A New York Winter

by Isla Gordon

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Curl up this Christmas with the ultimate city escape, and get ready to fall in love with NYC

Will her dreams come true in the city that never sleeps?

When she was nineteen, on a magical trip to New York City, Ashling created a list of her five life goals. There, she'd felt inspired to dream big, but now, ten years later, with four out of five goals having crumbled before her, she realises she has only one option left to live the life she's always dreamed of: move to New York City, before it's too late.

Armed with a ninety-day visa, she's sure that a winter in the city that never sleeps will help her finally get her life on track. However, after arriving in the Big Apple with nowhere to live, Ashling realises that she may be in over her head, until she meets River . . .

River is miserable. He's newly single, recently demoted and feeling entirely lost, but sensing Ashling could do with the help, he offers her his sofa bed. Despite their clashing personalities, over the course of the winter, outgoing Ashling finds herself growing closer to quiet, geeky River - but is he just shy or is there another reason he's holding back?

With snow falling on 5th Avenue, a Thanksgiving parade and a fun-filled Christmas in the most romantic city in the world, can Ashling once again learn to follow her dreams - and maybe even her heart?

PRAISE FOR ISLA GORDON
'Heart-warming and full of hope' - HEIDI SWAIN
'Gorgeously cosy . . . utterly lovely' - HOLLY MARTIN

Release date: November 23, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

‘Ashling, you’ve got your head in the clouds again.’

‘Leave her be – she takes after me.’

This gentle exchange between my mum and my gran floats into my head every day I do my job, probably because I heard it so often growing up that it could have been one of those family mantras, perhaps written in curvy calligraphy and framed above a household toilet.

I was that kid who was always bumping into things while I was staring up at the sky. Always falling off swings as I tried to loop right up above the threshold. Always lying on my back on summer grass lost in daydreams and creating cloud animals, leaving friends and games and the rest of the world to happen around me.

I always had focus. It’s just that my focus landed, well, not on land.

Right now, my focus, and my head, is far, far above the clouds. In fact, through the cockpit window, as I reach cruising altitude, I’m looking down onto a panoramic vista of peach, sun-coated white duvet.

As first officer of this aircraft, I can confidently say, conditions are perfect.

‘Ready to spot a UFO today?’ I ask my captain, Rebecca, who sits beside me.

‘Today’s the day!’ She laughs, and the cockpit door opens, revealing our flight’s purser, Alex, carrying two cups of steaming coffee for us.

‘You two say the same thing every day,’ he comments.

‘One day it’s going to happen,’ I sing out, swigging my drink, already enjoying today’s easy flight of four hours to sunny Athens. It’s early June and the happy holidaymakers are en route to try out their new swimsuits for the start of the summer season.

This is the best part of my job. Of my life. Sitting above the clouds, eyes on the horizons I’m chasing, a panorama of colours. I’m keeping a plane-full of passengers safe, I’m monitoring and checking and tweaking to keep them comfortable during my operating sector, and I’m doing it all with views that are, literally, out of this world.

Some pilots love take-off, some love landing, some love layovers, some love witnessing a dazzling Northern Lights show, some just love sleeping back in their own beds. I love this. This is where I’m completely in control, completely calm.

I roll my neck from side to side. Oof. ‘Do you want to know something really ridiculous?’ I ask Rebecca.

‘Always,’ she answers.

‘I was playing baseball the other day—’

‘You play baseball?’

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘But it’s so hot out this summer already that my friend, Flo, and I decided to A League of their Own-it and try a bit of pitching and batting in the park. Turns out, I’m great at batting, not so great at pitching, and I somehow absolutely yanked my shoulder out.’

‘Ugh! Are you okay?’

‘I thought I was: the next day it seemed totally fine. But actually, I can feel it again right now.’ I roll my shoulder a little and wince.

‘Those UFOs only want fine specimens so I guess they’ll just take me,’ Rebecca quips.

I laugh and my eyes trail the skies, reaching up to adjust a couple of the dials in the overhead panel, and that’s when a pain shoots through me, from my shoulder all the way down my arm.

A few swears spill out while Rebecca takes over my duties and alerts Alex to come back into the cockpit.

‘What happened?’ she asks. ‘Are you all right to keep flying?’

My eyes meet hers. ‘Yes. But something’s wrong.’

Nearly five months later …

‘I’ll take a treat, please,’ I croak out and laugh at my own joke, since nobody else does. ‘Because it’s … you know …’ I point down at myself. ‘And this all has to be a trick?’

