Ever After
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Synopsis
'Warm and funny and truly uplifting' Veronica Henry
'Achingly real and wise. A truly special, gorgeous story' Miranda Dickinson
'Heartbreaking and heart-mending. I adored it!' Laura Jane Williams
***
Tess and Gus are strangers when their lives collide one sun-drenched morning in Florence, but it feels as if fate has brought them together.
One their return to rainy London, will their love be strong enough to survive the challenges of their complicated lives?
Is it even possible for two such different people to live happily ever after?
This summer, fall in love with EVER AFTER from the bestselling author of Miss You
***
Your favourite authors are loving Ever After:
'Kate Eberlen has gone beyond the initial star crossed romance of Tess and Gus to explore the lasting nature of relationships with her characteristic sensitivity, perception and humour in this inspirational book' Martha Kearney
'A captivating story about love...at times heartbreaking and at others uplifting... and an ending that is as poignant as it is perfect. I really loved it' Clare Swatman
'Very special, exquisite book- I was in awe on every page!' Matt Cain
'Expertly drawn characters. Italy comes alive in Eberlen's hands, London too' Fanny Blake
'A wonderful read, funny, poignant and deeply satisfying' Emily Bell
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 448
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Ever After
Kate Eberlen
After nightshifts, stepping out of the fug of the hospital into this gorgeous weather, drinking in the early morning air like draughts of iced water, I Iook up at the blue sky beyond the sparkling silver spikes of the City and your absence feels so overwhelming, it slows the pace of my walking and my thinking. I find myself standing on the pavement in sunlight so bright it should illuminate everything, unable to remember where I’m going, or who I am.
There isn’t much left on the shelves in Tesco Express. A lone box of eggs because two are smashed, their fractured shells glued to the porous cardboard; an onion dusty with mould abandoned in the corner of a green pallet; a wrinkled red pepper.
‘Vegetables?’ I can almost hear you saying. ‘For breakfast?’
No amount of Tabasco or toothpaste seems to clear the sour taste of my own coffee breath.
Mid-morning, as I try to doze, the temperature outside is more Italian than English.
We could probably count on our fingers and toes the days we spent together in Italy, Tess, but it is where my imagination always takes me when I think of you. Your face surrounded by lapis lazuli sky, one moment as serenely caring as a Raphael Madonna, the next as mischievous as a cherub, your expression zipping between concern and excitement, faith and doubt, your radiant aura like a blessing, even to a non-believer like me.
I must try to sleep, but I can almost hear you saying it’s a shame to waste such a beautiful day.
I never knew how precious time was, until I met you.
The first time I saw you, really saw you, your face was haloed by the gold of a Byzantine mosaic in the church of San Miniato al Monte on a hill overlooking Florence. I was on holiday alone, and so were you. We were both thirty-four. It turned out that our lives had brushed past each other several times before crossing again here, in the very same place we’d first glimpsed each other when we were eighteen. When we discovered that, it felt like we had wasted sixteen years already.
The first time you smiled at me, on the gravel terrace outside the basilica, I felt as if my life was opening up to endless possibility. The first time I touched you was an instinctive grab to stop you falling down the steep stone steps. You were wearing flip flops and had some convoluted explanation about forgetting to pack shoes and your feet being too big for Italian womenswear. All I could think about was how fragile your hand felt in mine and how you were blushing, as if you had never been touched by a man before. At the bottom, you let go, embarrassed. And as we walked down through olive groves towards the centro storico, with invisible cicadas clacking around us, my brain was battling to respond sensibly to your questions while all the time trying to think of an excuse to hold your hand again.
When I picture us that afternoon wandering around the narrow streets of Florence, I do not see crowds of summer-school teenagers with identical backpacks, nor tour parties led by guides with umbrellas held aloft, nor queues outside the Uffizi, nor diners sitting at pavement tables in Piazza Signoria, though they must have been there because it was the end of August. In my memory, it is just the two of us, walking side by side but with a carefully maintained distance, both aware and a little scared of the magnetic pull that might make us inseparable were we to move a millimetre closer.
You said things as they occurred to you, offering your life up for examination, giving opinions, sometimes changing your mind mid-sentence. I was astonished by you. Your transparency coaxed admissions I hadn’t made before, even to myself, loosening knots of anxiety and leaving me strangely, pleasantly, unravelled.
