Amantine Delamar is a young and ambitious English literature university researcher, in London. On a Sunday morning, just outside Notting Hill tube station, she meets a green-eyed boy who she mistakes for a drifter. While struggling to ignore him, she is irresistibly attracted to his irreverent attitude and his way of provoking her. She goes back looking for him several times and finds out that he is not an ordinary guy, but Peter Wiles, member of a successful band, although completely unknown to her. Amantine is totally alien and disinterested in that showbiz world so far removed from hers, but she can’t resist the passion that Peter rouses in her. So much so, it pushes her to repeatedly betray Geoffrey, her actual boyfriend.
Amantine doesn’t yet know what love is, and she doesn’t even seem to be particularly interested in finding out. The only thing she really wants is to feel free and at the same time reach her professional goals.
Amantine Delamar and Peter Wiles are both aware that theirs is a story without a future, and with no guarantees. They set up rules that should never be broken: “no questions, no claims.”
But love, against every rule, is lurking and the bond between them grows deeper and more intense, such that Amantine and Peter, as well as lovers, become more and more friends, partners, supportive of one another. Unaware of a passion that will bind them for years.
Genre: FICTION / Contemporary Women
PROLOGUE
15th March 2014
I’m here. I almost don’t understand why. I look at you from a distance. My presence here doesn’t make sense. Yet I’m here, on this late winter’s day, still very cold. In front of you, you who caused me nothing but pain. One of the greatest agonies of my life. One of those that cannot be forgiven, and dragged over the years takes on exaggerated, exasperating proportions. And maybe I will never really forgive you. With this, I’m not trying to deny my faults, which are many and serious. But you took everything from me. Including what I didn’t think I wanted so much, at that time.
They have showered you with flowers. What hypocrisy. I’m sure that most of those who yearn for you now have never really tolerated you. I’m not like that. I won’t suddenly turn you into good and holy. And I won’t pray for your soul. You can forget about it. I never pray, on principle. Growing up I didn’t soften. They say that with the years the character defects are amplified. I am proof of this; I’m even more dried up, colder. All the words you had from me, I would repeat to you, one after the other. I’m not sorry.
I’m angry. You caused me extreme pain and I’m furious. But I repeat, the fault was also mine. I let myself be dragged, I didn’t fight. I was what the others had always forced me to be. But now, above all, I have clarity and I face all my responsibilities. I have been the one I committed myself to be.
They leave, finally. They glance at you compassionately for the last time and walk away slowly, then gradually faster. I bet when they reach the iron gate their thoughts, their emotions, will be even further away from you than their bodies. You lost everything, including the memories of those around you.
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