“I could come up some weekends, and obviously you could come here. I feel very strongly that we should pursue this, us. I don’t want you to think I’m getting ahead of myself . . .” he carried on.

“You’re not. I feel the same,” said Nory. “I don’t want this to end. I don’t mean just this weekend. I mean us. I want to be with you. I wish we had more time.”

Isaac stroked his finger lazily up and down her arm. “Me too. Do you need to rush off tomorrow?”

“I’ll be getting a lift with Ameerah and Dev, but I don’t think they’ll be in any hurry.”

“Good,” he said, kissing the top of her head and holding her a little tighter.

They were quiet for a while and then he spoke again.

“So, tell me what you did before you owned a bookshop.”

“Hmm, well after uni, I got a great job doing absolutely nothing to do with my degree whatsoever. It was fabulous pay with amazing prospects, and I absolutely hated it.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was working in advertising. It was actually Ameerah’s dad who got me the job. I knew it wasn’t something I would enjoy.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Well, explain it to me and if I get confused, I’ll stop you.”

“I was never allowed to forget that I’d been given this brilliant opportunity that neither my parents nor my brother—especially my brother—had access to. And I had to make sure I’d deserved it, otherwise what would have been the point? Does that make sense?”

“You felt you owed them a debt of some kind because you’d had a private education.”

“Exactly. I had to make it count or it would be unfair to someone who would have made better use of it but didn’t get the chance. There were twenty kids in my primary school class and only I got chosen. That’s a lot to live up to.”

“I think you were being a bit hard on yourself,” said Isaac, stroking her hair.

“You should have asked Thomas about it; he had very strong feelings on the subject.”

“And that’s why you felt lost? You mentioned feeling lost the other day.”