Beth O'Leary

What if the end of the road is just the beginning? Four years ago, Dylan and Addie fell in love under the Provence sun. Wealthy Oxford student Dylan was staying at his friend Cherry's enormous French villa; wild child Addie was spending her summer as the on-site caretaker. Two years ago, their relationship officially ended. They haven't spoken since.

The Road Trip

Ok he is totally still in love with her so the real question is not when they're going to get together again but what happened that made them break up

Sophia

For a flash of a second I see the driver's face in the rearview mirror. She reminds me of Addie - if you think about someone enough, you start to see them everywhere.

The driver has wound the window down, and she's stretched an arm out, gripping the roof of the car. Her wrist is looped with bracelets, glimmering silver-red in the car lights' glare.

The gesture is so achingly familiar - the arm, slender and pale, the assertion of it, those bracelets, the round, childish beads stacked up her wrist. I'd know them anywhere.

My heart jolts like I've missed a step because it is her, it's Addie, her eyes meeting mine in the rear-view mirror.

Help he's still so achingly in love with her I can't-

Every time I look at Addie something leaps inside me, dolphin-like, and you'd think after twenty months it wouldn't hurt quite like this but it does, it hurts, the kind of hurt that makes you want to fucking wail.

If someone would talk about me like this I would simply die - why is he so f*cking cute?!

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.

There is a knock at the car window, passenger side. I shriek. My hand flies to my chest.

But Dylan's reaction is the most surprising - he throws an arm out in front of me, as though we're still moving and we're about to hit something.

This is dangerous. Not the car troubles, I mean, but Dylan.

For a split second there, as I watched him strolling across the tarmac with his hair blowing in the wind, I didn't mind missing out on Dolly Parton and Minstrels with my sister.

Addie is brighter than that sort of talk. She is wild and clever, sharp and bright, always twisting out of my reach. She isn't mine.

The Road Trip quotes

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