Page 6 of Slow Burn Summer

“I’ve written a book,” Katesaid, flopping onto the other end of the sofa to her sister, careful not to lose any Pinot from her glass. She’d been back from London for a couple of hours, and all she’d done from the moment she’d sat on the train was read the mystery manuscript.

Liv looked at her sharply. “Have you? When? On the train home?”

Kate shrugged. She’d made the decision within the first few pages that she was going to say oh-my-God-this-is-heartachingly-beautiful yes, so technically, perhaps, she had become an author on the train. “Kind of.”

“Is it a gory thriller about an adulterous twat called Richard who catches his tie in the shredder while doing his secretary and gets yanked face-first into the blades? Or maybe he gets dragged into a dark alley by his ex-wife’s violent kick-ass sister? I’d pay good money to read that.”

Liv had taken Richard’s adultery almost as hard as Kate herself—she was the elder sister by two years, and she took her position seriously. They’d lost their mother as small children and been raised by the kind of father whose “eccentric scientist” approach bordered on unintentional neglect. He’d rarelyremembered to turn up at parents’ evenings when she’d been small, and he’d chosen to appear at an overseas convention rather than attend her wedding to Richard. It hadn’t hurt her as much as people might have imagined; he’d never exceeded her expectations as a father.

It had been Liv’s brain wave to move Kate into the flat above her fancy-dress shop in the aftermath of the separation, making decisions because her sister couldn’t face it. It was a far cry from the five-bedroom detached Kate and Richard had shared—or rather she’dthoughtthey’d shared it, until she’d walked in on him in bed with his secretary and realized he’d stitched her into a pre-nup so watertight that she’d been lucky to leave with her own clothes.

Damn those love goggles. She’d driven away from that house with a few cardboard boxes and a suitcase, her dignity in shreds as curtains around the gated community twitched with barely concealed excitement. She’d headed blindly to Liv and Nish’s overcrowded three-story terrace, where the welcome was all-encompassing and she’d had to talk her mild-mannered brother-in-law out of paying Richard a visit to relieve him of his teeth. Turkish veneers, not that it was relevant.

“I’ve been working out,” Nish had said gamely. “And I cycle to the office three times a week now, better for the planet.”

Kate tucked her legs beneath her, already in pj’s even though it was barely six o’clock.

“It’s a love story,” she said. “An incredibly beautiful one.”

Liv put her head on one side, studying her sister. “You’ve lost me.”

Kate reached behind the sofa cushion for the plain-covered book she’d stashed there when she’d answered the door to Liv ten minutes ago.

“This one,” she said. “It’s an orphan at the moment, and I’ve been asked to be its mother.”

“You didn’t actually write it, though?” Liv said, trying to understand. “You haven’t blown the dust off those old romances you used to write and gotten secretly famous have you?”

Kate swirled the wine in her glass, watching the concentric circles. It had been a long time since she’d written anything, fragile dreams squashed by the reality of life as Richard’s wife, life organizer, and hostess. She’d quietly channeled her soul-deep need for creative expression into writing rather than performing for a while, but even that had fallen by the wayside after Alice was born.

“God, I wish I’d written it because it’s stunning, but no, these aren’t my words.”

Kate had already made two decisions about the book. One, she was going to take the job. She could have called Charlie to let him know, but he’d wound her up by badgering her for an answer before she’d even caught the train home. And two, her immediate family needed to be on board, because she wasn’t prepared to lie to them. Liv refilled their glasses as she listened to the details of Charlie’s unusual job offer, flicking through the pages of the manuscript balanced on her knees.

“So you basically moonlight as the author online and on the cover, kind of like the book’s official representative?”

“That’s about right,” Kate said. “But we’d need to keep the fact I haven’t actually written it between ourselves. Nish can know, obviously, but I was wondering about Stevie and Arun…would it be easier to just not tell them I haven’t actually written it, so they don’t need to keep any secrets?”

“My kids will have very limited interest in the whole thing anyway, unless you go viral on social media or something,” Liv said. “If it doesn’t happen on their phones, it doesn’t happen.”

“I’m not planning on becoming a meme any time soon,” Kate said. “I better tell Alice, though, it feels too much to keep from her.”

“She called me last night to see how you are,” Liv said, finger-combing her blonde hair back into a knot at the base of her neck.

“I spoke to her myself,” Kate said.

“Yeah, she told me. She was just double-checking you weren’t faking it for her benefit.”

Kate sighed. “I hate that she feels as if she needs to worry about me.”

“She doesn’t need to. She chooses to, because you’re her mother and she adores you.”

“Did she tell you she thinks I should go solo traveling in Thailand to find myself? She bombarded me with links this morning.”

“Yes. Asked me to badger you into going.”

Kate sighed. “Oh to be nineteen and think the answer to all life’s problems can be found on a tropical beach.”

“Can’t they? I can think of worse places to look.”

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