Betty, from HR, scans me from head to toe and I find the pity in her eyes, and the confusion as she tries to figure out my costume.

‘I’m the bridge from the TV show The Bridge,’ I tell her. ‘One half of it, anyway. Rebecca is the other half. I’m Sweden, she’s Denmark, that’s why I have a torso and she has the legs.’

‘I haven’t seen it …’ says Betty.

‘You should, it’s really good.’

I’m feeling a little self-conscious in my Halloween costume now, to be honest, especially with a papier-mâché face looking up at me. Every year my airline puts on an informal costume contest on this day, for those not on shift. With me being off work, I went full steam with my costume, and it’s only now occurring to me how awkward I am to have worn this to this meeting.

In front of a rain-drenched window, Betty shuffles her papers and I know it’s not good news. Nobody shuffles papers before saying, ‘Congratulations, all is well!’ So when she says, ‘We had the medical assessment back, Ashling,’ I think I know what’s coming next.

It’s been almost five months since I buggered my shoulder playing baseball, five months since my last flight and my licence having to be suspended, and three months since I had surgery to try and fix things.

‘And?’ I gulp.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, her eyes on mine, and I know she means it. She clears her throat and says it more clearly. ‘I’m sorry, but, even after your surgery, even after all the work you’ve been putting in with your physio, we can’t clear you to fly.’

I knew, of course I knew. When I was up in the air that day, my seemingly mild injury magnified into a large rotator cuff tear. It was agony, and I was recommended for surgery but even with all their amazing help, they couldn’t fix the permanent damage I’d caused. Now I don’t have the full range of motion I once had, and that I need for my job. But day to day my shoulder doesn’t cause me many problems any more, now the pain is finally, slowly, slightly, beginning to subside. So a part of me prayed it could all still be okay. ‘For how long?’ A hot sweat floods my body. Do NOT cry, Ashling.

Betty and my management team are the most supportive airline leaders Living In The Air could ever ask for. I know in my soul they’d be doing everything they could to get me back up in the skies, which is why I don’t need her to say out loud what I already know to be true.

‘Is it really over?’ I say, a tear escaping.

‘At this point in time, under the advice of the medical experts, we can’t clear you to fly. The flight simulation you took part in showed you wouldn’t be able to perform your duties in an emergency. And it’s not looking likely that anything will change.’

‘But it’s just a little shoulder injury, it’s going to get better. It’s so much better than it was – it doesn’t even hurt now unless I reach upwards.’

Betty shakes her head. ‘You know it’s more serious than that. But I hope you know how gutted we are for you.’

I hear what she says for the rest of the meeting, a lot of words about reassessing in three months and finding me a new position if there’s no improvement, but Betty is stressing that, honestly, realistically, it’s the end of the line for me flying commercial planes. At the same time, I’ve checked out, my eyes unseeing, my brain thumping, my stomach hollow. My world just faded to grey and, even at the end when I stand and accept a hug, as she bends around my ridiculous costume, I am numb.

The first thing I do when I get back to my home in Sunbury-on-Thames is punch my stupid pumpkin right in the face. With my good arm.

Well, that showed him.

With an ice pack for my hand, I walk through my kitchen, the whole house silent except for my footsteps, like I’m not welcome here at this time of the day. Like it’s busy sleeping and I’m supposed to be out, living life. My house likes to come alive at night, creaking and groaning and clanging pipes as if it’s auditioning for the role of a haunted house.

But now, it’s quiet, and I’m alone. I sigh into the silence.

Sliding open the back door that leads to my tiny garden, I sit down on the step and wince as the ice touches the skin of my hand. Stupid pumpkin. I thought it would be softer since he was all hollowed out, but nooooo. Hard as a rock. I guess I’ll have to add busted-up knuckles to my failed medical record now.

The weight of reality pushes against my back, hunching me over, curving my spine until I’m a ball, my face between my knees, my eyes on the bronzed leaves that paper over my grass.

Shit shit shit shit shit. This can’t be real. It can’t be true. I can’t not be a pilot any more, it’s me, it’s everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve dreamed of. My mind races as though I’m seeing an Instagram Reel of my own life, one-second clips that montage the years of training, the expense, the hours and the flights and the joy and the pain and the fear and the fun. Being a pilot was my dream, it’s part of me. I am a pilot.

