Did You Miss Me?
Praise for Did You Miss Me?
‘Enjoyable, endearing and kind with a heroine we’d all like to have as a friend’
Katie Fforde, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Springtime Affair
‘Hilariously relatable. Did You Miss Me? feels like a nostalgic treat’
Sophie Cousens, This Time Next Year
‘An entertaining page-turner with a brilliantly relatable heroine. I couldn’t stop smiling as I raced through it’
Holly Miller, The Sight of You
‘I laughed out loud throughout this – no mean feat! This is a sure-fire summer hit!’
Laura Jane Williams, Our Stop
‘Full-on funny from the first page, filled with Sophia’s trademark wit and warmth. A great tonic to the year we’ve all had’
Zoë Folbigg, The Note
‘Sophia Money-Coutts’ writing is sharp and clever, and Did You Miss Me? is no exception. Super funny, super witty and so warm. I loved it’
Lia Louis, Dear Emmie Blue
‘A joyful, big-hearted balm of a book from one of my favourite writers. A funny, life- and love-affirming special book’
Cressida McLaughlin, The Cornish Cream Tea Wedding
Praise for Sophia Money-Coutts
‘Feel-good and enormous fun. It’s a delicious, warm, witty book’
Sophie Kinsella, Love Your Life
‘Bridget Jones’s Diary as interpreted by Julian Fellows with more explicit sex … Money-Coutts can certainly write, and some effective one-liners and unexpected poignant touches makes this a classy read’
Observer
‘Full of wit, warmth and heart’
Beth O’Leary, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Flatshare
‘Howlingly funny’
The Sunday Times
‘I love this author – her writing fizzes with life, you root for her characters and won’t stop laughing until the end … the perfect rom-com’
Daily Mail
‘Sophia Money-Coutts cements her stance as the new Queen of rom-coms’
Evening Standard
‘Sophia Money-Coutts is the kind of writer I’d like to be. She’s quick-witted, razor sharp and beyond entertaining. Reading her work is so enjoyable … A great read for romance fans’
Daily Record
‘Equally saucy and heart-warming … [it] will satisfy all your cravings for a fix of feel-good fiction’
Red
SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS is a journalist and author who spent five years studying the British aristocracy while working as Features Director at Tatler. Prior to that she worked as a writer and an editor for the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail in London, and The National in Abu Dhabi. She’s a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph called ‘Modern Manners’ and often appears on radio and television channels talking about important topics such as Prince Harry’s wedding and the etiquette of the threesome. Did You Miss Me? is her fourth novel.
Also by Sophia Money-Coutts
The Plus One
What Happens Now?
The Wish List
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021
Copyright © Sophia Money-Coutts 2021
Sophia Money-Coutts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008370602
Version 2021-07-22
Note to Readers
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008370619
I don’t mean to sound like ABBA, but this is
for anyone who’s taken a chance on love
Contents
Cover
Praise for Did You Miss Me?
Praise for Sophia Money-Coutts
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Six months later…
Acknowledgements
Extract
Chapter One
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
AT PRECISELY 6.10 A.M., as usual, my alarm went off.
Phone! Where was the phone? My hand groped the bedside table as Gus reached for me under the duvet, mumbling something.
‘Huh?’
‘TGI Friday,’ he clarified as his fingers ran up my stomach.
I fell back on my pillow, alarm silenced, knowing what came next. Sex came next because that’s what Gus and I did before work on Friday mornings. Quick, efficient sex where we avoided one another’s sour breath by panting into the other’s shoulder.
On Saturday mornings we went to the dry cleaners and collected croissants from the French bakery.
On Sunday mornings we bought a Sunday Times from the newsagent, ate eggs on sourdough (Gus) and eggs and avocado (me) in the posh coffee shop opposite the French bakery before returning to the dry cleaners to pick up the clothes we’d dropped off the day before.
But on Friday mornings, it was always sex.
‘Tees us up nicely for the weekend, Nell,’ Gus observed once, rolling off me with a little sigh of contentment, as if our love life was a Spotify playlist.
And right on time this morning, his fingers progressed up my ribcage.
‘Good morning, Mr Nipple,’ he said, rolling my left nipple between his thumb and his forefinger like a child with a marble.
After half a minute, he moved his hand to my right breast. ‘And Mrs Nipple,’ he added, before spending another thirty seconds there.
I supposed it was precision timing like this that made Gus such a good cook.
