Page 8 of The Next Chapter

‘So, you think it’s Lola?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know. It sounded like that. And when I said, are you talking about Lola Starr, she wouldn’t confirm or deny it. Obviously, I didn’t tell her about you.’

My heart is beating really fast.

‘But… but… if it is Lola, why, I mean, why now?’

‘No idea. She’s been missing for what, thirty years?’

I nod. ‘A few months after she gave me up.’

‘Shit. It’s been going round in my head all week. No one even knows where she is.’

‘Most people don’t,’ I hear myself say. ‘But Dad did. It’s in a letter she wrote me when I was eighteen.’

‘OMG, the letter that haunts you from the unfinished to-do list on the fridge? I’ve seen the look in your eyes when you look at that list. I knew it was about Lola but not that he’d hunted her down. I just assumed he’d written you a deathbed farewell.’

I shake my head. ‘Hunted sounds quite predatory.’

Seb puts his wine glass on the old trunk.

‘Lily, I can’t ask you to do this. You’ve never even spoken to Lola; you can’t very well trot up to her now and pitch to ghost-write her bloody memoirs. No, it’s a terrible idea. Let someone else write it.’

That thought makes me feel vaguely ill. The thought that someone else might write Lola’s memoirs. Dredge it all up again. Listen while she talks about giving up her baby… People will find me… everyone will know…

I’m sitting up straight now, perched on the edge of the sofa. I wonder how it would feel, to be brave about this. It would definitely help Seb, and the business. Plus, it’s clearly what Dad wanted me to do. Maybe I could even help myself a little, too. Maybe I wouldn’t feel quite so lost and drained.

Wondering feels like dipping my toe in a still lake and watching the ripples circle outward.

I take a deep breath. Close my eyes. Get ready to jump.

‘What if this is meant to be, like, the next chapter? For us, for me, I mean?’ I ask.

Seb is still frowning and muttering to himself. ‘It’s a bad idea, you might get hurt. You’re already so needy. It’d be off the scale.’

‘Just listen a second, will you?’ I cut him off. ‘You know Dad wanted me to get in touch with her, and it’s a year since he died and then Daisy went and died, and I keep wondering if she had, I don’t know, unfinished business.’

‘She was literally a hundred,’ Seb interjects.

‘And now this with Kitty… it just feels… fated. Like maybe now is the time because everyone is dying all of the time and what if Lola wants her memoirs writing because she’s dying too.’

I hadn’t even considered that fact until I say it, but now it’s a real-life worry.

Seb is looking at me like I’ve sprouted a third eyeball.

‘Fated. Like in the stars.’

‘No, not in the stars, just, I don’t know, something that I need to do. Plus, the business needs the money and I hate, like really hate, the thought of someone else writing those memoirs.’

Another look from Seb.

‘It’s the unfinished to-do list, isn’t it? It’s eating you alive.’

‘No… well, yes, it is a little bit, but it’s not just that. If I could do what Dad wanted and help the business, it could be a good thing. If she’s going to write them anyway, it might as well be us. Perhaps I won’t spend each night crying quite so much,’ I say with the faux cheer of a budget Christmas elf.

‘Okay, we’re revisiting that at some point, likely with the help of a professional.’ He pauses to have a drink. ‘You really want to do this?’

I deflate a little. I did want to do this, a second ago, now I’m less sure. Decisive people really are life’s winners.