Free How to Find Love in a Book Shop by Veronica Henry

since she’d heard the news, but now, here she was, hovering on the threshold. She could see Emilia, Julius’s daughter, putting the finishing touches to a window display. She plucked up the courage to go in and speak to her. She wanted to tell her just how much Julius had meant.
    Thomasina had been three years below Emilia at school, and she still felt the awe of a younger pupil for an older one. Emilia had been popular at school: she’d managed to achieve the elusive status of being clever and conscientious but also quite cool. Thomasina had not been cool. Sometimes she had thought she didn’t exist at all. No one ever took any notice of her. She had few friends and never quite understood why. She certainly wasn’t a horrible person. But when you were shy and overweight and not very clever and terrible at sport, it turned out that no one was especially interested in you, even if you were sweet and kind and caring.
    Food was Thomasina’s escape. It was the only subject she had ever been any good at. She had gone on to catering college, and now she taught Food Technology at the school she had once attended. And at the weekends, she had A Deux. She thought it was probably the smallest pop-up restaurant in the country: a table for two set up in her tiny cottage where she cooked celebratory dinners for anyone who cared to book. She had been pleasantly surprised by its success. People loved the intimacy of being cooked for as a couple. And her cooking was sublime. She barely made a profit, for she used only the very best ingredients, but she did it because she loved watching people go out into the night glazed with gluttony, heady with hedonism.
    And without A Deux, she would be alone at the weekends. It gave her something to do, a momentum, and after she had done the last of the clearing up on a Sunday morning she still had a whole day to herself to catch up and do her laundry and her marking.
    She was used to being on her own, and rather resigned to it, for she felt she had little to offer a potential paramour. She had a round face with very pink cheeks that needed little encouragement to go even pinker and her hair was a cloud of mousy frizz: she had been to a hairdresser once who had looked at it with distaste and said with a sniff, ‘There’s not much I can do with this. I’ll just get rid of the split ends.’ She had come out looking no different, having gone in with dreams of emerging with a shining mane. She did her own split ends from then on.
    To her surprise, her students loved her, and her class was one of the most popular, with girls and boys, because she opened their eyes to the joys of cooking and made even the most committed junk food junkie leave her class with something delicious they had cooked themselves. When she spoke about food she was confident and her eyes shone and her enthusiasm was catching. Outside the kitchen, whether at home or school, she was tongue-tied.
    Which was why she had to wait until the shop was empty before approaching the counter and giving Emilia her condolences.
    ‘Thomasina!’ said Emilia, and Thomasina blushed with delight that she had been recognised. ‘Dad talked about you a lot. When he was in hospital he said he would take me to your restaurant when he got better.’
    Thomasina’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It would have been an honour to cook for him. Though it’s not really a restaurant. Not a proper one. I cook for people in my cottage.’
    ‘He was very fond of you – I know that. He said you were one of his best customers.’
    ‘You are staying open, aren’t you?’ asked Thomasina anxiously. ‘It’s one of the things that keeps me going, coming in here.’
    ‘Hopefully,’ said Emilia.
    ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you how – how much I’ll miss him.’
    ‘Come to his memorial service. It’s next Thursday. At St Nick’s. And if you want to say a few words, it’s open to everyone. Just let me know what you’d like to do – a