Oh my god, but I’m not any more. I am not a pilot.

So, who am I?

I sit on the step for a while, tears dropping onto the leaves below, the chilly October wind finding its way through the holes in my crochet jumper, my bridge costume a sorry heap on the mulchy ground.

‘All right,’ I whisper to the leaves before lifting my head and taking a big sniffle. ‘So one dream has gone to shit. It’s not the end of the world, and I’m bloody well going to be okay.’

I stand, all stiff legs and tense back, but as I reach my patio doors, a thought hits me, a thought that causes a lightning bolt of panic in my chest, a wave of sickness in my stomach, and I have to hold the doorframe.

No. No, that can’t be right. I have to check something, right now.

Stumbling through the kitchen, I leave the back door open and allow any heat inside the house to dance free. I crash up my stairs, falling at one point with a thump, and into my bedroom, where I yank open my desk drawer, and dump onto the floor an absolute hoard of hairy hairbands, my birth certificate, an eyeliner cap, the half-read copy of Dracula I keep meaning to finish, a string of expired condoms, a phone-charging cable from the mobile I had seven years ago and, eventually, uncover the thing I’m looking for.

My Dreams I’ve written on the cover of the journal, in twirling marker above an illustration of a flamingo. Flamingo print seemed to be really big when I was nineteen.

It was ten years ago now that I bought this in a summer stationery sale at the airport bookshop. I was on my way to New York City for a long weekend, whisked away by my gran who saw I was in serious need of a bit of inspiring, as I had zero clue what I wanted to do with my life. All my friends were at uni or already had jobs, and I was milling about like an undecided, unanchored jellyfish.

You could say, my head was in the clouds. I knew I had big dreams inside me – my name even means ‘dream’, and was suggested by my gran who, too, was a big dreamer. But I needed to go somewhere big to unlock them, get out of my hometown, out from the shadows of life plans being made by those around me.

While in New York, I filled the pages of this journal with everything I wanted to do, to be, all those ideas and ambitions and wants and needs, and by the end of the trip I narrowed them down to five dreams. Five big life goals.

I remember the moment it all clicked into place. I spent days prioritising, re-prioritising, de-prioritising my list. In between sightseeing with my gran, who’d spent time in New York as a ‘young un’, I’d sat in cafés and diners, poring over my journal pages. I read them aloud to a bored but kind Swedish girl in our hostel lobby to see what she thought I should do. Then on our last day, my gran sent me out to be on my own. Finally, up there it felt so clear, as clear as the dawn’s cloudless sky. I knew what I wanted for my life.

And just like that, I was no longer the lost nomad of a friend, the head-in-the-clouds girlfriend, the drifting daughter. I had a structure, a purpose, a plan.

Now, as I flick the thin pages of the journal to the last entry, scanning past-me observations about life and bullet-pointed lists of all the languages I intended to learn and hairstyles I wanted to try out, sketches and doodles of the things my eyes viewed a decade ago, my heart thuds loudly. It sounds particularly ominous to my ears inside my silent bedroom.

My list. My finalised list – there in black and white. Well, blue biro and off-white paper. I know this list by heart. It is in my heart. I just haven’t thought to look at it for years. At least not as a full collection, as this anthology of dreams. But it was my compass, my life summed up into those five goals. My ultimate to-do list. I might as well have laminated it.

Grabbing a red Sharpie from a pot on my desk, I sink down beside the foot of my bed, and read.

1: Get accepted on the Young Artists’ Residency.

2: Marry Hugh.

3: Take Gran on her own trip of a lifetime.

4: Move to New York City.

5: Be a pilot.

That last one – that was my biggest dream of all. Nothing has felt more right than when I accepted that was what I was meant to do.

I first felt the pull to be a pilot when I was seven and my mum and gran took me to a fairground and I rode a big wheel. I don’t think I blinked the whole ride, and my heart soared as we rose into the air. But I kept pushing the idea aside: it felt unrealistic, too hard, too expensive, too out-there, and it wasn’t until New York, at nineteen, that morning on the top of the world, that I stopped fighting myself.

For the next few years my whole world became about the sky. I earned and then trained alongside earning, and built up my flying hours, and took tests, and got licences, and eventually, a long time and a lot of money later, I qualified. Then I just wanted to fly all the time, and thankfully I was taken under the wing, as it were, by the beloved commercial airline, Living In The Air. I’ve been there for nearly five years now, flying short-haul all over Europe, and it’s everything I ever wanted, even before I quite knew it.

