Countdown…
Three Days to Go… Meet Sean, Linda, and a Very Stubborn Tree
We’re down to three days until The Light Between Us is out in the world, so today I wanted to introduce you properly to the people (and one slightly scruffy tree) at the heart of the story.
Real lives, real choices, and the kind of connection that never quite goes away, even when life does its best to pull two people apart.
Two teenagers, one ordinary school field
The story starts in North London, mid-80s.
Sean is fourteen, new to the area, and trying to work out where someone like him is supposed to stand. His dad is army-straight, his house is full of rules, and the only place that makes sense is a crooked tree at the edge of the school field and an art room that smells of turpentine and pencil shavings.
Linda has lived here all her life. She draws to turn the volume of the world down. At home she’s surrounded by warmth, noise and a big-sister hurricane called Lorraine. At school she’s “the arty one” who sees the details everyone else misses.
They meet in Art B, on an ordinary Wednesday, with a grumpy teacher, a pile of sketchbooks, and that leaning tree just visible through the window. There are no fireworks, no fate stepping in with a spotlight—just:
A boy who can’t quite get the light right on the page
A girl who notices he’s looking at the world properly
One small sentence that lodges in his chest and refuses to leave
From there, it’s drawings, borrowed cameras, shared crisps on the steps, walks home the long way round, and first love in the middle of homework, mixtapes and exam timetables.
What goes wrong (without spoiling it)
Life, basically.
Families. Expectations. The kind of decisions you make at seventeen that feel sensible at the time and look very different in the rear-view mirror.
Sean’s dad has a clear idea of who his son should be. Linda wants to chase art, but also wants to be the steady one, the reliable one, the daughter and sister who doesn’t make too much trouble. Jobs, postings, money, fear, distance… none of it is dramatic in a Hollywood way, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that quietly rearranges lives.
They don’t get a neat, youthful happy-ever-after. Instead, the years go on. They grow up. They make other choices. They bend around the lives they’ve built.
Fast-forward: two adults, still carrying the past
The Light Between Us doesn’t stay in the 80s. We jump forward to see who Sean and Linda became.
Sean is a photographer now, known enough to have books and exhibitions, still chasing that same elusive thing: how to catch light in a way that feels honest.
Linda has poured her creativity into teaching, family, and a life that looks “sensible” from the outside. She’s raised a son, survived a marriage that ran out of road, and is slowly finding her way back to the girl who loved to draw under that tree.
They haven’t spoken in decades. But they’ve never quite put each other down either. There’s no time travel—no jumping back to change what happened—just emails, chance discoveries, late-night messages, and the quiet courage it takes to say: “I remember. Do you?”
This is very much a “what if?” story without any magic wand to fix the past. It’s about what happens when you finally stop pretending a first love didn’t matter… and start figuring out what it might mean now, with all the years and scars and responsibilities that come with being older.
The real “light” in The Light Between Us
So if there’s no actual magic, what is the light?
It’s:
The light on a school playing field in 1985, catching on a crooked tree
The red glow of a darkroom lamp, watching a photograph appear in a tray
The everyday light of a modern kitchen, a classroom, a café where two people finally sit down across from each other again
The small, hopeful space between “what we were” and “what we might still get to be”
The book is full of art rooms, cameras, emails, train stations, family dinners, bad coffee, good scones, and the kind of conversations you only dare to have when you’re old enough to admit you got some of it wrong the first time.
No spells. No portals. Just the ordinary, complicated magic of people trying again.
Three days to go – how you can help
If The Light Between Us sounds like your kind of story—a slow-burn, decades-spanning love story with 80s nostalgia, messy families, stubborn hope and one very important tree—here’s how you can help in these last few days:
Pre-order the book if you haven’t already – it seriously helps
Share this post with someone who loves a heartfelt, real-world love story
Tell me in the comments: is there a song, place, or object from your teen years you still think about? (Bonus points if it involves a questionable haircut.)
Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a bit about the places in the book—North London estates, school corridors, and later, the coastal light that changes everything.
For now: thank you for being here, for reading, for cheering this story on.
Three days to go.
Sean, Linda, and that crooked tree are nearly yours. 🌳✨
