upstairs. Surprised, and also shy. So, what then? A romantic? Lord, that might be even worse. She'd been one of those once herself, and look what it got her. All right, then, she said to herself, let's look at the facts. He's a professor in Philadelphia. I'm an artist in Cornwall. And this is where I belong. Is he going to toss aside a career at a major university to build stone hedges? Not likely. Then again, she'd overheard Jamie talking to someone at the Welly the other night about “this American” who was a “stone artist.” She remembered that she'd felt secretly proud of Andrew then.
Then it struck her that the reason she was lying here in the dark trying to figure out Andrew Stratton was that she cared for him. A lot. This astonished her. What if he did love her? Did she love him? No, that was ridiculous. She'd fallen for Jeremy because he was handsome and charming and, as it later turned out, rather wealthy. She'd agreed to marry him before she knew anything about him, really, anything deeper than the superficial charm. And that veneer had turned out to be very thin indeed. She wasn't falling for this Andrew chap either: far too little information upon which to base a decision.
Assuming love was something you decided upon …
Lee was halfway up her favorite tree, but the climbing was slow, what with having to hook the umbrella over a branch each time she climbed higher. After having been drenched more than once by summer showers while reading in her tree, she'd had the brilliant idea of keeping her old red umbrella with the white polka dots there permanently, hooked over a limb to be used as and when necessary. The thing about summer showers was that they were short, sharp, and unpredictable. It could be sunny one minute and absolutely pelting down the next. You could stay in the tree and get soaked, or you could climb down, run home, and also get soaked, by which time the shower would have passed. With a brolly you could wait it out and keep your book dry. She thought this arrangement exceptionally clever. And besides, she considered the dotted umbrella too childish to be seen in public with anyway. A proper seat—a couple of planks nailed to two limbs, maybe—would be nice, too, but Elizabeth at the Visitor Centre had told her the valley was owned by the National Trust and she knew they'd never go for that. The trust was very strict; her Dad leased land from the trust, and they even told him what kind of cattle he could graze there. Maybe a pillow would be okay, though. She was reading the latest Harry Potter, and the branch she favored tended to get hard after a couple of chapters.
Today, however, she wasn't reading. She'd come up to have a think. The tree was a good place to think, what with the water bubbling along below and the birds and the privacy and all. It was like Harry Potter's Platform 9¾ at King's Cross station; it was her portal to a special, if not actually magical world.
Today's think was about Nicki—well, Nicki and Drew, really. Nicki had called while she and Mum were having breakfast and, after listening a bit and glancing at Lee, Mum had taken the phone out into the hall, where she talked in urgent whispers. Naturally, Lee went to the door to listen—Nicki was her best friend, after all. She couldn't hear what Nicki was saying, of course, and all she could catch were snatches of what her mum was saying in response: “Andrew said what?” and “Why'd you run away, you silly cow?” and “Sweetie, you need to let go of Johnny.”
That was all Lee needed. Obviously, Nicki liked Drew but was seeing somebody named Johnny whom she needed to “let go of.” In her perch high above the river, now, Lee realized she felt kind of hurt that Nicki had a boyfriend she didn't know about. After all, she told Nicki absolutely everything that was going on in her life. Why had Nicki kept this a secret? She scrunched her eyes and made her mind sail above the village, on a reconnaissance mission, like Harry on his broomstick. But she couldn't think of anybody named Johnny in Boscastle—not in the upper town, not by the harbor, not in Forrabury Maybe he was from Camelford or Tintagel. Wherever he was from, it