Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
Absence makes the heart grow fonder…doesn’t it? Contains exclusive sneak peek of Claudia’s latest novel A Very Accidental Love Story.What happens when two people decide to take a year off…from each other?Annie and Dan were the perfect couple. But now the not-so-newly weds are feeling more like flatmates than soul mates and wondering where all the fun and fireworks went …When Annie lands her big break in a smash-hit show…that’s heading for the bright lights of Broadway she’s over the moon. Goodbye remote Irish village of Stickens and hello Big Apple! But with their relationship already on the rocks, how will Annie and Dan survive the distance?They’re hitting the pause button on their marriage. One year off from each other – no strings attached, except a date to meet at the Rockefeller Centre to decide their fate. Will they both turn up? Or is it too late for love?Unplug your phone, pour a large glass of wine and lose yourself in a fabulously entertaining and poignant love story.
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CLAUDIA CARROLL
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
Copyright
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.
AVON
An division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2011
Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2011
Claudia Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781847562104
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780007338566
Version: 2016-09-19
For Frank Mackey, with love. This is your year Frankie and don’t forget it!
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
Dorothy Parker,
Not So Deep as a Well (1937)
Table of Contents
Prologue
Thoreau said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Course he wasn’t to know it, but he was actually talking about me.
Falling in love is easy, you see; any idiot can do it. It’s falling out of love that’s hard.
It takes courage, brinkmanship and a certain degree of recklessness, not just with your own heart, but with someone else’s too. Someone else whose whole existence once meant more to you than your own ever did.
And if you’ve ever sat across the kitchen table from the person you’re supposed to be living happily ever after with and wondered where in hell the spark went…well, then you’ll know exactly what I’m going through right now.
I’m looking silently across the breakfast table at Dan and trying to pinpoint when exactly we first became such a disconnected couple. And I just don’t get it. When did we first start swapping ‘I’ for ‘we’? Dan and I used to be able to have unspoken conversations together. We used to finish each other’s sentences. We used to finish each other’s food. For God’s sake, there was a time when we’d even skip breakfast altogether in favour of an extra hour, tangled up together in bed, making love in a daze of exhausted pleasure.
Now I’m wondering if I sat here dressed like Lady Gaga, singing all the words and doing all the moves from the ‘Telephone’ video, might he even look up from his Times’ Sudoku puzzle? Because the sad truth is this: like wearing nappies as a baby, or the lost City of Atlantis…any love life we once shared is little more than a hazy memory now, as we sleep side by side, like stone figures on a tomb.
The thing about this house though, is that avoidance is generally considered to be a good thing. A sign of deep maturity and awareness. We both know that we’re in a minefield and have been for the longest time; so on the very rare occasions when we find ourselves alone together, we sidestep any embarrassment by just tiptoeing carefully around each other. On the principle that if you don’t acknowledge or talk about a thing then it’ll just quietly go away all by itself.
Trouble is that all this living in denial is physically starting to give me heartburn and I honestly think I’ll scream if I don’t get to articulate what’s going on inside my head. Which is that the current state of our marriage is a steady beep emerging from a heart monitor showing a clear, straight line.
We have officially flatlined.
I take a sip of tea and unconsciously stare over at Dan, my mind in whirling, agonising turmoil but he’s too engrossed in the paper to even notice.
Honest to God, if you were to look at us from the outside, having a civilised breakfast, utterly comfortable in silence, you’d swear our lives were perfect. Dan and Annie, Annie and Dan. Even our names go together. We’ve been together for almost half of our lives, which I know makes us sound like one of those silver-haired, middle-aged couples with porcelain veneers that you’d see in an ad for stair lifts, and yet we’re not. Both of us are only twenty eight. But I can barely remember back to a time when we weren’t a couple.
