After Hello Page 9

  But Jack was dangling the temptation of talking about things she’d wanted to talk about for so long.

  ‘Sometimes you don’t know what to do. You know?’ Jack shook his head and exhaled and scuffed the toe of a Paul Smith brogue on the grass.

  ‘Not really. Marrying is a pretty straightforward yes or no. They put it in the vows.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … that, exactly. Charlie’s great, obviously. I mean. All of this. Fuss. Oh, I don’t know.’

  Edie sensed he was several degrees drunker than she’d first realised.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ Edie said, with as little emotion as possible.

  ‘Edie. Stop being like this. I’m trying to tell you that you matter to me. I don’t think you know that.’

  Edie had no reply to this and in the space where her answer should be, Jack murmured, ‘Oh, God,’ stepped forward, leaned down, and kissed her.

  We hope you enjoyed that exclusive extract from Who’s That Girl?

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  Author’s Note

  The greatest moment as a writer is when you win the Bailey’s Prize For Fiction as they finally wake up to their responsibilities readers get in touch to ask ‘What happens next?!’ I love that question. To think characters you invented have gone on to mean something to someone else, and they’re alive in another imagination: it’s all you could wish for.

  With the power of a Godlike deity, if deities were still in their pyjama trousers at half ten, I can provide that reassurance, in 140 characters or fewer every day on Twitter: the cast still wander around my mental attic. I don’t mean that in a Fritzl-y way. That was a cellar.

  And I get the ‘Where are they now?’ question about Ben and Rachel, the star-crossed English Lit students who took ten years to get it together, from You Had Me At Hello, more than any other.

  It seems there was something about the pair of them that particularly resonated with people. Is it that the ‘what if?’ question about the one who got away is so universal? Was it the joke about a bag lady’s downstairs hair looking like giving birth to Ken Dodd? I simply don’t know. But as my firstborn book, those two will always have a special place in my heart. And I loved their friends just as much.

  Therefore, in the spirit of why the hell not, this mini story is what I think Ben and Rachel – and their ‘world’ – did next. Is it possible to fan fic yourself? I’ve explored that the hard way. Obviously, the risk of satisfying the wish for an update is that some readers will shout NO NO NO THIS ISN’T WHAT I PICTURED THEM DOING AT ALL. Well, then this simply never happened.

  For those of you who are at peace with these notions as the next instalment in the life of Ben and Rachel, I hope you enjoyed it. The rest of you can say: ‘Isn’t it a shame they never made sequels to The Matrix, oh, and also You Had Me At Hello?’

  Mhairi x

  About the Author

  Mhairi was born in Scotland in 1976 and her unnecessarily confusing name is pronounced Vah-Ree.

  After some efforts at journalism, she started writing novels. Who’s That Girl? is her fourth. She lives in Nottingham with a man and a cat.

  Also by Mhairi McFarlane

  You Had Me At Hello

  Here’s Looking At You

  It’s Not Me, It’s You

  Who’s That Girl?

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