to provide enormous support and terrific therapy. Emily Kitchin, my editor, is not only a very talented, unflappable and stupendously encouraging person, she is also incredibly cheerful on Twitter and I am a big fan of that. The whole team at HQ remain the dream to work with. On the editorial side, special thanks to Lisa Milton, Joe Thomas, Katrina Smedley, Mel Hayes and Jo Rose, who quite literally never seem to stop working. I’d also like to salute the production skills of Angie Dobbs, Halema Begum and Tom Keane and the colourful genius of Charlotte Phillips, who designed the cover *does actual salute from behind laptop*. Writing this against the backdrop of the news, as the coronavirus crisis deepens, I am in awe of the lengths everyone is going to in order that books continue to be published. Thank you.
I wrote much of this book while living in Norfolk, in a house I borrowed from the exceptionally kind de Stacpoole family. Every morning, I got up and wrote for several hours before striding out across the marsh and beaches of the North Norfolk coast thinking about Florence, Rory and Zach. I also visited Sandringham three times while up there, so I’d like to thank the Queen for that distraction as well as for the excellent shortbread sold in the Sandringham gift shop. Well worth a trip for that alone.
Family and friends, to say ‘I’d be lost without you’ is such a cliché. It’s also not true. I’d actually be nothing without you. Particularly at low moments, on bad days and during the weeks when life can feel heavy, you are everything to me and, although I often grumble about the WhatsApp groups, I’d much rather have them than not. Thank you all.
Keep reading for an extract from the laugh-out-loud romcom from Sophia Money-Coutts, What Happens Now?
Prologue
I WASN’T SURE I had enough wee for the stick. I pressed my bladder through my jeans with my fingertips, holding the pregnancy test in the other hand. Not bursting but it would have to do. I peeled off the top of the foil packet, balanced the stick on the top of the loo roll and unzipped my flies. I sat down and reached back for the stick.
Looking down at my thighs, I realized I was sitting too far forward on the loo seat, so I shuffled my bottom backwards and widened my knees until there was enough space to reach my hand underneath me, trying to avoid grazing the loo bowl with my knuckles. Christ, this was unsanitary. There must be better ways.
I narrowed my eyes at the bath in front of me and wondered if it would be easier to step into that, crouch down and wee on the stick in the bath, letting it trickle out down the plughole. No worse than weeing in the shower, right?
I shook my head. I was in my parents’ bathroom. Couldn’t do a pregnancy test by pissing on a stick in my mum’s bath. She loved that bath. She spent hours in it wearing her frilly bath hat, shouting at Radio Norfolk.
I frowned down into the dark space between my legs again where the stick was poised in mid-air, ready for action. What a simple bit of plastic to deliver such potentially life-changing news. It was the shape of the vape my friend Clem carried round with him everywhere, loaded with lemon sherbet-flavoured liquid.
‘Why lemon sherbet?’ I’d asked him once. He’d shrugged and said he just liked sweets.
I shook my head again as if to try and physically dispel thoughts of Clem and lemon sherbet. Concentrate, Lil. The stick. Wee on the stick. Get on with it. But I couldn’t. At this, the most important moment of my bladder’s life so far, it had stage fright. Funny how, when you really concentrate on weeing, you can’t. And yet normally, when you sit yourself down what, six, seven, eight times a day, out it comes, no trouble.
I sighed. The other problem was I wasn’t sure where to hold the stick in order to catch maximum wee. I shifted my hand slightly towards the front. Was that a good place? Maybe. But if it came out as more of a trickle than a jet it would need to be in the middle.
‘Oi,’ came Jess’s voice from outside the bathroom door. I’d locked it because I knew she’d come in otherwise. ‘Have you done it yet?’
‘Shhhh,’ I hissed back. ‘No. I haven’t. And pressure from you won’t help.’