Satisfied that he’d paid due attention to both nipples, he dropped his hand to between my legs and burrowed around there with the same energy I’d seen him deploy on his sock drawer: concentrated and determined.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered after another min
ute of frowning at the ceiling, wondering what shirt to roll into my rucksack for the office. I reached for his hand to pull it up again. The white one from Sandro.
It wasn’t that I disliked sex with Gus. I enjoyed sex with Gus, especially at the beginning. He’d been the one who’d helped me discover why poets banged on about sex. But, eleven years into a relationship, there was the sort of sex that poets banged on about, and there was sort of sex you had on a Friday morning before work.
This was going to be very much the latter.
‘Oh. You sure?’
I nodded.
Unperturbed, Gus heaved himself on top of me and, through the gloom of our bedroom, waggled his eyebrows. ‘Morning, my little knuddelbär.’
Knuddelbär was German for ‘cuddle bear’. I’d had words with Gus about his peculiar terms of endearment before but he never paid any notice. He liked using them to remind me that he’d read German at Cambridge.
I smiled sleepily back and then he pushed into me with a groan, before dropping his head to my collarbone and muttering: ‘Forgot to tell you, the plumber’s coming later.’
‘What tiiiiime?’ I wheezed like an accordion, my voice husky not due to the eroticism of this situation, but because the weight of his torso was compressing my lungs.
A damp square directly under the shower tray had appeared on the kitchen ceiling a few weeks ago and Gus insisted he’d sort it out.
‘It’s the shower tray, it’s definitely leaking,’ he’d announced proudly, after half an hour in the bathroom accompanied by a backdrop of crashes as the shower gel and shampoo bottles cascaded to the floor. Gus was the most cultured man I’d ever met: he had strong feelings about Italian films and French wine, and spent his weekdays in a corporate office thrashing out complicated regulatory agreements for tech giants. But he wasn’t much of a handyman. Some years earlier, while trying to build an IKEA bookcase that we’d bought to shelve his growing collection of historical biographies, he’d confused a spanner with a hammer.
‘He said around seven,’ he panted on top of me, between thrusts.
‘I might be late, got a new client meeting todayyyyyyy,’ I wheezed again, as the air was squeezed out of my chest.
‘No… problem… I… can… be… here.’
‘Thank you,’ I rasped, tracing my nails up and down his back.
His thrusts sped up and he groaned into the pillow under my head. ‘Did… you… book… that… restaurant… for… lunch… tomorrow?’
‘That place in Chiswick? Mmmhm… ouch, Gus!’
He’d moved his hand to the wall behind us and caught a clump of my hair in his fingers. ‘Sorry! You’re… an… angel.’
Lunch tomorrow was with Hector and Harriet, two of Gus’s Cambridge friends, who’d just had a baby called Homer. When Gus emailed me with the news, I’d sent him a GIF of Homer Simpson but he’d replied solemnly explaining that the name was in homage to the ancient Greek poet. Obviously I knew that; Hector and Harriet would never have even seen an episode of The Simpsons. They were the sort of couple who boasted smugly about not owning a TV, as if they sat reading The Iliad every night.
‘Nearly… there,’ Gus panted over my shoulder.
I dropped my fingers to his bottom and pulled him deeper into me. That would help.
‘Ooooh,’ he puffed, speeding up again, his bottom like a pogo stick, in and out, in and out. ‘Nearly there… there, nearly… there, nearly… there.’
I knew what would work: I bent my fingers so my nails dug into his buttocks.
‘And I’m THERRRRRRRRRRE,’ roared Gus, breathing hotly into my neck. He froze and then collapsed, with his face in the pillow.
I turned my head to glance at the clock. 6.19 a.m. Perfect. I’d be in the office by seven.
I always ran into work carrying a rucksack of neatly rolled clothes. From our flat in Clapham, I wound up to Vauxhall roundabout, then along the south side of the river and over Waterloo Bridge.
Here was my favourite view of the city: to my right, the sun rising brightly (on a good day) over St Paul’s Cathedral; to my left, the Houses of Parliament. Then it was straight up Kingsway, the wide, four-lane street that buses thundered up and down which obscured a quieter square tucked behind it. My office overlooked this square, a worn patch of green where pigeons pecked at crumbs left underneath benches. It was a distance of five miles exactly, took forty minutes and I ran it every day – summer and winter.
I’d discovered running when I’d started work as a trainee lawyer at Spinks. The hours were crazy and I needed fresh air during the day without being away from my desk for too long. But I didn’t have time for the gym, so jogging into work became my solution, almost a form of meditation.
