My head whips up so fast my glasses go flying backward off my ears and over the headrest. As the car in front stops sharply, and I fail to hit the brakes on the seventy-thousand-quid Mercedes that belongs to Marcus's father, I have just enough time to regret this. My heart jolts like I've missed a step because it is her, it's Addie, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.Įarlier, Marcus gave a similarly horrified scream when we passed a Greggs advertising vegan sausage rolls, so I don't react as fast as I perhaps otherwise would. The gesture is so achingly familiar-the arm, slender and pale, the assertion of it, and those bracelets, the round, childish beads stacked up her wrist. Her wrist is looped with bracelets, glimmering silver-red in the car lights' glare.
The road tripper driver#
The driver has wound the window down, and she's stretched an arm out, gripping the roof of the car. Marcus coughs and fidgets some more, and I almost take pity and tell him it's all right, he doesn't have to say it if he's not ready, but as we idle past the bookie's another flash of light hits the car in front and Marcus is forgotten. "I'm just saying, we hit some bumps, I get that, and I didn't handle things well, and that's-that's really unfortunate that that happened."Īstonishing, really, the linguistic knots in which he will tie himself to avoid a simple I'm sorry. The eyes of the driver in front are lit again in the mirror, her eyebrows slightly raised behind squarish glasses. Please get your head out of your arse so that you can actually listen." She reminds me of Addie-if you think about someone enough, you start to see them everywhere. We're close behind them, both following the slow, rattling path of a lorry ahead.įor a flash of a second I see the driver's face in the rearview mirror. It's half past four in the morning, the air thick with duvet-darkness, but the bland yellow light from the shop illuminates the three people in the car in front as if they've just moved into a spotlight. "Isn't it the course of true love that never runs smooth? A Midsummer Night's Dream, I believe." The word sorry did feature, but it was preceded by I'm not very good at saying, which somewhat undermined its sincerity. This is my first experience of a heartfelt apology from Marcus, and so far it has involved six clichŽs, two butchered literary references and no eye contact. "The road of friendship never did run smooth, is what I'm saying," Marcus tells me, fidgeting with his seat belt." Cramped into the same space, Dylan and Addie are forced to confront the choices they made that tore them apart-and ask themselves whether that final decision was the right one after all.
So, along with Dylan’s best friend, Addie’s sister, and a random guy on Facebook who needed a ride, they squeeze into a space-challenged Mini and set off across Britain.
The car Dylan was driving is wrecked, and the wedding is in rural Scotland-he’ll never get there on time by public transport.
It’s the day before Cherry’s wedding, and Addie and Dylan crash cars at the start of the journey there. Today, Dylan’s and Addie’s lives collide again. Two years ago, their relationship officially ended. 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. What if the end of the road is just the beginning? Four years ago, Dylan and Addie fell in love under the Provence sun. Two exes reach a new level of awkward when forced to take a road trip together in this endearing and humorous novel by the author of the international bestseller The Flatshare.
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