Page 35 of Book People

I probably shouldn’t have bothered him again tonight, but this can’t wait. Or at least,Ican’t wait. Also, I’ll be damned if I let one kiss get in the way of something that could save this festival.

He replies immediately, his text as terse as mine.

Yes. He was away for the duration.

Okay, interesting. I type out another question.

When did he marry?

Again, Sebastian responds quickly.

The year after he returned. 1946.

Right. But he didn’t marry his C. He married someone else, Sebastian’s great-grandmother. I wonder who C was and whathappened to her. Because somethingmusthave. If Sebastian Blackwood the First was as intense as his great-grandson is now, then I couldn’t imagine him letting any kind of obstacle get in his way.

Except, of course, if the obstacle was himself.

I let out a breath, not seeing the paper for a minute, only Sebastian’s taut expression and the blaze of his eyes.

‘I never date women in the village . . .’

I was brought up in London, not a small village, though even the largest of cities are just collections of villages if you really think about it. Certainly, London, as big as it is, could seem like a village sometimes.

So, I can see why he wouldn’t want to have a relationship with someone who lived here. If it all went bad, there’d be no escape. You’d have to see them every day and that would be difficult, especially if they then went out with someone else. Also, it’s a pretty small pool here and finding someone eligible that you like must be a challenge.

Even so, you could bend your own self-imposed rules for someone if you wanted them enough. Especially if you found yourself trapped by those same rules.

Except I can’t see Sebastian bending his. He doesn’t have any give in him and maybe his great-grandfather was the same. Maybe Sebastian the First got in his own way and wouldn’t bend for the woman he loved. Maybe that’s why he married someone else, because he had some stupid rule of his own that he wouldn’t break.

In fact, maybe that’s why the Blackwood men were supposedly cursed. Maybe they were all too rigid and, instead of bending, they broke.

I sigh. I shouldn’t think about Sebastian. It’s not like I’m going to have a relationship with him. In fact, I’m not goingto have a relationship with any man for the foreseeable future, because men suck.

They all want you to be someone you’re not and then get pissed off when you don’t fit their vision of you. Jasper wanted someone more polished and contained than I was. Someone sleek to have on his arm, to parade around at his endless corporate dos. He thought having a girlfriend in publishing made him look intellectual, so he’d tell me not to mention the kinds of books I edited, because it reflected badly on him. He’d say it with a smile and put in an eye-roll, suggesting it was his bosses and colleagues who were uptight about it, never him. But itwashim.

He had rules too, and I never saw the cage he was constructing around me until he’d almost locked the door. It was on the second anniversary of Mum’s death and he had dinner with his new boss planned, and he wanted me to come. I told him that I wasn’t feeling up to it because of Mum, and his response was: ‘Bloody hell, Kate. This dinner is important to me. Your mum’s been dead two years. Get over it.’

I sat on the couch that night, grieving my mother, desperately scrolling through my phone so I could ring one of my friends for a chat. But I couldn’t find their numbers. Jasper had gone through my contacts a couple of months earlier on the pretext of helping me weed out ‘contacts you don’t need’, and it was only then, when I could have badly used a friend, that I realised he’d deleted them all. I hadn’t noticed because all my time was taken up with my job and him.

That’s when I knew. That’s when I saw the bars of my cage.

He only cared how he looked to his new boss. He hadn’t cared that my mother was dead or that I was still grieving.

He didn’t care about me. He’dnevercared about me.

He took my love for him and twisted it subtly to centre himself in everything we did. Everything became about him. Nothing was about me.

The four years of our relationship hadn’t been a relationship at all. It had been a pot of water on the stove slowly coming to a boil, and I was the frog sitting in it. I was the frog who didn’t know she was being boiled alive.

He didn’t speak to me for a week after that night, but that week was enough for me to realise that I had to leave.

That’s why I walked out on him, and it’s a mistake I won’t make again.

I open another envelope.

Yesterday you told me that you had never read Dickens, so here isDavid Copperfieldto try. It is my own personal copy. If you like it, send the book back with anything you want to say to me in between the pages. Do not sign the note or write anything that could identify us. That way, we can say whatever we want to each other.

There is no signature on this one, but I know it’s from H, Sebastian’s namesake, and that it’s clearly the first note.

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