With my chequered history of relationships, I don’t think I’d known what it was like to feel at ease before that day. Yet I felt a slightly off balance light-headedness too, as if from a gulp of champagne on an empty stomach, as my mind attempted to formulate questions I wasn’t brave enough to ask.
Is something happening here? Are you feeling it too?
It was only much later that evening that I got my answer.
The restaurants were closed, the shops shuttered, and we were alone, our footsteps echoing, our words softly murmured as if to respect the city’s slumber. Pausing on the Ponte Vecchio, we stared down at the river made slick and black by the moonlight, neither of us bold enough to suggest what might happen next.
In my usual way of deferring intimacy, I mentioned something I had read that I thought would sound profound, about the random interconnectedness of the world. Apparently, the flap of a butterfly’s wing could cause a thunderstorm thousands of miles away.
You turned, looked into my eyes, your smile all innocence and certainty.
‘Or a rainbow,’ you said. ‘It doesn’t have to be something bad.’
Suddenly there was no space between us. My hands were on your waist, touching the warmth of your skin beneath the flimsy fabric of your summer dress, your body so delicate yet so determined that I wanted to treat you with infinite care, like the most precious porcelain, then break you with my passion. Our first kiss was an exquisite alchemy of desire and restraint. We drew back a moment, looked at each other, then it was all urgency.
The first time we made love, under a ceiling painted with ribbons and cherubs in the villa where we were both staying, it felt like an obliterating union of bodies and souls. The intensity of sensation made me cry out then left me feeling both vulnerable and protected, like being lost and found at the same time.
I wake up, roll over, still half in my dream, expecting to find you looking at me, your angelic face on a snowy cloud of pillow like that first morning. But now, in this City bachelor pad, there is only the masculine navy of borrowed bedlinen.
It occurs to me that I may never wake up beside you again.
In the emptiness of this unfamiliar space, I hear myself choking with stifled despair.
Why did this happen to us? Why now?
The sun is low in the sky, washing a coral glow over the bedroom walls.
I must get up and shower then eat something before I get back to the wards.
I miss you, Tess. I long to be with you. But this is how you have decided it must be.
That first night, as I lay gazing up at our celestial ceiling listening to the soft rhythm of his sleep, I remembered the feeling of enchantment that used to envelop me as a child when my mother read to me at bedtime.
I can’t have been more than four because I could read by myself at five, devouring so many books each week that the nice librarian knew my name and offered me all the new releases.
‘Once upon a time . . .’ As I closed my eyes, I would become drowsily aware of Mum’s voice fading as images flooded my mind, of turreted palaces and princesses so dainty they could wear shoes made of glass or feel a pea through a dozen mattresses.
The story of Gus and me sounded like a fairytale. As we talked that first night in Florence we worked out that our paths must have crossed on many occasions. We’d been on the same plane, at the same gig and now we lived at different ends of the same London street. There were so many other just-missed opportunities that our encounter, in the very church where we’d first set eyes on each other, felt like fate rather than chance. It was as if we’d had to overcome many obstacles before finally meeting properly. Like the Prince hacking through the overgrown forest to get to Sleeping Beauty, or Cinderella doing all that bloody housework before going to the ball.
‘Maybe people miss each other all the time, though,’ Gus said, as we sat at a pavement table in the Oltrarno. ‘I mean, when you think of all these lives intersecting with ours now for just a second . . .’
He waved in the direction of the locals taking their evening passeggiata in the square.
‘Or all the people you’ve ever stood next to queuing for coffee, or passed on the escalator going down to the Tube? Maybe we’ve just got lucky today?’
Gazing up at the darkening sky I decided that serendipity was just as romantic as destiny, because it meant there was hope for everyone.
In the morning, I was awake before him. I kept as still as I could, feeling a little clandestine as I stared at his face. In repose, he looked younger than thirty-four, more boyish than princely, with reddish brown hair and the sort of freckly, fair complexion that doesn’t need a shave every day. Just as I was wondering whether I dared kiss him awake, he stirred, his breath a bit garlicky from the pizza we’d shared the previous evening. I was trying to work out if I could tiptoe to the bathroom to brush my teeth without disturbing him when he opened his eyes, looked at me warily for a second, before remembering, smiling and pulling me on top of him. When we kissed my body was suffused with a rush of affection and sensuality so intense it felt like forever.
