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) 📕

‘Only three hundred and fifty-eight miles to go,’ he says, quietly enough that only I can hear him.

Marcus is explaining to Deb that he is ‘often misunderstood’, and is ‘actually in the process of reforming, much like a rake from a poorly written nineteenth-century novel’.

‘Three hundred and fifty-eight miles,’ I say. ‘I’m sure it’ll fly by.’

Dylan

We speed along the A34. Already the heat is as thick as honey, viscous and sweet. It’s turning into a glorious summer morning: the sky is a deep lapis lazuli blue, and the fields are sun-kissed and yellow-bright on either side of the road. It’s the sort of day that tastes of crushed ice and suntan lotion, ripe strawberries, the sweet head rush of too many gin and tonics.

‘Chocolate’s going to melt at this rate,’ says Addie, turning the air conditioning as cold as it’ll go.

I perk up.

‘Chocolate?’

‘Not for you,’ she says, without looking away from the road.

I sag back in my seat. I thought we’d made a little progress – earlier she turned to me and offered half a smile, like the smallest bite of something delicious, and my heart soared. A real smile from Addie is a true prize: hard to win and utterly heart-stopping when it comes. Disturbingly, this seems to be no less true now than it was two years ago. But she’s gone cold again; it’s been thirty minutes since we left the services and she’s not spoken to me directly until now. I have no right to object, and it shouldn’t make me angry, but it does – it feels like pettiness, and I like to think we’re better than that.

I shift in my seat and she glances across at me, then reaches to turn the radio up. It’s rattling out some pop song, something bouncy and repetitive, a compromise between Addie’s tastes and Marcus’s; at this volume I can’t quite catch the inane chatter in the back seat. Last I heard, Rodney was explaining the rules of real-life quidditch to Deb, with the occasional amused interlude from Marcus.

‘Go on,’ Addie says. ‘Whatever you want to say, just say it.’

‘Am I that transparent?’ I say, as lightly as I can manage.

‘Yes.’ Her voice is frank. ‘You are.’

‘I just . . .’ I swallow. ‘You’re still punishing me.’

The moment I’ve said it, I instantly wish I hadn’t.

‘I’m punishing you?’

The air con is a slow, warm breath frittering away on my face; I’d rather crack the windows, but earlier Marcus complained about what it did to his hair, and I don’t have the patience to go through that conversation again. I shift so the lukewarm stream of air hits my cheek side-on – this way I can watch Addie driving. The tips of her ears have gone red, just visible through the ends of her hair. She’s wearing sunglasses now, and her other glasses are propped up on her head, pushing her sweeping fringe back from her face; I can just see the brushstrokes of her old hair colour at the roots.

‘You still won’t speak to me.’

‘Not speaking was never about punishing you, Dylan. It actually wasn’t about you at all. I needed the space.’

I look down at my hands. ‘I just thought you’d stop needing space eventually, I suppose.’

She glances at me; her eyes are unreadable through the sunglasses’ filter.

‘You were waiting?’ she asks.

‘Not . . . not waiting, per se, but . . .’

I trail off, and the silence rolls ahead of us, ribbon-like, too long. I catch sight of the expression of the passenger in the car across from us on the motorway – a middle-aged woman in a cap, staring wide-eyed at our car. I glance back at the others and imagine what she’s seeing. A motley collection of twenty-somethings cheerfully crammed into a bright red Mini at half seven in the morning on a bank holiday Sunday.

She has no idea. If one could harness secrets for energy, we wouldn’t need petrol – we’d have enough grudges in this car to take us all the way to Scotland.

THEN

Addie

I stare at the ceiling. The caretaker’s flat in Cherry’s villa is underneath the house – same size as the first floor, just at basement level. Beautiful, if you don’t mind not having any windows. When it means living in the south of France all summer for free board and a few hundred euros a month, I don’t mind not having windows at all.

A family arrived this morning, friends of Cherry’s parents. They got a cab from the airport, which is lucky because last night me and Deb drank three bottles of wine on the balcony of the master suite and stargazed until the sky got light. I’m probably still not legal to drive and it’s basically midday already.

I’m pretty sure this is the summer of my life. It’s like . . . there’s an epic backing track playing, or the saturation’s turned up. This summer I’m not little Addie, trailing behind. I’m not the person you forget when you’re telling your mates who’s at the pub. I’m not the girl you ghost because you’ve met someone better. I can be whoever I want to be.

This is my summer, basically. Not that you’d know it right now, because I’m too hungover to move much.

I frown up at the ceiling. Something’s up with this new family. The caretaker’s flat isn’t soundproofed – we always have a pretty good idea of exactly what’s going on up there. More than we’d like, generally. But now I can hardly hear anything. They’re definitely here – the cab woke me when it pulled up earlier. And there’s movement. Just . . . quiet movement. Like, one person’s worth of movement.

One set of steps making its way across the kitchen to the wine cooler and back again. One shower running. One window left open so that a bedroom door slams when the mistral blows through.

I wake Deb at quarter to two in the afternoon. She shuffles