Preview of How to Find Your Way Home by Katy Regan
Preview of How to Find Your Way Home by Katy Regan
CHAPTER ONE
EMILY
March, 2018,
LONDON
If you’d looked through the window of my flat that Saturday evening in early March, what would you have seen? A warmly-lit open-plan space for living and dining. In the foreground, a soft, vintage leather sofa, a 60s floor lamp emanating a cosy orange glow. Further back, a dining table, tastefully laid with Moroccan-inspired eclectic crockery and flickering with tea-lights.
Finally, at the very back, the kitchen area; bijou but chic with its metro tiles and aluminium pendant lights over the kitchen island and hob, on which there is a Le Creuset dish bubbling with deliciousness and, beside it, a man: tall, boyishly chiselled and bequiffed, the sleeves of his navy-blue shirt rolled up to reveal toned forearms, peeling and stoning fresh lychees, a cocktail shaker at the ready.
Does he live alone? You might wonder. Perhaps too many feminine touches for this to be a bachelor pad and you’d be right. But you wouldn’t have seen me, owner and sole official inhabitant, chief orchestrator of this picture of aspirational living - thirty-something urbanites preparing to entertain. That’s because I am upstairs, up the polished slatted staircase to the right, still in a towel after my shower, hair in a turban, sitting on my bed in the light of my laptop. I’ve got Facebook open, my heart up somewhere near my throat, where it seems to live permanently these days, as I type the name into the search box:
Stephen Nelson
I click on ‘show all’ as I always do, and press my palms together, fingertips to my lips in an unconscious praying action. Facebook reveals sixty-one of them. I scroll down to where I left off yesterday, ten Stephen Nelsons down, fifty-one to go. Why couldn’t he have been called Xavier or, I dunno, Piers? This would all have been so much easier.
Stephen Nelson number ten is a Man Utd supporter (that’s him out then), and appears to have met Barry Mannilow several times (that’s definitely him out). Number eleven went to Preston Poly but has somehow found himself living in Kazakhstan - moving on. Number 13, though? ‘Artist’ it says, avatar of an eagle - my stomach seems to float. I click on it, my pulse drumming, but this Stephen Nelson must be seventy if he’s a day, and so I close my laptop with a defeated sigh just as my boyfriend James - the handsome lychee peeler with the nice forearms, I’m sure you guessed that - pops his head around the bedroom door, face full of affection and, I know it, lust. We’ve only been together five months and are very much still in that stage. The stage I don’t ever seem able to get beyond, before things fizzle out, for reasons that currently baffle me.
“Hi,” I smile.
“Hi,” he says. “I brought you a little livener.” And he puts a lychee martini, complete with lychee pinned to the glass rim, on the bedside table. I thank him. He tips his head to the side and smiles at me - he has very sexy dimples. Then he frowns. “You on Facebook again?” he says. “Em, you know it makes you feel crap and anyway shouldn’t you be getting ready sweetheart? They’ll be here in twenty minutes…In fact, just enough time...”
And he hops onto the bed.
“Just enough?” I tease. “You’ll be lucky to last half that.”
“Right!” And with that he burrows and growls into my neck, pretending to eat it as I squeal with laughter, pulling my towel tighter. “Get off! I’m joking! We do not have enough time!”
So, he flounces off in a mock-huff and the smile drops from my face as I put my laptop on the floor, my chest tight because I know that’s it until tomorrow now - and I set about getting ready quickly. I leave my hair to dry naturally wavy, put on mascara, lipstick and the outfit I chose a week ago: a grey-marl pleated skirt and hot-orange scoop-back t-shirt with the slogan ‘happy days’ across the middle. Silver hoops. Bare feet. It’s an ensemble I hope hits just the right note on the effort scale, that says I’m totally at ease in my own skin, my own home.
Ten seconds later, the doorbell rings and I pad downstairs to find James is already greeting Dan and Vanessa, who are ebullient, excited to have been invited for dinner at their best friend’s new girlfriend’s flat at last, laden with gifts of orchids and botanical gins. This will be the third time we’ve met but the first I’ve hosted, and here begins one of the last evenings I remember of my old life. The life I had constructed like the tough, prickled outer-shell of a horse chestnut around me, before it was cracked open and the truth of my life was laid bare, as frighteningly untouched and uncharted as that shiny conker hidden inside.
Excerpted from HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY HOME by Katy Regan, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022
Preview of How to Find Your Way Home by Katy Regan
