Wish You Were Her(40)

When Grace’s shoulders stiffened, Allegra knew something was wrong. She stared at her new friend’s back, her eyes scanning and searching for any sign of an answer. But when Grace turned, her face was ashen.

“What is it?” Allegra breathed.

“Um.” Grace looked so sorry, it made Allegra want to panic. To flee.

“What?”

“It’s…” Grace cast a glance back at the cafe and then stepped toward Allegra. “It’s definitely a bookseller in there. But it’s not Simon.”

Allegra stared at the other girl before pushing ahead to the window and looking for herself. The cafe looked almost Parisian with its beautiful lighting and its calm, composed atmosphere. She spotted the book first, perched on the end of a small table for two in the middle of the main floor. A waitress was blocking her view of the book’s owner. She spotted the rose, crushed gently between the pages of Middlemarch, exactly as promised. She stared at the spine of the large book and tried to control her breathing.

When the waitress moved away, the owner of the book, the person dressed in a black suit with combed hair, was not the person she had anticipated. It was the person who had always been in her periphery, an unwelcome thought, a “what if” every time she had told herself that it had to be Simon.

Her eyes took in the scene with a tight breath and a deep feeling of shock.

Jonah Thorne.





Chapter Fifteen


“Are you just going to leave him there?” Grace asked softly, as Allegra backed away from Pete’s Cafe and set off toward the book festival site, now built up and put together in the middle of town. Multiple great white tents, just waiting for everything to begin.

“Yeah,” Allegra said sullenly. “I am.”

But she stopped. She hesitated. If she left for the festival site, she would be standing him up. He wouldn’t know it was her, but it was still unkind. A little cowardly.

Jonah Thorne, she thought bitterly. It had to have been Jonah Thorne.

“Confirmation bias,” she said, her words barely audible; a sad admission from a girl in a town that did not have room for movie stars. “I just assumed it was Simon…”

A million little coincidences. The shared language, the jovial tone, the same books from the pictures. Allegra had had the narrative so ready to go in her own head, she hadn’t looked properly at other factors.

Other booksellers.

“Go in and see if you can both find the funny side,” Grace suggested.

Allegra stimmed and stumbled, caught between two places and unable to find even a drop of humor in anything.

“I’m so stupid,” was all she could conjure up. “So, so stupid.”

The stupid girl, who had watched as national newspapers printed a countdown clock to her eighteenth birthday, who had wanted to come to a small town and fall in love.

“Stupid,” she repeated.

She began to walk away once more, her heels clacking against the cobblestones. She heard Grace make a noise of disbelief.

“You can’t leave him alone in there, Allegra.”

“I can, Grace,” Allegra said without looking back. “He can sit there all night for all I care.”

“Allegra!”

She stopped at that, shocked by Grace’s sharp and forceful tone. “What?”

Grace was staring her down with steely disapproval. “Jonah Thorne is like his name. Prickly and spiky. But he’s a good guy. He’s my friend, even. You are, too. But you’re not going to leave him there, wondering and worrying about you. Go inside. Explain.”

Allegra’s eyes drifted back to the cafe and she felt a flood of fear and humiliation. “I can’t, Grace. I can’t go in there and face him.”

She had auditioned for some of the most terrifying directors in the business but this was something else completely.

“Yes, you can,” Grace said firmly. “What are you even upset about? Really? You love those emails but you were lackluster about Simon. No, you were! Come on, be honest. The only thing he had going for him in your eyes was the possibility of being this mystery pen-pal.”

“Well, it’s not him,” Allegra said. “It’s not Simon. It’s the guy who said I looked like a snob and who has barely said a nice word to me since.”

Even as she said it she knew it wasn’t the whole truth, but she was feeling tripped up and scared.

“Because you’re not at all intimidating?”

“Grace, stop.”

“No, you stop. You’re not in your big, fancy city now. This is Lake Pristine. And we don’t ghost people here. It’s too small. So be a big girl and get inside.”

A smile flickered on Allegra’s lips as she regarded her friend. “You know, no one speaks to me like this.”

“Well,” Grace shrugged unapologetically. “Maybe they should. Friends tell their friends when they’re being dicks.”

Allegra’s small smile wobbled. “Grace.”

“I know, babe,” Grace said, her voice almost sisterly in its softness. “It’s okay, you’re okay.”

“Why does it have to be him?” she asked the universe as much as she did her new friend. “Him! The guy who yelled at me over movie tie-in covers!”