“He can’t get lost, he drives a train.”

“You know what I mean. I just . . . I just wanted. For once. Things to happen. Things to be nice.”

Surinder sat up. “I am genuinely sorry, you know. I know you liked him. I liked him, too.”

“I liked what I thought he was.”

“And he definitely liked you. Honestly. People very rarely risk great big gigantic freight trains for no reason if they don’t really like you.”

“I think he’d have clung to anyone who was nice to him.”

“I don’t. He’s perfectly handsome, you know. He could walk into any bar and come out with women clinging to him like burs. I think he had a romantic soul, too. I think you were two dreamers.”

Nina sighed. “Well, too late now. He’s got a kid and a girlfriend and all the rest of it going on.”

Surinder gave her a huge hug.

“I’m sorry. I really am. It would have been nice if it could have worked.”

“I know,” said Nina. “I know.”

“But look at it this way: someone else fancied you! That makes Griffin AND Marek. You are giving off good Nina vibes.”

“Griffin just fancied me because there was nobody else around. Default. And I think Marek thought I was easy and would drop my knickers for him.”

“No he didn’t. Even though you would have.”

“Yeah, well, shut up.”

Surinder looked at the clock. “Do you really have to leave tonight? Come on, you’re your own boss now.”

“I have to go because it’ll be light traffic and I have to drive a billion miles. Plus I need to get back to work and actually earn some money so I can pay for gas and the occasional bottle of pinot grigio. SO.”

Surinder looked at her.

“No. There’s no point in staying here and throwing a pity party for myself.”

“I’ll buy the snacks!”

Nina shook her head. “No,” she said again. “I don’t want to think about it. I want to go home and play the radio loud and never see another train for the rest of my life.”

She kissed Surinder and gave her a long hug, telling her to get back up north pronto, and Surinder hugged her back and said she would be coming up when it stopped being warm in Birmingham, because then she could be cold in either place, and told Nina to stop being daft if she ever could.

“And just look for something real,” she whispered. “Something real.”

As Nina drove past the railway station in the noisy Saturday night, she looked at the long trains in the sidings and, despite herself, started to cry. Would it never happen to her? Everyone else got to meet someone, but when she finally did, she ended up with someone else’s boyfriend, or just an idea for a person rather than the person himself.

Look for something real, Surinder had said, but how could she when she didn’t even know what that was?

Chapter Twenty-four

Are you ready?” said Lesley, the woman from the local grocer’s. She’d been very sniffy about the bookshop to begin with, and disliked Nina’s recommendations, as well as expressing general doubt about the entire enterprise. Even though it was becoming obvious that her prophecies of doom weren’t being fulfillled, she still liked to come in and poke through the stacks, making disappointed sounds at everything. Nina was determined, somehow, to find something she’d like.

So far historical, romance, comedy, and one of those novelists who specialized in child abduction had failed to hit the spot. True crime had raised a flicker of interest, but nothing had made Lesley rush into going “Yes! This is the book I’ve been looking for that will change my life.” Very little seemed to make her happy.

“Am I ready for what?” said Nina. In the back of the arches at the auction house in Birmingham, where the books had been deposited, there’d been a big roll of brown paper. She had asked the man there about it, and he’d said it was nothing to do with him, so they had taken it on board, too. Now she was becoming an expert at wrapping up the books—for gifts, or just to take home, tied with the cheap twine that was plentiful around town.

Lesley squinted at her. “Sunday, of course!”

“Nope,” said Nina. “Still none the wiser.”

“How long have you lived in the village?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Well, it’s midsummer, you Sassenach. It’s the midsummer night. The festival.”

“Everyone keeps going on about this festival!”

“Are you a heathen, or what? Every year on the longest day there’s a festival, as everybody knows. If we’re not rained out, there’s dancing and a party and a celebration. And if we are rained out, there’s all of those things but it’ll take place in Lennox’s barn.”

“Well, I’d better come then,” said Nina. “I live up there.”

“Aye, I know that,” sniffed Lesley. “Everyone knows that. How’s he doing, the poor man?”

“Poor man?” spluttered Nina. “He’s . . . well, he’s very rude and a bit obnoxious, if you must know.”

“Aye,” said Lesley. “But he went through such an awful time of it with that Kate.”

“What was she like?”

“Hoity-toity,” said the woman. “Posh. Not like you.”

“Well, thanks very much,” said Nina.

“Things around here were never good enough. She complained about the pub and all the old men hanging about outside it all the time.”

Nina thought she might have a point about that.

“She complained about the town, about how there was nothing to do.”

“There’s loads to do!” said Nina. It was true. You could barely walk down the street without being corralled into something or other. There were festivals and choirs and school fairs and shinty matches. It was astonishingly busy for such a small place. Nina had grown to understand the longer she stayed there that because they were so far away from big-city attractions, and because the weather was so often not their friend, they had to rely on each other through the long winter evenings and difficult days. It was an actual community, not just a long row of houses full of people who happened to live next to one another. There was a difference, and she had simply never realized it before.

“Aye, well,” said Lesley. “You probably wouldn’t enjoy the party anyway. I don’t think there’s anything here for me.”