The night before, our love-making had been frantic, as if we were trying to clamber right to the core of each other. Now it was exquisitely slow and delicious. I’d never thought of myself as good at sex before. Lying next to previous lovers, I always seemed to have a surplus arm or leg I didn’t quite know where to put. Being naked just seemed to emphasise how long and imperfect my body was, and I never knew if I was making enough noise, or too much. But with Gus it felt totally natural and mind-blowingly perfect.
Eventually, he volunteered to find us breakfast, returning with strawberries and tiny pastries. We made love again, his lips dusted with icing sugar, then we dozed until the splinters of sunlight through the shutters were blinding. I threw back the white cotton sheet decisively.
‘We can’t waste such a beautiful day . . .’
‘Waste?’ He grinned at me.
‘You know what I mean . . .’
Some places in the world are so like the images you have seen on postcards they actually seem unreal when you are there. In Pisa, where we went on our first day, the sky was so blue, the clipped lawns so green, and the lacy marble carving of the cathedral and bell tower so white, it was almost like ambling through a computer-generated landscape. The cobbled medieval streets and squares of San Gimignano on our second felt like a movie set for Romeo and Juliet. And I had stumbled onto it with a stranger who was just as lovestruck as me.
There was this constant dialogue going on in my head. Is this really happening? Is it love or just lust? Why does love even exist? Lust alone would do the evolutionary job, so why did god or nature have to add all that emotion whose exquisite joy seems to anticipate anguish?
Don’t say that out loud, for heaven’s sake!
To the adjectives boyish, charming, sexy, which I’d initially ascribed to Gus, I had rapidly added troubled. As we talked about our backstories, it became apparent that, while he was materially better off than me, he was much less contented.
We’d both suffered profound grief in our lives. My mother died when I was eighteen. Around the same age, Gus’s elder brother Ross had been killed in a skiing accident. The course of my life had been fundamentally altered, and I missed Mum every single day, but I’d always tried make the best of things as she had done. Gus and his family appeared to have been poleaxed. Unable to move on, his parents divorced and Gus’s life had been haunted by the tragedy. He had even ended up marrying his brother’s girlfriend, which had been doomed to failure from the start. Sometimes, he would go quiet, as if his mind was somewhere else completely. It made it all the more satisfying when I managed to make him smile. As Jane Eyre discovered, there’s nothing more compelling than making a sad man happy.
Which is not to say that he wasn’t good company. His sense of humour was so dry I sometimes didn’t realise he was teasing, but he was never mean. Gus was a gentle man.
When my best friend Doll and I were at that teenage stage of falling in love with a different member of Take That each week, Mum always used to warn us that good looks weren’t everything. What you wanted was a kind man, she’d told us.
Not that Gus wasn’t good-looking too. And interesting. He knew all about art and architecture and showed me details I never would have noticed, like the different designs of lampposts in each Tuscan town, and the pale horizons of Piero della Francesca’s skies. He was generous, always offering to buy me kitsch trinkets as we passed market stalls, so in the end I stopped pointing. He had an appetite for gelato as endless as mine.
There are some couples where one, usually the woman, operates in the shadow of the other. Mum and Dad were like that. And maybe I’d picked that up from her because no man in my life had ever been interested in my opinions. Leo, my most recent partner, had only pretended to be when he wanted sex. When I’d finally figured that out, I’d felt like a prostitute paid in nods of the head and utterances of ‘that’s a fascinating idea’.
But it wasn’t like that with Gus. He listened to everything I said, never interrupting or looking at his watch. He made me feel equal.
Our third morning together was the first when I hadn’t pinched myself hard upon waking. I had become used to Gus’s shape, his weight and warmth on the luxurious mattress. I loved lying there in the slight chill of dawn with the sheet pulled up to my chin, gazing up at the heavenly canopy above and rerunning moments from the day before.
In the trattoria full of Italians having their lunch, he’d taught me how to wind spaghetti like a native, using only a fork. His gently guiding hand and the intent in his eyes felt almost as intimate as foreplay.
