A Christmas Wedding(44)

‘This is April,’ he says, sticking his tongue out at his daughter before nodding at me. ‘That’s Bridget,’ he says more civilly.

‘Hello, April!’ I reply, cringing because my voice sounds too loud and overeager.

April looks over her shoulder at me, her expression vacant. Then her mouth breaks into a toothy grin and she says something unintelligible. Charlie pushes on the back of her bouncer again and she happily returns her attention to him.

I’m tense as I sit down on the second sofa, hoping she’ll ignore me from here on in.

‘Where are you staying?’ Charlie asks, back to making courteous small talk. He picks up the remote control and turns the volume down on the TV, not quite muting the ludicrously enthusiastic and eccentrically dressed man doing something bizarre with an egg carton.

‘A B&B in Padstow. It’s cheap and cheerful. My bus leaves early in the morning.’

‘You’re only here for one day?’ He seems surprised.

‘Yes, but… Obviously I can come back if…’ He looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to complete my sentence. ‘If I get the job,’ I finish awkwardly.

‘Oh.’ He averts his gaze and takes a small sip of his tea. ‘Fay said you’re a travel writer.’

‘That’s right.’ I smile with relief. This territory I can talk about for hours. ‘My mum works on a cruise liner so I grew up seeing the world in my school holidays.’

‘Bet that was an interesting childhood.’

‘It was. I lived with my dad during the term, but we visited Mum pretty regularly.’ He nods, listening. He doesn’t ask any more questions, so I carry on pitching myself to him. ‘I used to write about the places that I saw, then I built my own website and eventually started to pester magazine and newspaper editors for work. I can pretty much get work writing about anywhere, these days.’

‘That would’ve been Nicki’s dream job,’ Charlie says with a fond smile. Nicki, not Nicole, I note. ‘Before she got a book deal,’ he adds.

And before her life was cruelly stolen from her.

He breaks the long, awkward silence. ‘So you liked her novel?’

‘I loved it!’

He smiles properly now, a smile full of pride, but its light reaches his eyes only briefly.

How bad do I feel? He shouldn’t have had to prompt me – I should’ve been raving about his lovely wife’s book from the moment I got here.

‘I really loved it.’ I’m trying to make up for my gaffe, and for the next few minutes it’s all I can talk about.

In Nicole’s novel, the heroine, Kit, is a travel writer who falls in love with two men at the same time: Morris, a laidback surfer-turned-entrepreneur from right here in Cornwall, and Timo, a sexy Finnish rock climber who is based in Thailand. At the end of the first book, Kit goes to Thailand to break up with Timo because Morris – her first love – has proposed to her. But, before she can come clean, Timo asks her to marry him, too. And she says yes.

I know! WTF, right?

‘I detest cheating with a passion, so I shouldn’t have liked this book on principle,’ I tell Charlie, arguably too honestly. ‘But somehow Nicole made it… I don’t know. It’s so believable. She wrote in such a heart-wrenching way that I couldn’t help but be swept up in the story. I felt like I was inside Kit’s mind, feeling every emotion she was feeling and somehow understanding the crazy decisions she was making. It was…’ I shake my head, finally, yes, finally lost for words.

I think I’ve said all the right things from the look on his face.

‘Do you know what was going to happen in the sequel?’ I ask. ‘Do you know who Kit was going to end up with?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure even Nicki knew.’

I feel a surge of disappointment. Charlie leans back to put his empty mug down on the windowsill behind him. ‘But, if she did, the answer will be in her notes. She made lots of them. Let me show you her office.’

April seems to be content sitting in her bouncer for the moment, so Charlie turns the sound back up on the television and leads me upstairs. He walks straight ahead, pushing open the door to a small room that looks out over the messy back garden. Any view of the estuary would be from the other side of the house. A large desk fills the area under the window, and there are bookshelves and filing cabinets lining the walls. A slick Apple computer takes pride of place in the centre of the desk. The room is tidy, but I can see from here that the computer screen is dusty from underuse.

Charlie pulls open the top left desk drawer to reveal a series of notebooks crammed inside.

‘Nicki was always writing in these,’ he says.

He closes that drawer and opens the next to expose more notebooks.

‘I haven’t gone through them.’ From the tightening of his voice, I take it he hasn’t wanted to. ‘But all of her research is in here.’ He opens another drawer. ‘She also used to keep diaries when she was younger. Her dad moved to Thailand for work and she’d visit when she could. A lot of what she wrote about back then made it into Secret. I think you’ll find clues as to where she planned to go with the sequel.’

I look up at the crowded bookshelves and notice several Post-it notes sticking out of the tops of some of the books. What pages did she mark? Were they significant?