Until today, and now it’s over.

Taking the lid from my Sharpie, I draw neat red lines through my dreams, one at a time, the reality of my situation settling over me.

I cross out my dream of getting a place on the Young Artists’ Residency. I cross out marrying Hugh. I cross out taking Gran on her own trip of a lifetime. I cross out being a pilot, a tear dripping onto the page and smudging the decade-old lettering.

Every single one of my goals has collapsed, apart from the one about New York, I suppose. But I’d always figured that would happen far, far down the line. I thought that perhaps I’d change airlines one day, work for a US carrier, or even a private airline based out of America, and then with their help I could get the necessary work visas and sponsorship and make my transatlantic move. I was enamoured with New York from the moment I stepped out of the airport shuttle bus into Manhattan. And when the city inspired me to map out my life in just a long weekend, I knew it was the place to go if you wanted to think big and be something. But there was no rush. I had a whole lifetime.

Only now, with my thirtieth birthday barely three months away, it doesn’t feel that way. This list was a promise I made to a younger me, and I haven’t been able to give her a single win in ten years. How quickly will another decade slip by?

My mind zooms about, clutching at fading images of my future that disappear like cloud mist. What the hell am I going to do with myself now? And how can I grip hold of this final goal before it, too, slips from my grasp?

‘I don’t have any dreams left. They’ve all gone.’ Three hours later, I’m sat on my floor in front of my mirrored wardrobe, my phone on loudspeaker. I’ve been in crisis mode since getting home and have called my best friend Flo for help.

‘What are you talking about?’ her voice crackles out. ‘You don’t dream any more at night?’

‘No, I don’t have any life dreams left. They’ve all … crumbled. My goals. My aspirations. Gone!’ I pile my hair on top of my head and tie it with a scrunchie.

‘Oh no. What happened at your meeting today? Did it go badly?’ she asks.

‘It went supremely badly,’ I answer, and my voice hitches, but I can’t cry any more today. I’ve turned off the waterworks, I’ve had my pity party and I’ve moved on to mild panic. I don’t have it in me to reverse. ‘In short, I can’t fly any more.’

‘What?’ she yelps. ‘For a while?’

‘Most likely, ever.’

‘I’m coming over.’

‘You’re at work!’

‘Who cares?’ Flo cries.

‘No, no, don’t leave work and trek all the way out to Sunbury, I’m fine. Well, not fine …’ I examine my reflection and raise a pair of scissors towards my hair. ‘I’ve just got a lot of shit to figure out.’ I let the scissors hover. ‘Oh my god, there’s just so much shit.’

‘As in, you need to figure out what to do next?’

‘What to do at all!’ My voice is high and shrieky. I drop the scissors and grab my journal from the floor beside me and read the four failed dreams out to Flo, one by one. When I’ve finished, I sigh. ‘All my twenties I’ve been living around these goals. Now, thanks to me either leaving things too late, or breaking up with someone, or getting into a stupid accident, I’ve let them all slide away.’

‘Didn’t you say you had five goals? What was the fifth?’

‘Moving to New York City.’ I pause, cloudy ideations taking form somewhere in my mind.

‘You could still do that,’ Flo says, breaking into my thoughts.

She’s right, except, ‘What if I don’t have time? What if something, somewhere, sometime stops me? What if I get some new skills, and find some new international company to join and eventually work my way through the ranks, only by then the laws have changed or something and then that falls through too?’

Flo hesitates on the end of the line, then dodges the question with another of her own. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re going to do now?’

‘No, not one.’ I swallow down hysteria. ‘I have spent the last three hours sitting here on my floor, completing online career tests and taking personality quizzes, and I just don’t know. I don’t know who I am or what I want. I don’t know, Flo!’

‘All right, chill,’ she says. ‘What did the career tests and things say?’

‘The career test said I should be a … wait for it … pilot, a personality test said I was best suited to work in a job where I can travel and keep people safe, and a Buzzfeed quiz told me my next big career move should be acting.’

‘So … maybe you could play the role of a pilot in a TV show?’