Over coffee, he’d remarked that I seemed to imagine lives for all the other diners, so I’d confided that my dream was to be a writer and he’d just nodded and said, ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
Now, I watched his face as he slept, wondering what he was dreaming about. He stirred, opened his eyes, smiled.
‘Is there anywhere you’d particularly like to go before you leave?’
It was the first time my departure had been mentioned. Gus was booked to stay another week. My mind suddenly flooded with doubts.
Was our relationship an illusion unsustainable outside the magical landscape of Italy? Was it just a holiday romance? I’d never had one before. I didn’t know how they went.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Our last day!’
The words came out sounding as if I was being strangled.
‘We live on the same street, Tess. I walk past the salon where you work almost every single day. I’m not going to be able to get away from you now!’ He smiled, reached for my hand. ‘It’s our last day in Italy. When I’m back, it will be our first day in London.’
Which was lovely. Except if it had been the other way round and I’d been the one booked in for another week, would I have stayed on by myself?
I told myself that if we were going to be together, we’d inevitably have to spend time apart, wouldn’t we? And if we weren’t, then I’d better make sure we lived this day like it really was our last.
‘How far is Assisi?’
Turned out it was much further than I’d anticipated, but Gus was happy to drive.
‘Why Assisi?’ he asked, once we were sure we were on the right road.
‘It was the first place in Italy I heard about. My mum had a photo of the town rising up out of fields of sunflowers. St Francis is everyone’s favourite saint, isn’t he?’
The postcard had been sent by one of Mum’s church friends who’d been on a package tour with Pilgrim Air. It was propped up on the knick-knack shelf in our kitchen behind her other precious souvenirs, like the snowglobe my brother Kevin sent from New York, and the painted plate from Tenerife with the motto: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
I remembered Mum telling me about how St Francis spoke to the animals and how, one Sunday afternoon, watching Doctor Doolittle, I’d shouted that St Francis was on the telly, and that became one of the anecdotes she relayed to Auntie Catriona when we went to Ireland for our holidays.
‘Are you a practising Catholic?’ Gus asked.
It was weird because in some ways we knew each other inside out, in others we were still total strangers.
‘I lapsed when I was twelve and refused to be confirmed,’ I told him. ‘It broke Mum’s heart . . . I don’t know why I couldn’t have just gone along with it to please her. I suppose I wasn’t lapsed enough to think that wouldn’t be a sin . . .’
Gus turned his head from the road towards me for a second, with a puzzled look that I was becoming used to.
‘Is your family religious?’ I asked Gus.
‘My mother would say she’s Church of England, although she never goes. My father thinks of himself as a scientist, so if there’s no proof of god, that means he can’t exist.’
We exited one motorway for another.
‘We should be there in time for lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m starving, aren’t you?’
I noticed that he changed the subject quickly whenever his family was mentioned. Perhaps it was repressed emotion? Gus had been to public school where he said that showing feelings made you vulnerable. I didn’t know him well enough to ask for elaboration.
‘What about you?’ I pushed. ‘Religion-wise?’
‘I love churches. You meet amazing people there.’ He smiled at me. Then, perhaps seeing from my frown that he wasn’t going to get away with another deflection, he added, ‘I’m in awe of the devotion that made people strive so incredibly hard to create such beauty. But I don’t really understand it.’
‘My mum used to say that faith is a step you have to take and then it becomes clear. But it never did to me.’
The sunflowers on the Umbrian plain were beginning to turn from golden to brown, making the view a more autumnal shade than the bright yellow on my mother’s postcard. I was quite glad that the harvest had not started, as I knew I would have been disappointed if the fields had been stripped to bare brown earth.
As if tapping into my line of thought, Gus said, ‘I’ve always thought Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery was a rather mournful painting about the transience of life, not the vibrant vase of flowers that other people seem to see.’
That was Gus all over. At first, I thought he was more profound than me, but actually Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: alive or dead? was only a middle-class way of saying glass half full or half empty.
In a restaurant near the main square, Gus ordered pasta filled with pumpkin, with a sauce of melted butter and a fried leaf on top that he said was sage.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, as I tasted it hesitantly.
