Jojo Moyes: The One Plus One

He reached out then and gently took hold of the belt loop of her jeans. He pulled her slowly towards him. She couldn’t tear her eyes from his hands. And then, when she finally did lift her face to his, he was gazing straight at her and Jess found she was crying and smiling, perhaps the first time she had smiled properly in about a million years.

‘I want to see what we can add up to, Jessica Rae Thomas. All of us. What do you say?’

So the uniform for St Anne’s is royal blue with a yellow stripe. You can’t hide in a St Anne’s blazer. Some girls in my class take them off when they’re going home, but it doesn’t bother me. When you work hard to get somewhere, it’s quite nice to show people where you belong. The funny thing is that when you see another St Anne’s student outside school it’s the custom to wave to each other, like people who drive Fiat 500s. Sometimes it’s a big wave, like Sriti, my best friend, who always looks like she’s on a desert island trying to attract a passing plane, and sometimes it’s just a tiny lifting of your fingers down by your school bag, like Dylan Carter, who gets embarrassed about talking to anyone, even his own brother. But everyone does it. You might not know the person waving, but you wave at the person in the uniform. It’s what the school’s always done. It shows that we’re all a family, apparently.

I always wave, especially if I’m on the bus.

Ed picks me up in the car on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that’s when I have maths club and Mum works late at her handywoman thing. She has three people working for her now. She says they work ‘with’ her, but she’s always showing them how to do stuff and telling them which jobs to go to and Ed says she’s still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of being a boss. He says she’s getting used to it. He pulls a face when he says it, like Mum’s the boss of him, but you can tell he likes it.

She takes Friday afternoons off and meets me at school and we make biscuits together, just me and her. It’s been nice, but I’m going to have to tell her I’d rather stay late at school, especially now I’m going to do my A level in the spring. Dad hasn’t had a chance to come down yet, but we Skype every week and he says he’s definitely going to. He’s got two job interviews next week, and lots of irons in the fire.

Nicky is at sixth-form college in Southampton. He wants to go to art school. He has a girlfriend called Lila, which Mum said was a surprise on all sorts of counts. He still wears lots of eyeliner but he’s letting his hair grow out to its natural colour, which is sort of a dark brown. He’s now a whole head taller than Mum and sometimes when they’re in the kitchen he thinks it’s funny to rest his elbow on her shoulder, like she’s a bar or something. He still writes in his blog sometimes, but mostly he says he’s too busy so it would be okay if I take it over for a bit. Next week it will be less personal stuff and more about maths. I’m really hoping lots of you like maths.

We paid back 77 per cent of the people who sent us money for Norman. Fourteen per cent said they would rather we just gave the money to charity, and we were never able to trace the other nine per cent. Mum says it’s fine, because the important thing was that we tried, and that sometimes it’s okay just to accept people’s generosity as long as you say thank you. She said to say thank you and she’ll never forget the kindness of strangers.

Ed is here literally ALL the time. He sold his house at Beachfront and he now owns a really small flat in London and Nicky and I have to sleep on a put-you-up bed when we’re there but most of the time he stays with us. He works in the kitchen on his laptop and talks to his friend in London on this really cool set of headphones and he goes up and down for meetings in the Mini. He keeps meaning to get a new car, as it’s really hard to fit all of us in when we want to go somewhere, but in a weird way none of us really wants him to. It’s kind of nice in the little car, all squashed together, and in that car I don’t feel so guilty about the drool.

Norman is happy. He does all the things the vet said he’d be able to do, and Mum says that’s enough for us. The law of probability combined with the law of large numbers states that to beat the odds, sometimes you have to repeat an event an increasing number of times in order to get you to the outcome you desire. The more you do, the closer you get. Or, as I explain it to Mum, basically, sometimes you just have to keep going.

I’ve taken Norman into the garden and thrown the ball for him eighty-six times this week. He still never brings it back.

But I think we’ll get there.

Thank you as ever to my amazing Penguin teams on both sides of the Atlantic. At Penguin UK I am in particular indebted to Louise Moore, Clare Bowron, Francesca Russell, Elizabeth Smith, as well as Mari Evans and Viviane Basset. In the US thank you to Pamela Dorman, Kiki Koroshetz, Louise Braverman, Rebecca Lang, Annie Harris and Carolyn Coleburn. Thank you, too, to all the lovely media escorts – Cindy Hamel Sellers, Carolyn Kretzer, Debb Flynn Hanrahan, Esther Levine, Larry Lewis and Mary Gielow, who have spent so much time with me over there this year. In Germany, thank you to Katharina Dornhofer, Marcus Gaertner and Grusche Junker, and all the team at Rowohlt for your wonderful work.

At Curtis Brown, thank you yet again to my indefatigable agent Sheila Crowley, and to Rebecca Ritchie, Katie McGowan, Sophie Harris, Rachel Clements, Alice Lutyens as well as Jessica Cooper, Kat Buckle, Sven van Damme and of course Jonny Geller.

Thank you to Robin Oliver and Jane Foran for advice on insider trading law. I have had to skew the legal procedure slightly to fit the plot, so any errors or anomalies are entirely my own.

More generally thank you to Pia Printz, Damian Barr, Alex Heminsley, Polly Samson, David Gilmour, Cathy Runciman, Jess Ruston and Emma Freud as well as the gang at Writersblock for excellent narrative interruptions. Also for excessive levels of help, advice and general loveliness, Ol Parker and Jonathan Harvey – thank you.

Thanks nearer home to Jackie Tearne, Chris Luckley, Claire Roweth, Vanessa Hollis and Sue Donovan, without whom I couldn’t fit in the actual writing.

Thank you to Kieron and Sharon Smith and their daughter Tanzie, after whom the main character in this book was named, thanks to their generous bid in a charity auction in aid of the Stepping Stones Down Syndrome support group.

And thanks to my parents – Jim Moyes, Lizzie and Brian Sanders – and most importantly Charles, Saskia, Harry and Lockie, for being the point of it all.