“I don’t know—when is that?” he said, but he smiled to show her he was teasing.

Carmen smiled back. “Okay,” she said.

Oke raised his eyebrows. That was not, if he was being honest, which he always was, the response he had hoped for. He liked the passionate dark-haired girl. He liked her a lot. But she had . . . well . . . Normally Oke did well with girls. But this one . . . He remembered the man in the very expensive clothing she’d been with in the Grassmarket. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who was very interested in how much money a man made, but who could tell? He didn’t know Scottish women at all.

“Thanks again,” she said, gingerly stepping out onto the slushy pavement.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and disappeared into the throng, his distinctive gait making his hair visible in the crowd as she watched him bounce up the hill of the Lawnmarket in the direction of the tidy, orderly university, and Carmen scrambled down the icy steps and back into the higgledy-piggledy, disordered world of the bookshop.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The rest of the week remained trying. Sofia had ordered a gingerbread kit for Carmen to do as a family project on her babysitting night. It had not been a success.

Phoebe had licked her bits of the kit together and eaten all the Smarties decorations, as Pippa, who was doing her own carefully, harangued her. Jack had looked at it, said, “What’s the point of this?” which Carmen had found very difficult to give a good reason for, before he added, “Can you just do it and tell Mummy I did?” Then Phoebe collapsed in floods of tears when she couldn’t get anything to stick, and Carmen didn’t do a much better job, and when Sofia came down from her nap, she almost cried because in fact the sections were meant to stack on top of each other and make a perfect replica of their own house and the kit had cost a solid fortune and, apart from Pippa’s layer, it all looked like a dog’s dinner, and Sofia ended up staying up till 2:00 A.M. redoing everything and was teary and exhausted and hormonal, which Carmen felt was not her fault, and they had both attempted to pull their mother around to their point of view.

On the other hand, it looked sensational.

IT HAD BEEN a chilly morning. And now Carmen, while grateful for the customer—rather sweetly, she’d bumped into Crawford, who had bought three beautiful books on winter birds for his window display and added a note explaining where to buy them and the bookshop had had lots of queries—was not feeling at her best.