Gus was a bit of a foodie. I never paid much attention to what I ate. There wasn’t a lot of money in our family and our most exotic treat was the chicken tikka masala my dad brought back on Saturdays if he’d had a good afternoon at the bookies. The only person I’d had to cook for was my little sister Hope, who rejected anything outside our usual routine. If it was Monday, it was bangers and mash; Tuesday macaroni cheese, which was the only type of pasta I’d had before visiting Italy, apart from tins of spaghetti hoops on toast, which we sometimes ate as an alternative to beans on Thursdays.
I tried to concentrate on the delicate flavours in my mouth, putting on a thoughtful face like one of the restaurant critics on Masterchef.
‘It’s earthy, with slightly sweet floral notes. Almost like eating a garden.’
Gus laughed, but I don’t think he realised I was joking.
I recalled the games that my best friend Doll and I used to play on long train journeys. If you had one last meal, what would it be? Doll changed her mind according to the party food mentioned in Hello, often including things like cocktail blinis and mini pavlovas that she’d never eaten and wasn’t even sure how to pronounce. Mine was invariably dippy egg and chips. I could imagine Gus putting a lot of serious deliberation and organically sourced ingredients into his choices.
The basilica of San Francesco was on a different scale from the rest of Assisi, like the cathedral of a capital city plonked outside a little hilltop town. Inside, it was flooded with light from the high windows. The colours of the frescoes by Giotto depicting the life of the saint were so bright they looked as if the paint had only just dried.
A sombre atmosphere of reverence was maintained by a priest, dressed in the rough brown robes of the Franciscan order, who intoned ‘Silenzio!’ in a deep voice whenever Gus’s commentary became too audible.
We stared at the panel with St Francis exorcising demons from a little walled town, which was clearly recognisable as the one we’d just walked through. The devils were evil-looking creatures, part human, part bat.
‘I wonder if St Francis was schizophrenic,’ Gus whispered. ‘I mean, he clearly experienced hallucinations and heard voices . . .’
I’d never heard anyone speak like that about stories I’d been taught as facts. With a shiver of fear for the consequences of such heresy, I looked over my shoulder to check we were out of earshot of the priest.
‘People didn’t know about mental illness then,’ Gus went on. ‘So what better way to explain weird things than believing that they came from an external source, rather than a misfiring neuron?’
I’d never thought of a medical explanation for miracles before.
‘If that is the case, though,’ I whispered. ‘I’m glad they didn’t know.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if people just thought he was crazy, they wouldn’t have been inspired to make these transcendent works of art, would they?’
Outside, we sat on a warm wall in the sunshine, neither of us speaking, as if we needed time to reflect on the emotions that the place had stirred. Below us on an overgrown ledge, a single white butterfly flitted between yellow wildflowers. In the sunflower valley below, occasional planes drifted in to land at Perugia airport. I wondered if pilots made the sign of the cross as they spotted the huge basilica, like a lighthouse guiding them to safety.
I wished Mum could see me in this holy place. When she died, I found it wasn’t life’s difficulties that I missed sharing with her so much as all the lovely things. I’d never realised how much her enjoyment, when I recounted my little achievements or the beautiful things I’d seen, had enhanced mine. Part of the thrill of a new experience had been the anticipation of telling her.
I felt Gus’s hand reach for mine, the touch of his fingers still so unfamiliar it quickened my pulse.
‘Tess . . .’
He said my name often, as if he was about to ask me something, and I’d wait and no question would come.
Just at that moment, the strict priest came out of the church and walked past us with a ringtone coming from the voluminous folds of his habit, growing louder until he eventually managed to retrieve it.
‘Pronto?’
‘Silenzio!’ Gus said.
The priest looked at us sharply, then shrugged as if to say fair enough.
‘Tess?’ Gus began again.
‘Yes?’
‘You make me feel I’m engaging with the world, not just observing it from a distance.’
‘I hope that’s OK?’ I responded, ridiculously, the breeze blowing my hair across my eyes.
‘It’s a fucking miracle!’
He took my face in his hands and kissed me so passionately it felt like my whole being was exploding with joy, then he pulled away, his wonderfully expressive eyes flickering from anxiety to happiness as he gathered me into his arms and held me close.