I was embarrassed at first, plodding flat-footed along the pavements, my bag swinging heavily on my back. But then I got better, faster, I bought proper kit and belted my new rucksack around my stomach. I became one of those people who wove through commuters and tourists, on and off the pavement, willing the lights to change up ahead so I didn’t have to stop. I joked to colleagues that I was like a dog that needed to be walked first thing. What I didn’t disclose was that running meant I arrived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields with endorphins surging around my body and I could handle sitting next to Gideon all day.
Gideon Fotheringham was my boss, a sixty-year-old partner at Spinks with a face as ruddy as raw steak from long lunches, and blond hair that was never brushed. He was a pig in a wig who earned just over £2.1m last year. Whenever a new client came in to see us, Gideon joked that he was ‘exceptionally good’ at divorce because he himself had done it twice. He’d recently remarried a third time, to a woman my age called Ophelia who had a single-digit IQ and spent most of her time deliberating over curtain patterns for their house in the Cotswolds.
Gideon also owned a flat in South Kensington which he supposedly used during the week, although he didn’t always sleep there. More than once, when a graduate trainee, I had to race to Tyrwhitt’s in the morning to fetch a fresh shirt since he hadn’t been home the previous night. I always warned new female trainees not to get in the lift or find themselves alone in the boardroom with him.
But then Spinks and Co was full of Gideons. It was London’s oldest, most traditional law firm, situated in a Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse protected by shiny black railings outside, and with thick carpets, mahogany doors and fridges full of small Perrier bottles inside. All the partners were white sixty-something men who’d been to Eton and Oxford; from midday on Fridays, champagne was served to them in the boardroom. Although being old and traditional didn’t necessarily make it inefficient in its methods. These men were piranhas in pin-striped suits, going after the biggest corporate and commercial cases they could – and winning most of them.
At law school, places on Spinks’ trainee scheme were fought after, the biggest prize for ambitious students. I’d only applied because Gus said I should, and he was proved right when I won a place, much to my astonishment, having assumed they’d mostly go to the posh boys on my course who wore Barbours to their lectures. I was an unworldly student who’d grown up in a cold, damp Northumberland village and never even been to London until I started law school. Landing a contract at Spinks seemed a miracle.
After rotating through different departments as a trainee, I’d chosen to qualify into the family law department, knowing that I wanted to work with actual human beings and the cases that affected their lives rather than on boring tax schemes and corporate fraud claims which took years of court time to unravel. This meant I mostly dealt with rich people’s divorces – footballers splitting from pop stars and minor British royals separating from their cousins, that sort of thing.
As I ran along the river, I thought about today’s priority: a meeting with a new client. Linzi Lemon was a former model (known as ‘Luscious Linzi’ when she’d started out on Page 3) who’d recently decided to separate from her celebrity chef husband. Larry had a string of Italian restaurants in shopping centres across th
e country and appeared on a cooking show every Saturday morning.
Unfortunately, Linzi had recently discovered Larry and a guest from his TV show doing something unmentionable with a courgette in his dressing room, and decided to start divorce proceedings.
The Lemons had been married for ten years and had two children – Lewis, nine, and Liberty, seven. From what I’d already gathered, they owned at least three houses – in Battersea, in Poole and St Ives. I’d also watched a few YouTube clips of Larry’s show and wondered how he managed to seduce any woman, let alone with a courgette, given his carrot-coloured skin and the belly as round as a basketball that hung over his apron.
But after several years of family law, it took more than a vegetable sex toy to surprise me.
It’s like they say, criminal lawyers see bad people at their best; divorce lawyers see good people at their worst. Although not all our clients were that good. One claimed she wanted a divorce because her husband would no longer let their dog sleep on the bed; another that his wife had gone to Korea for a facelift without telling him. A French lady came to us in tears a few months back saying she’d discovered pictures on her husband’s phone that revealed he visited a prostitute in Chelsea who indulged his fetish for dressing up like a baby, wearing a nappy and sucking on a giant dummy.
I’d worked at Spinks for nearly a decade, listened to hundreds of clients discuss the reasons for the collapse of their marriage and, as a result, become fairly unshockable.
I enjoyed it, too. I liked helping people out of romantic tangles, helping them find freedom again, to realize an oath they’d made in front of a priest didn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t change their minds later on. Two years ago, Spinks had promoted me to senior associate which, in turn, had sparked my ambition to become the firm’s first female partner by the time I turned thirty-four in August. I was at my desk by seven fifteen every morning and usually got home around eight, but often later. I answered my phone on the weekend and kept it on at night in case a client needed me. When I was away from the office I checked my email approximately every three seconds. When I was in the office, I barely moved from my desk.