‘You look fantastic,’ Jackson told Mia, and it was true. She did. She was only in jeans and a silk paisley top, but she looked much healthier than she did in all the fitness gear she wore these days, which just made her look like a shiny stick insect.
She’d been wary when Jackson had flourished the tickets. She had looked at him as if it was some sort of trap. He’d hoped she couldn’t resist, especially as he had arranged for his mother to come and babysit for Finn. He was pretty sure that, except for her ridiculous training sessions, Mia hadn’t been out for a long time.
‘Are you guys going on a date?’ asked Finn. He was in his pyjamas, all ready for Cilla to put him to bed.
Jackson didn’t know what to reply. Mia put him straight.
‘No. We just happen to be going to the same thing. So we’re going together.’
‘Cool.’
Outside, on the way to the book shop, Jackson turned to her.
‘So this isn’t a date then?’
Mia made a face. ‘No. That would be weird.’
‘Oh.’ Jackson was a bit stung by her vehemence.
‘We’re going to a thing together,’ Mia reiterated. ‘But not together together.’
Funny, thought Jackson, I thought I’d bought tickets for something I thought you’d like and invited you out. It was typical of Mia to completely recalibrate the gesture and throw out the original intention. But then, that was partly what he loved about her. Her relentless goalpost moving.
‘You’d be annoyed if I buggered off to the pub, though, wouldn’t you?’
Mia sighed. ‘Go if you want. When has what annoys me stopped you doing anything?’
‘I don’t want to go to the pub.’
‘Then don’t!’ She looked exasperated.
Jackson kept quiet. They were going round in circles, like they always had done. It was how their relationship worked. They arrived at the book shop. Inside, it was heaving. There were silver moons hanging from the ceiling. And behind a table, a figure with white hair behind a stack of books.
‘Mick Gillespie,’ breathed Mia. ‘Actual Mick Gillespie.’
‘He’s about ninety-seven!’ Honestly, thought Jackson. There was no accounting for women, or pleasing them.
The window of Nightingale Books took June’s breath away. She’d seen it in progress, but now it was all lit up from the inside it looked incredible. She pulled her coat around her, standing in the chill air. The window display was crammed with shots from his most famous films. Fifty years of Mick Gillespie playing heroes and villains and sex symbols and icons. He was an icon himself. And amidst them hung silver moons, the symbol from the film that had made his name. The Silver Moon …
It was almost a shrine.
There were thirty-seven of them in the window. She counted. Thirty-seven Mick Gillespies. And she shivered. He could still do that to her.
Just before she stepped over the threshold, she stood and measured how she felt. It still hurt, even now. That dull tug deep inside her, the one that never left. She imagined it, her feeling: a tangle of scar tissue that would never be allowed to heal.
She was here tonight as a guest, not a member of staff, because she still wasn’t technically a member of staff – she just did what she could to help as and when she was needed. She refused to take payment, so Emilia had insisted tonight was for her enjoyment. Mel and Dave were holding the fort, and Thomasina and Lauren were passing round the food and drinks.
They’d sold seventy tickets – the shop wouldn’t fit many more – and Mick was sitting behind a wide table, surrounded by copies of his book. Bea had made a veritable throne for him to sit on: a golden high-backed chair that was to be the shop’s special signing chair for visiting authors. At the back of the shop, Marlowe was playing Irish tunes on his violin, adding to the atmosphere. It reminded June of the tiny pub in the village they’d filmed in where the locals had often taken over in the evening, entertaining them with their fiddles and whistles and drums.
June took a Silver Moon cocktail: she wasn’t sure what was in it, but it tasted delicious and there was a glittery moon perched on the side of each glass. She needed a drink to take the edge off her jitters, although she wasn’t quite sure how to identify what she was feeling, or even what she was expecting from the evening. Just to be breathing the same air as him felt momentous.