‘Look at me, Mum, in this beautiful place with this lovely kind man!’ I shouted silently up to her.
As we walked back to the car, the main street was quiet, half of it in shadow, the other still bleached white by the sunlight. Thinking of all the pilgrims whose footsteps had trodden these warm paving stones, I enjoyed that giddy, privileged feeling that I’ve only ever experienced in Italy, of being part of the past and the present at the same time.
‘Do you think if we had met properly when we were eighteen our lives would have been different?’ Gus asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I wish we had.’
‘No point in regretting what might have been. We can only make the most of what’s next,’ I said. It sounded like one of Mum’s mottos.
‘Look!’ Gus pointed at a sign on a house saying Vendesi. He stopped walking, grabbed both my hands. ‘Why don’t we come and live here? You could write . . .’
For a moment, I allowed myself to picture a rooftop room beneath the terracotta tiles, a wooden desk where I could gaze out over a sea of golden sunflowers and be inspired.
‘What would you do here?’ I asked him.
He looked a little sheepish. ‘I’ve always wanted to paint. I was going to go to art school . . .’
‘How did you end up studying medicine then?’
‘It was almost like a genetic condition in our family. Ross was at medical school when he . . . so I . . .’
I hadn’t quite been able to see him as a doctor. He was so much less sure of himself than the doctors I had encountered, although maybe they weren’t all like that off duty. Snippets of information were gradually forming my picture of his life, like pieces of a jigsaw. Now I knew he had studied medicine to try to make up for his parents’ loss, it made more sense.
In my imaginary room, I placed an easel next to the desk and put Gus in front of it, mixing different shades of ochre on his palette.
In the evenings, as the sun began to sink in the sky, he would put down his paintbrush and I would close my laptop. We would go for our passeggiata, strolling up to the main square to buy ice cream cones, greeting our neighbours in fluent Italian.
‘What’s to stop us?’ he said.
As if in answer to the question his phone rang, the ringtone as jangly and incongruous on this ancient street as the priest’s had been. Gus crossed to the dark side of the street to see the screen. I started walking again, to give him privacy, but in the stillness of the afternoon I could hear every word.
‘Bella? What’s the matter, poppet? No, of course you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to . . . Italy . . . Wish you were here too . . .’
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked, when he caught me up.
‘My youngest.’ He looked flustered.
‘She doesn’t like her summer camp. I hope she’s not being bullied . . .’
I knew better than to express an opinion. This was new territory and we’d entered it much sooner than I was prepared for.
‘Do you want to call . . . ?’
I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. Your wife? Your ex-wife? He’d told me her name was Charlotte, but that might sound overfamiliar.
He hesitated.
‘No, it’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine.’
His two daughters now lived with their mother in Geneva. I knew he missed them but it hadn’t really registered how difficult it must be to have all those little everyday worries and not be able to do anything from such a distance.
He was smiling at me, but I could tell that the focus of his thoughts had shifted back to the real world.
Darkness falls early on Italian summer days and we were still on the road back to Florence when the blood red sunset faded to black. Speeding along the unlit motorway felt like being in a tunnel. The inside of the car was so full of Gus’s anxiety that I didn’t want to disturb his concentration with words. The atmosphere was so different from that morning, and I couldn’t think how to take us back to that carefree breeziness. It was like starting all over again with a different person. And there wasn’t enough time for that because my plane was leaving in less than twelve hours.
Trying to calm myself down, I found myself remembering another anecdote my mother had told her sister when we were on our summer holidays. Us kids were meant to play outside while the grown-ups sipped tea from Auntie Catriona’s best china, but I used to listen at the door as they competed with smart things their children had said or done. My mum told the story of how, once, she had thought I’d drifted off after my bedtime story, so she had ever so softly closed the book, ever so carefully stood up and ever so quietly tiptoed across the room. And suddenly I’d sat bolt upright in bed and demanded, ‘How do you know?’
She’d sighed. ‘Know what, Tess?’
‘That the Prince and Princess lived happily ever after?’
‘Because that’s how fairy stories always end, Tess.’
‘But they’ve only just met!’
Auntie Catriona’s usually stern face had softened at that, and her eyes had caught Mum’s, almost like they had a shared secret. With a strange l. . .
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