‘I’m sure the Duffer Brothers are just gagging to hire me.’ I tighten my scrunchie again, holding the ends of my ponytail down over my forehead and angling the scissors. I snip at a few straggly split ends and a tiny wave of satisfaction ripples through me as they flitter onto my open journal. ‘So then,’ I say, moving the scissors an inch higher up my pony. ‘Then I started reading back through my old journal, at all my lists of all the other things I wanted to do with my life. All the littler things that didn’t make the cut for the Big Five, but I still imagined I’d get round to doing, sometime. And you know what? I’ve barely done any of them. So now … I’m doing them.’ Snip.

‘Everybody ignores to-do lists, especially ones written ten years ago in some old diary. Wait, what do you mean you’re doing them now? What kind of things are listed on there?’

‘Remember once I told you I used to have a huge crush on Chris Evans? One of my aims was to write him a love letter. So I started by sliding into his DMs.’ I guess my crush is still there, somewhat.

Flo laughs. ‘That’s fine, I’m sure he has hundreds, maybe thousands, of those a day. I thought you were going to say you’d been taking more drastic actions.’

I slide the scissors another inch higher. Snip.

‘What I’m hearing is,’ Flo interprets as I hold my ponytail aloft above my head and study its now shorter length. I think I should take a little more off, just to make it spot-on. ‘You’re worried you don’t have a lot of frameworks for your life any more, and you need some new goals to work towards, and in the meantime, you’re ploughing through a few things that have been hanging around your to-do list?’

‘Yes, exactly!’ I say. ‘Well, not exactly. I don’t just need new goals, it’s like I need a whole new me. It feels so much bigger than me just sitting down with a notepad and picking a couple of new bucket-list items.’

She’s quiet for a moment, and I take another snip. A message from my mum, the fourth in the last hour, slides onto the screen from the top, checking in on me, and how the meeting went. Oof. A knot of apprehension in my stomach prods at me at the thought of telling her all of this once I’ve finished chatting to Flo. Mum will be lovely, sympathetic, caring, but I know underneath all that she’ll worry about me.

‘You know something I’ve always wanted to do?’ I say, swiping away the message.

‘Tell me,’ Flo says.

‘Get a “Rachel cut”.’

‘As in, a “Rachel from the first couple of seasons of Friends” cut?’ she clarifies. Flo is a hairdresser; she knows what I mean.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. It’s actually a lot of maintenance you know—’

‘I want a peach Rachel cut.’

‘Peach.’

‘Peach. I’ve always wanted to dye my hair a lovely light peach.’

‘Well, make sure you come into the salon and I’ll do it for you properly—’ At that point I snip again and her words halt, changing into a gasp. ‘I know that sound – that was scissors on hair. What are you doing?’

I yank out the scrunchie and shake out my brand-new mane. ‘Oh, bollocks.’

‘What have you done?’

It is not the reflection of Jennifer Aniston in the early years of Friends looking out at me. Instead, it’s a girl with pink, mascara-smudged eyes and dirty blonde hair I’ve now hacked into a tufty, jagged bob that in places still straggles beyond my shoulders and in other places hits level with my jawline.

‘Listen. I’ll be thirty in less than three months. I can’t be thirty and have no direction at all for the rest of my life.’

‘You actually can,’ Flo counters, sounding off-balance with my frequent changes of conversational direction.

‘I need to do something drastic.’ The clouds in my mind part, my view clearing.

‘You need to give yourself a minute to let it all sink in.’

‘I need to go to New York before it’s too late. Before that dream gets scuppered too.’

‘Well, one thing at a time, okay? You only just got the bad news today. Let me find you a bit of space and I’ll bring you into the salon in the next few days and I’ll give you the peach Rachel cut of your dreams.’

‘You will?’

With an affectionate tut, Flo says, ‘Of course I will. Please always come to me first before you start chopping at your own hair.’

‘Thanks, Flowy.’

‘Just promise me you won’t do anything wild until then, okay? Don’t fly off to New York, or something.’

‘I won’t,’ I reply, dragging my laptop close to me.

‘And don’t cut any more of your hair off.’

‘I won’t.’ I laugh, tucking some locks behind my ear, which then fall out, just as the search page on Google brings up the list of flights to New York City.

Three days later, on one of those November mornings that are so gloomy and grey it’s like you’ve stepped right into a film noir, I sit cosy and warm inside Flo’s salon, which has already strung up its white and gold decorations ready for Christmas. The rain is splattering down on the window beside me, as if it’s angry at the bright interior lights that reflect onto the glass.

Flo gives, in my opinion, an exaggerated sigh from behind my spinny chair.

‘It’s not that bad,’ I say, watching as she fluffs my hair ab. . .