for you, but she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know she’d done it until the day I saw it in your bag. She’s the only other person who knows what I’ve been doing, who had access to that room and the books I’d bound.’
‘But … but it makes no sense!Whywould she do it?’
Harry sat forward, put his elbows on his knees, then immediately sprang back, pain twisting his features. Sophieneeded to look at his shoulder, but she had to make sense of what had happened, first.
‘May is a hopeless romantic,’ Harry said.
Sophie laughed. ‘She’s a tech wizard. She went to Silicon Valley. She spends her days working with bits and bots and … whatever they’re called.’
‘She’s technically brilliant, but she is also as sentimental as they come,’ Harry explained. ‘She’s known me for a long time; we stayed in touch when we were miserable on opposite sides of the world. She knew about the bookbinding and, once we’d both moved back here, she said we had to do something special with the books I’d rescued. She knew I wanted to reopen the bookshop at some point, but she said there were other ways of being creative, of making magic out of what I was doing.
‘I thought she meant when I’d finished a good number of them; when the house was done and I’d spent some time bringing my skills up to scratch. I didn’t realize she’d taken that copy ofJane Eyre, or the others. I didn’t notice they were gone, because that room is full of books and I tend to focus on the one I’m working on, and lately, with the festival, I’ve been too busy to spend any time in there anyway.’
‘So she took them without your permission?’ Sophie couldn’t help sounding sceptical.
‘She did.’
‘And you didn’tnotice?’ She walked over to Harry’s desk and pulled back the curtain. The floodlights lit up the driveway and the still pelting rain. It was dark and miserable, and she turned back to the cosy room.
‘I didn’t notice,’ Harry repeated. ‘If I’d asked you moreaboutyourbook, if I’d seen it earlier, I would have known it was one of mine.’
Sophie shook her head. She’d instantly dismissed Harry as her anonymous giver. She hadn’t properly asked him about it, had never shown him the –his– beautifully bound book. ‘But youdidknow,’ she said. ‘Ten days ago.’
‘I wanted to make sure I’d got it right before I said anything to you.’
‘You knew May was the only person itcouldbe,’ Sophie said. ‘You could have told me. You could have trusted me.’ He’d chosen May over her; had wanted to protect his friend, rather than be honest with Sophie.
‘It wasn’t aboutnot trustingyou,’ Harry said. ‘I didn’t want to come to you with half the facts.’
‘And what facts are you still waiting for? Because youdidn’ttell me. I found out by discovering your Secret Book Lair.’
‘Secret Book Lair,’ he muttered. He looked up at her, and he suddenly seemed exhausted. ‘I wanted to find out from Maywhyshe’d taken one of my books and left it for you. And she has told me, but I suppose I was …’ He swallowed. ‘I suppose it was an uncomfortable thing, telling you the truth.’
Sophie sat back down, the armchairs so close that their knees were touching.
‘Why was it uncomfortable?’
‘Because May had realized I liked you.’
Sophie frowned. ‘We didn’t know each other. We’d seen each other a few times in the village, but hardly ever spoken. I got the book the day after our run-in on the cliff path.’
Harry closed his eyes. ‘I didn’t know exactly when you got it.’
‘Why does that matter?’
He met her gaze. ‘I’d mentioned you to May a few times, asked her about the woman selling notebooks in Fiona’s shop, told her when I’d seen you out running. I’d done that thing of bringing you up whenever I could, because even though I didn’t know you, I’d noticed you. I thought you were attractive, your smile was warm, and you were focused – determined. I had a … crush on you.’ He grimaced. ‘May understood immediately, because we’ve been friends for three decades. I wanted to speak to you, but it turned out I wasn’t very good at it.’
Sophie remembered bumping into him outside Fiona’s shop, when he’d spilt his coffee, and their run-in at the post office. This was another moment when she should have had her arms around him, laughing delightedly at the idea of forty-two-year-old mega grump Harry Anderly having a crush on her, being so rusty with his communication skills that she thought he hated her instead.
‘She was matchmaking us?’
Harry nodded. ‘She thought she could bring us together, somehow. She saw how much I messed up in the post office. When I confronted her, she said she thought she could do a better job.’
‘With an anonymous book? How was that supposed to help?’
‘She told me that you’d figure it out: that having the book would, at the very least, send you in my direction, because of Dad and the bookshop. She thought it would be a kind of treasure hunt, and that when you got talking to me, something was bound to happen between us.’
‘It sounds like a fairy tale.’
