as he always did, that he didn’t know he had whipped cream on his top lip. ‘Got much homework?’
‘I have to read a book I’ve never read before,’ Tilly said, straight-faced.
‘Goodness, sweetheart,’ Grandad said with a grin. ‘You’d better crack on with that immediately, if you even have a hope of finishing in a week.’
Tilly giggled as she stuck a finger in her whipped cream, thinking of the pile of five books she had stacked next to her bed for her holiday reading.
‘Ms Webber did say that after the holidays we’d be starting a project about our favourite characters from books, and that if we wanted to get a head start on that we should think about who ours were. Who would you pick?’
‘What a question,’ Grandad said, licking the cream from his lip. ‘I must admit my gut instinct is pulling me towards Sherlock Holmes, but I’ll have to have a proper think and get back to you with my official answer. Now, other than your particularly arduous workload, what else do you have planned for the week? Is Grace coming over?’
‘I don’t know why you and Grandma keep asking me about Grace,’ Tilly said.
‘Do we?’ Grandad said, surprised. ‘Well, I thought she was your best friend?’
‘I don’t have a best friend,’ Tilly said firmly. ‘I’ve realised there isn’t anyone who’s best-friend material at school.’
‘And what exactly makes someone best-friend material?’ Grandad asked.
‘Someone who sticks by you; someone who never gets bored of talking to you. Someone who’s adventurous, and clever, and brave, and funny …’ Tilly said, checking her criteria off on her fingers. ‘Someone like Anne Shirley or Alice from Wonderland – those are my favourite characters, incidentally.’ With very few exceptions Tilly found that she much preferred the company of characters in her books to most of the people she knew in real life.
‘I’m not sure best friends are a one-size-fits-all sort of situation, Tilly,’ Grandad said carefully. ‘Sometimes a person who becomes a friend is the least likely person you’d expect. Friends should bring out the best in you, not be the same as you. I’m sure you’re someone’s perfect fit.’
Tilly tried to imagine herself as the perfect fit for a potential best friend. But when she thought about herself too directly she felt sort of fuzzy round the edges, like a photograph that was blurred, and when she compared herself to the characters she met in books their ink and paper felt more real than her bones and skin.
‘And, for now, you’ve always got me,’ Grandad continued. ‘If you’re in the market for an elderly best friend with whiskers and a bookshop.’
‘Exactly,’ Tilly said, trying to erase all thoughts of hypothetical best friends from her mind. ‘I don’t need anyone who doesn’t live in Pages & Co.’
‘So, what’s the plan for today?’ Grandma asked, handing Tilly a mug of milky tea.
‘Reading, mainly,’ Tilly said.
‘Do you want to wander down to the woods with me later?’ Grandad suggested. ‘Or I need to pop into the florist’s and confirm all the flowers for the Wonderland party on Wednesday night – I could do with your eye for colour. We’ve created a monster with this party, I sometimes think. Every year the customers and publishing folk seem to expect a more extravagant theme.’
Tilly shrugged.
‘Do you ever wish,’ she said, ignoring Grandad’s question and turning to her grandparents with a serious look on her face, ‘that you had a relatively good friend in mortal peril that you could go and rescue?’
‘I can’t say that’s something I spend much time thinking about,’ Grandma said, exchanging a look with Grandad across the table.
Tilly sighed. ‘I just wish there was something more exciting to do than go to the florist’s,’ she said. ‘No one has proper adventures in real life.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I do, my dear, but it never hurts to keep a weather eye open for adventures, even small ones.’
‘But for now,’ Grandma said, ‘why don’t you stick with an adventure in a book and, if the rain ever stops, we can head out for a wander later.’
Tilly opened the door into the bookshop and went to find Jack, who looked after the snug café area that took up a corner of the ground floor. When she reached the mismatched collection of chairs and tables he was nowhere to be found, so she went to see if there were any cakes she could sample, but, just as she reached out for a gooey-looking chocolate brownie, Jack’s head popped over the counter.
‘Aha! Caught red-handed!’ he said.
‘I was just looking,’ Tilly said sheepishly, before registering the wide smile on his face. ‘Why do you have honey on your forehead?’ she asked.
‘I’m experimenting with pop cakes,’ he said, holding up an ice-cube tray filled with sticky honey. ‘Remember in The Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton? They eat those cakes that explode with honey when you bite into them? I’m going to freeze the honey so I can bake it in the middle of cupcakes. At least that’s the plan – the honey is proving a little, well, uncooperative.’
Jack, who was nineteen and saving up to go to pastry school in Paris, took his role as a bookshop baker very seriously and was always trying to recreate cakes and bakes from books. Tilly was under strict instructions to tell him whenever she came across a particularly tasty-sounding dish in a book she was reading. She had a suspicion he was using some of the new cookbooks for inspiration as well, as every once in a while she’d had to wipe off a smear of icing from a spine sticking out from a shelf, as though it had been put back in a hurry.
‘Do you want some hot chocolate?’ Jack offered as he manhandled the ice-cube tray into the tiny freezer section of the café fridge. ‘I’ll bring it up.’
Tilly nodded and grinned and then headed to her favourite reading corner on the first floor. Ten minutes later Jack sat down next
