‘Come on!’ Edie said, with mock impatience. ‘You’re holding up the whole party!’

Gilly gave an elaborate sigh and shook her head. ‘You are a nightmare.’

‘And you’re a horrible brat. We know both of these things already. Come on, give.’

Gilly handed over the gift, laughing, although Edie could also see a trace of genuine anxiety in her eyes. ‘You might hate it.’

‘We won’t,’ Ezra assured her, as together they carefully removed the paper.

The print had been expertly mounted and put into a beautiful pine frame. Edie looked at it, lost for words.

‘Wow,’ Ezra said softly.

Gilly had carved the two of them sitting as they had that night in Edie’s front room, at the moment that Ezra had taken Edie’s hand and she had found herself looking right into his eyes. The touch of Ezra’s hand, the shock of finding him so close, the sudden intensity of his look – Edie had carried these things in her mind ever since that evening, and it seemed to her that Gilly had inscribed every emotion that moment had inspired into the multiple layers of delicate ink that depicted them both perfectly.

‘Is that a quote?’ Ezra asked, and it was only then that Edie realized that Gilly had incorporated words into the lines that made up the background of the image.

‘ “I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?”’ Edie read, and laughed through sudden, happy tears. ‘Yes, that’s a quote. Benedick says it to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.’

Ezra looped his arm around Edie’s shoulders and kissed her hair. ‘Could not have put it better myself.’

‘Gilly,’ Edie said, ‘this is extraordinary. I can’t even…’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain how phenomenal this is for someone so new to the medium.’

‘You like it, then?’

Edie brushed her fingers across Gilly’s cheek. ‘Darling, like is not a big enough word.’

‘Right,’ Ezra said, leaning forward to kiss Gilly on the forehead and then hefting her print between his hands. ‘I’m going to go and put this in pride of place on the gift table. I want everyone to see it.’

They watched him walk away for a second before Edie turned to Gilly.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Beatrice and Benedick, eh?’

Gilly’s face took on a look of studied innocence that Edie didn’t buy for a second. ‘What?’

Edie shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Come on. Let’s get this party started.’

Fifty-Three

The bookshop was full of laughter and talk. Ezra and Edie flitted between tables, but rarely parted from each other for long. Rachel watched from where she sat beside Toby. She was absolutely certain that when she had laid this table, his name card had not been beside hers, and yet when they had both come to sit down, there they had been, side by side. No one would own up to switching the places. It could have been any one of their friends, or it could have been all of them, in it up to their necks together.