The Moment I Met You: The unmissable, romantic and heartbreaking new novel for 2021 from the million-copy bestselling author by Debbie Johnson

Author:Debbie Johnson [Johnson, Debbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2021-06-23T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Ten days later I am sitting in a small café in South Kensington, wondering why I agreed to meet Em at all. And why I chose London, rather than a place nearer to home.

Perhaps it’s because I remember coming here when I was a young teen, on trips to the Natural History Museum, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the dinosaur skeletons.

The first Jurassic Park movies had been out for a while by then, and a lot of the other kids were unimpressed at the lack of teeth and blood and screaming. I, on the other hand, was amazed – and a tiny bit scared. I mean, if they did come to life, they’d be even more terrifying than the ones in the films. We’d be getting chased around by raging, rattling bones, wouldn’t we?

Perhaps it’s because I wanted to keep the two worlds separate – the life I have now, back at home, and the past that Em wants to discuss.

The café has an Italian-sounding name, and everything is painted in dusty shades of matte grey and black, like a giant chalkboard. The background noise is a pleasant mix of jazzy music and the hissing and spitting of a giant coffee machine. The staff are all stupidly young and stupidly beautiful, as though they are off-duty actors slumming it to gain life experience.

Outside, the sky is a relentlessly dull shroud. It looks like a lid made of dark clouds, held oppressively flat over the city in a way that says ‘the sun will never shine here again’.

It is early November, and several shops and bars have already swathed themselves and their picture windows in pretty Christmas lights. I have a seat at a table for two right by the café window, watching the world go by.

Several groups of schoolchildren are snaking through the streets in lines as they tour the museums with tired-looking teachers. There’s a busker wearing a duffel coat and a floppy red hat that makes him look like Paddington Bear, and a man who looks about a hundred and fifty years old, swathed entirely in neon-green skin-tight Lycra, promenading with a miniature poodle. Couriers and food-delivery people swish in and out of traffic on bikes; cars blare and bully their way along the congested roads.

Even at a quiet time of day, it is busy, alive, flowing with other people’s stories. Every lit-up window, every face looking down from the top deck of a bus, every set of feet that carries its owner away into the long tunnel to the Tube, is a story. Not that I’ll ever know any of them, because this is London.

Today, I am enjoying the anonymity of it all. I feel invisible, and it is liberating. With the anonymity, and perhaps simply the distance from my home and my real life, also comes a sense of recklessness that I haven’t felt for years. I am nervous about meeting Em, about discussing the past, about being away from home – but it also feels delicious.

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