‘You’re blathering. Stop it! He was fine,’ she looks me in the eye and raises an eyebrow, ‘a bit subdued, but fine. He asked how your dating was going, and I told him it was shit, and he must have been a shit teacher.’

‘You didn’t!’

‘I did. I told him maybe you needed more lessons, and he said you’d chickened out, dropped out. Quit.’

I can feel myself bristling. ‘I don’t quit things! I’d finished, we’d finished!’

‘Oh yeah. Course you had. Well, that’s my coffee done. I’m going to winkle Jed out of the sci-fi corner and introduce him to my fantasy section!’

‘Fine. I’ll go back to putting stickers on books, shall I?’

‘Perfect, back in an hour.’ She pauses, her tone softening. ‘He did say he was open for sign-ups to a new course, advanced, if you were interested.’

Chapter 26

Bea is right. Noah is right. Even though I’m not a quitter, I just quit. Though it doesn’t really matter if I’m not planning on dating any time soon, does it?

I want to send Noah a ‘sorry you lost Millie’ message, but that would be plain weird, wouldn’t it?

But I am. Sorry that it hit him so hard. I can’t imagine what it must be like when you care about somebody that much.

‘Saw Jed earlier, didn’t realise him and Bea were an item!’

Is that a bit pass-agg? I ask the potted plant on my windowsill, and then delete the text. It has kind of ‘why didn’t you tell me?’ connotations. And it was me who insisted we were done.

I have spent the last half an hour picking my mobile up and then putting it down.

What if I have made a mistake?

I could just send a ‘more lessons needed!’ message, couldn’t I? Bea did say he had an advanced course in mind.

Or would that be, what’s the word, disingenuous? Insincere. Because he would be doing it to help me, and I would have ulterior motives. I would be doing it so that I could spend time with him, stare at him, feed my rude and not so rude fantasies.

Or I could just apologise for tarring him with the same brush as my father. That wasn’t fair at all. Even if he is like Dad, I have absolutely no proof at all. He’s not married, he’s a free agent. And he’s never done anything but be nice to me.

I could just say ‘sorry, hope everything is okay with you’, couldn’t I? And maybe add ‘do you think I’d be mad to take Hugo on?’ I mean he is the only friend I’ve got who knows about Hugo, so he’d be the ideal person to ask.

Oh God, I am really clutching at straws now, aren’t I?

I need to be brave. Just say sorry. Get it out of my system. Then he can say bog off you witch, and we can both carry on with our lives.