Gio follows the arc of my finger and then looks sideways at me. “You did not.”
I laugh under my breath. “No, I did not. It’s too cloudy. But you went to all this effort, so I’m going to lie and say I saw a shooting star and you’re going to smile and pretend you believe me.”
“I’ll never stand straight again after this,” he says, shifting his shoulders against the ridged metal floor of the open-back pickup truck he moved mountains to hire as a Valentine surprise. He’s driven us upstate for most of the day so we can lie out under big dark skies to look for shooting stars, but the weather is not being kind to us.
“I should have got an inflatable mattress,” he grumbles.
I shake my head. “It had to be a checked blanket, or dinner on top of the Empire State Building.”
“Or some other equally trite shite,” he says, in the same terrible English accent he used on our initial bookshop encounter twelve months ago. I couldn’t believe he’d remembered what I said that day, nor could I believe the effort he’d made to surprise me with this echo of our first meeting, a checked blanket in the bed of a truck under the stars.
I land a punch on his arm and smile into the darkness. I can think back on that day now without the accompanying feelings of dread and shame, because it triggered a chain of events that led me here with the love of my life.
Gio rolls on his side and gazes down at me. “I don’t think we should make this our annual tradition,” he says.
“Definitely a one-off,” I say. “My turn to plan Valentine’s next year.”
“Can it be somewhere inside, with a bed?”
I nod. “Deal.”
I sit up cross-legged and pull my rucksack toward me. “I got you something,” I say, lifting a gift-wrapped parcel out of my bag. I hand it to him, and he reaches under the blanket and produces a gift for me too.
“Swap,” he says.
“Open yours first,” I say.
He pulls the ribbon and opens the box, and his laugh is quiet as he looks at the two silver spoons lying there.
“One big, one little,” I say.
“Cucchiaino,” he says, massaging my knee.
I turn the gift he’s given me over in my hands.
“I know what it is,” I say.
“Open it anyway,” he says.
I unwrap the book and trace my fingers over the intricate cover design. It’s a special edition hardback with golden sprayed edges, not at all reminiscent of the paperback we argued over last Valentine’s Day. I’m glad; perhaps I’ll be able to read this copy without any lingering feelings of shame and regret.
“Coniglio,” he says.
“No clue what it means but say it again,” I say, because he knows full well it does something to my brain when he speaks Italian.
“Rabbit,” he says. “It means rabbit.”
“Smartass.” I spot the hidden rabbit on the cover and then lie down again and prop myself on one elbow. “Think that sky is going to clear?”
“Not a chance,” he says.
“I don’t care,” I say. “It’s all about the truck and the blanket for me anyway.”
“You could have said that before I drove five hours straight to get here,” he says, winding a strand of my hair around his fingers.
“It was romantic. I love you for trying.”
I lean over to kiss him and he rolls me on to my back beneath him.
“You’re right about this truck, though,” I say as my shoulder blades jar against the metal.
“I love this truck right now,” he says, putting his hand inside my sweater. “I might buy it.”
“Not too cold to make out?” I whisper, when he kisses my neck and says something I hope is unspeakably dirty in Italian.
I open my eyes and, honest to God, I see stars.
For Sally and Rose,
my inspiring friends
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU TO MY WONDER agent, Nelle Andrews, and my UK and U.S. editors, Harriet Bourton and Hilary Teeman. I will forever appreciate your extra-mile kindness and unflinching support while I worked on this book.
Special thanks to all at Notarianni Ice Cream in Blackpool for providing the initial spark of inspiration for the story via a segment on The Hairy Bikers—all of my hours spent idly surfing cooking shows are not in vain!
Thanks as always to everyone at Viking and Penguin UK and the rights team for your continued brilliance, I feel fortunate to be in your hands.
Huge thanks to everyone at the mighty team Dell. I’m so thankful for our continued relationship and the thoughtful way you share my stories with the U.S. audience.
Much gratitude to all of my overseas publishers; it’s amazing to think of my books in the hands of readers in distant corners of the world.
Love to the Bob girls for the many, many years of friendship and cheerleading, and to Emily Blackledge in particular for your wise singing advice.
And last but never least, love and thanks to my lovely family and friends. As always, you are my favorites and my best.
An Author’s Inspiration
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MY INSPIRATION COMES FROM LOTS of different places, and this particular story began late one night as I lay on the sofa surfing TV channels. We have a cookery show in the UK called The Hairy Bikers, I don’t know if it’s made it over to the United States? It’s a cookery show, and in this particular episode the two guys, who unsurprisingly are hairy bikers who love to cook, visited Notarianni’s iconic ice cream shop in Blackpool, a coastal town in the north of England.
I listened to the segment about the proud history of this legendary ice cream shop stretching back over more than ninety years, and about the Notarianni family who have run it for all of that time—the story of their secret family recipe really stopped me in my tracks. They spoke about how only two family members are allowed to know their recipe at any given time—they even fly separately just in case!
I found myself rewinding the TV to listen to the piece a second time, and the romance of the family history and their story stuck itself somewhere in my head. That was a couple of years ago now, and it’s been percolating like a good cup of Belotti’s coffee ever since.
I’m super grateful to the Notarianni family for allowing me to use their wonderful family history as the spark for A Winter in New York, which is of course entirely fictional. I hope they love reading about Iris and Gio, and that they get a kick from knowing these characters wouldn’t have made it onto the page without them.
A Q&A with Josie Silver
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Q: Thanks so much for telling us about the Notarianni family and how they inspired A Winter in New York! Do you always have some kind of specific inspiration for your novels, or do you find that inspiration comes in a different way every time you sit down to write a novel?
A: I often see something mentioned on TV or in a magazine that will set off a train of what-if thoughts in my head, as was the case with A Winter in New York. Music inspires me too, sometimes it can even be just the way someone’s voice sounds when they deliver a particular line. I’m a bit of a country music fan—those guys really know how to deliver a line with emotion, don’t they?
I keep a notebook of my story ideas, but I don’t always have it with me if I’m out and about. I’ve been known to come home with random ideas scrawled over the back of store receipts, or failing everything else, on the back of my hand. I have to write things down when I think of them or they’re gone!