Dear Thing (41 page)

Anyway, we have to get used to being together all the time because we are going on a real proper adventure together. All week for the past week I’ve been closing my eyes and picturing what it will be like when we get to Brazil. It will be worth all those injections we had. Jarvis has promised to teach me how to use his camera when he’s not working, and Romily promises that we won’t spend too much time looking at beetles.

You will have to look after Ben and Claire for me while we are gone. I know you don’t mind doing this because they’re your mummy and daddy. I used to pretend that they were my mummy and daddy, back when we used to see them all the time, more than we do now. I also used to pretend that my name was Prunella Ferrari and I owned fourteen cats. I never told anyone about that one. I didn’t believe it but I did believe it too, and I think this is the difference in pretending between children and grown-ups. But I could be wrong.

When I see you again in the autumn you’ll be older and maybe crawling. I’ll show you my photographs and I can teach you some more French if I learn any, and I’ll tell you all the stories about our adventures.

I love you,

Your godsister,

Mariposa Jane Summer, Esq.

Special thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, and my editor, Cat Cobain, who have taught me so much. Thanks too to the entire Transworld team who have made me so welcome.

Thanks to midwife Harriet Neville for answering my endless questions about pregnancy and childbirth. For information on surrogacy, thanks to COTS (
www.cots.org.uk
) and Surrogacy UK (
www.surrogacyuk.org
). I’m also indebted to Elly Teman’s book,
Birthing a Mother
. For information on fertility, thanks to Fertility Friends (
www.fertilityfriends.co.uk
) and to several of my own friends for sharing their private struggles with me.

Thanks to Matthew Williams and Angela Houghton for the tour of Reading Museum and particularly of the entomology store. Fond thanks to the staff and students of St Mary’s school, from which I have borrowed the grounds, graves and guinea pigs, but not the people.

As always, thanks to friends and fellow writers Ruth Ng, Anna Scamans, Brigid Coady and Lee Weatherly.

Last but not least, thanks to my parents, my husband, and most of all to my son, who’s taught me everything I know about identifying ladybirds.

Julie Cohen
grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University and Cambridge. She moved to the UK to research fairies in Victorian children’s literature at the University of Reading and this was followed by a career teaching English at secondary level. She now writes full time and is a popular speaker and teacher of creative writing. She lives with her husband and their son in Berkshire.

Her website is
www.julie-cohen.com
.

Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak
One Night Stand
Honey Trap
Girl from Mars
Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom
Getting Away With It
The Summer of Living Dangerously

For more information on Julie Cohen and her books, see her website at
www.julie-cohen.com

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Julie Cohen 2013

Julie Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448152605
ISBNs 9780593070826 (cased)
9780593070833 (tpb)

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