Page 4 of Christmas at the Borrow a Bookshop

What was she doing? Maybe she should head for land? It was only a week until Christmas. Surely she couldn’t spend it alone at sea?

She’d been looking forward to a family dinner round Ben’s mum and dad’s and a few days in front of the telly with the ferry moored up, but that had gone out the window along with her three-and-a-half-year-long relationship and a million promises that he’d move in to her dad’s place with her one day. It was always maybe next year, or maybe once his car was paid off – or maybe never, with Ben.

All that was over now, along with her striving to be settled like a normal couple looking to the future and hoping that one day it would come back to her – that feeling of contented homeliness that she could just about remember from when she was little. She’d been willing to overlook how much hard work Ben was, and how – it was beginning to strike her now – indifferent he could be.

Her plans for a cosy, easy future with no more shocks and no more losses were shot to bits now. She’d lost Ben, his family, Eve, and now Christmas: all gone. Life had snatched every last bit of comfort away from her and she simply could not face her empty house reminding her of that fact, like a great big ‘I told you so’.

The silence there would be hideous, especially at this time of year, and she’d have nothing to do but sit there thinking about how she’d let herself get comfy with Ben and the Thomases even when deep, deep down she’d worried she was on the wrong path with the wrong person. It was just that, when she was passing the veggies around his mum’s dinner table or going to Thomas family weddings and parties, her vague misgivings about Ben were so very easy to ignore. She’d been as close to happy with him as she knew how to be since her dad died.

She knew too that if she hadn’t got in her boat and bolted, if she’d stayed at home over the holidays, everyone would have come knocking at her door.

Eve would have been there, crying and apologetic – or maybe smug and triumphant? Either way, Alex couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. Mrs Thomas woulddefinitelyhave been crying and saying how she didn’t want the break-up to change things between them, even though nothing could possibly remain the same now.

Then there’d have been the whispers going round Port Kernou. It was that kind of place. She’d have given it to four o’clock the next day for the first of the lasagnes to arrive. Well-wishers and nosey parkers, the whiskery harbourside old timers and her school pals, they’d know all about it by now and it would be ‘Poor Alex!’ all over again, just like when her mum died; just like after Dad.

For months of her twenty-six years she’d lived off donated lasagnes and ‘let me know if there’s anything you need’ (always said with the same pinch-browed concern). It was only people being kind, of course, but she couldn’t help feeling bitter now. Everyone is always ‘sosorry’ until they’re spotted later that same day on Facebook grinning in selfies out and about, forgetting all about how ‘heartbroken’ they’d said they were on her doorstep.

Alex had had enough of that kind of attention, and Ben’s cheating risked bringing it all back to her doorstep once more. There was no way she was sticking around to find out if she was at the eye of another pity storm.

She wanted solitude and to be where nobody knew her, and she wanted to be alone on her dad’s boat, where she felt his presence the most. The feeling of going somewhere in theDagalienwas certainly better than going home and facing December’s brutal emptiness head on.

She’d have kept sailing too, if it hadn’t been for that great tower of cumulonimbus just offshore.

When she set off from Port Kernou it had been a calm and misty winter’s day; now the clouds claimed half the sky and reached up so far it hurt her neck to contemplate them; a mass of grey the likes of which she’d never seen before. It turned the water around her a deep, foreboding black like ink in a pot.

Perhaps she’d have made it all the way to Scotland, or Bergen, or Iceland maybe, if it hadn’t been for the one-hundred-year storms intent on playing havoc with mellow old Clove Lore and her own little boat which today, on December the nineteenth, just so happened to be approaching the village’s harbour mouth, where on brighter days the sunfish flap their fins over blue shallows. Alex had no idea her journey was about to end in Devon.

Meanwhile, in spite of the clouds gathering and the early weather warnings that foretold of storms expected to break over land in the coming days, nobody in Clove Lore yet knew how monumental, how life-altering, they would be. Everyone was simply going about their days, waiting in for Amazon deliveries, wrapping gifts, baking and buying, lighting hearth fires and getting ready to settle in for a well-earned holiday rest.

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