The Road Trip: The heart-warming new novel from the author of The Flatshare and The Switch by Beth O'Leary (books to read now TXT) 📕

– I’d intended to take three weeks out from our trip for a family holiday here at Cherry’s villa, but my relatives all cancelled after a classic rerun of an Abbott family favourite, the perennial ‘everyone is a disappointment’ dispute. This old gem invariably ends with my father screaming spittle and invectives at us all, and my brother and I promptly spending reckless amounts of cash to spite him. This year I have gone easy on him: I’ve merely robbed him of the opportunity to get his money back by attending this holiday solo.

Mum is still leaving me voicemails three times a day. They’re all the same: Dylan, my darling, your father is very sorry, please do call us back.

Funny how my father never phones me himself, given how terribly sorry he is.

My long summer in Europe was his idea. Like the classic English gentleman, I should go and sow my wild oats on the Continent before returning to the duties of real life. I have resolutely rejected this idea all summer, of course – I’m here looking for Grace.

But Grace is proving very hard to find. And here’s Addie, tiny and beautiful, living fairylike beneath my feet.

‘So who was it who saw your friend in La Roque-Alric?’ Addie asks, as we wind our way through the vineyards. There’s nobody on the road but the two of us, and even through the wind you can hear the crickets rattling out their strange song from the dry undergrowth bordering the tarmac.

‘Just a friend of a friend.’ I wave an arm vaguely. The truth is, the lead came from Instagram-stalking people who had liked Grace’s last post; I’d rather not share this with Addie. I’m sobering up a little – perhaps it’s the fresh mountain air – and without the edge of the wine, I’m beginning to feel somewhat out of my league here. Addie is sharp and self-possessed and has really quite phenomenal legs and I don’t think I put any product in my hair this morning. I surreptitiously check – no, nothing, damn.

‘Is she missing, or what?’ Addie asks.

I think for a moment. ‘She’s whimsical,’ I say eventually. ‘She likes to keep people guessing.’

Addie raises her eyebrows. ‘She sounds tedious.’

I frown. ‘She’s wonderful.’

‘If you say so.’

Grace was with Marcus for most of third year, though neither of them ever gave their relationship any sort of label. She’d flirted with me outrageously after a tutors’ dinner in Trinity term, and Marcus had laughed. Why not? he’d said, when Grace had climbed into my lap and I’d looked at him, drunk, a little lost. We share everything else. So Grace and I became . . . whatever-we-were just before the summer, and then she disappeared. Off to travel, boys, her note had read. Come catch me. G

It was exciting for a while, and it’s given a shape to mine and Marcus’s aimless wanderings around Europe, but we still haven’t found her, and the clues she’s been leaving us – odd texts, late-night voicemails, messages passed on by youth-hostel owners – are becoming briefer and fewer. I’ve been getting rather worried about her losing interest in the both of us and the trail running cold; once that happens, I’ll have no choice but to answer the question of what the hell I’m doing with my life, a question I am at great pains to avoid.

Ahead of us, the road winds its way up the hillside into dark woodland, then opens out again to reveal parched, chalky fields scored with vines. I don’t mean to be critical but Addie is driving far too slowly – these tailback roads are meant for speeding on, but she’s crawling up the hill and braking for every corner like an old lady in a Škoda.

‘You strike me as a man who gets driven more than he drives,’ Addie says. ‘But I can feel you back-seat driving.’

‘My father gets driven,’ I say. ‘I drive.’

‘Well, look at you.’ Addie laughs. ‘Aren’t you just a regular guy!’

I frown, irritated – with her, for a second, and then with myself – but before I can think of a suitable response we round a bend and above us is a village cut into the rockface, so beautiful it distracts me altogether. The rough stone of the cliff is dotted with houses in the same shade of pale, sandy yellow, their higgledy roofs slanting this way and that between cypress and olive trees. A castle sits atop the hill, the slitted windows of its turret turned our way like narrowed eyes.

I whistle between my teeth. ‘This place belongs in a fairy tale.’

‘It’s my sister’s least favourite place around here,’ Addie says. ‘She hates heights.’

‘You have a rather negative outlook on the world,’ I tell her, as we wind our way up towards the village. Fields of olive trees give way to dense hedges and stone walls cut into the side of the hill, with scrubby bleached grass clinging doggedly to the crevices.

Addie looks surprised. ‘Me?’

‘The fairy-tale castle is too high up, my whimsical friend is tedious, my singing voice is not to your liking . . .’

She pauses and purses her lips in thought. That mole shifts. Suddenly looking at her lips is too much for me: I’m gone, thinking about kissing her, thinking about her mouth against my skin. She catches my eye and her gaze seems somehow molten.

I swallow. She turns back to the road, shifting into a passing place as a rattling open-backed truck comes barrelling down the hill.

‘I don’t think of myself as negative. Practical, maybe.’

I make a face accidentally – still tipsy, then – and she catches it and laughs.

‘What?’

‘Just . . . ah. Practical. It’s the sort of thing you say about someone matronly and stout. An aunt with a knack for darning socks.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ Addie says dryly, pulling her sunglasses down from the top of her head as the road twists again, bringing us head-on with the low, fierce sun.

‘It was you who said practical,’ I point out. ‘I’d call