Carmen wasn’t remotely in the mood for any type of party but promised faithfully to look in and bring the copy of The Winter Almanac to Bronagh, the magic shop’s proprietor. It had been sitting on the front desk for a month.

BLAIR WAS ON a plane, she told herself. It was a really long flight to LA, with a change in Amsterdam, so you had to go the wrong way before you went the right way. Not that she’d checked (she’d checked).

Anyway, what was he going to say? “Oh, I made a terrible mistake sleeping with someone else after you turned me down when it was my total right to do so”?

He’s a bad man, Carmen told herself for the millionth time.

Her phone rang and she grabbed it. It was Idra.

“Hey!” said Idra. “What’s up?”

“Um,” said Carmen, reluctant to explain. But actually it turned out that Idra calling and saying “what’s up” was a way to tell her her news, which was all amazing, as it happened. Someone had come in to eat lunch there every day and she hadn’t thought anything of it, then on about the fifth day he’d begged her to go out with him, as otherwise he was going to get unbelievably fat and then he really wouldn’t have a chance with her, and she had laughed and agreed—nobody ever asked you out in the hats and accessories department—and he turned out to be super-lovely and some kind of software engineer who made a fortune and was taking her away skiing after Christmas!

“You’ve never been skiing,” said Carmen.

“I know,” said Idra. “I am going to lie and say I have an injury from other skiing and have to sit on the sundeck and drink mulled wine all day.”

“They have a sundeck?” said Carmen. “This doesn’t sound like Glenshee.”

“Italy!” said Idra smugly.

Carmen went quiet. Oh goodness. “Wow,” she said.

“Tell me you are really, really super-jealous,” said Idra.

“I will do that.”

“See! Now that we’ve left stupid old Dounston’s, all sorts of amazing things are going to happen. You’re in Edinburgh, full of rich blokes and Harvey Nicks and fun! It’s all there, Carmen. Go grab it!”

THE MORNING WAS busy in the shop, and every second person who looked local appeared to be going to Bronagh’s party, many of them buying her books as gifts, the more abstruse the better.

“Do you have . . . ?” said one rather vampiric skinny young man. He leaned over the counter. “A secret section? For forbidden books?”

“Sure,” said Carmen, “seeing as this is a fourteenth-century monastery built on a hellmouth.”

“Ahem,” said Mr. McCredie, who was signing for a delivery.

“Sorry,” said Carmen, ashamed of her bad mood. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. No. I mean . . . Sorry.”