I really don’t want to throw up here and I also don’t want to deal with this now. I just want to get through the rest of this hellish morning and get home and crawl under my duvet.
‘That’s some seriously misleading editing you’ve done there.’ Jake’s looking almost white with what I assume is anger. Anger that he’s been found out.
‘Not that misleading,’ says Sonja, with the air of a woman about to play a gigantic trump card. ‘Look at this.’
I don’t want to look. I can’t bear any more of this. But of course I do look.
And there’s a screenshot of a two-hundred-pound donation by J Stone to Battersea Dogs Home.
‘Sorry, what? How isthatlegal?’ says Jake.
‘Fully legal,’ Sonja says. ‘We consult our lawyers on everything.’
‘They’re wrong,’ Jake says shortly. Like the invasion of his privacy is the most important thing here.
I want to scream at him. Find out more. Find out nothing. Tell him that I trusted himfullyand how much I’m hurting right now. And scream again.
I can’t do any of that now, though. I do not want to do any of it on national television, or in front of Sonja.
I produce a genuine-sounding laugh, and speak over Sonja, who’s just begun spouting more of her poison, to say, ‘Sonja, congratulations on all your detective work, although I’m nottotallysure that the British public will think it’s appropriate to spy on people in their private lives like that. I’ll leave the legal side of things to Jake.’
‘Jake won, didn’t he?’ Sonja says.
I do another excellent laugh (I should have had a way bigger part inMacbeth) and say, ‘Ha, are we still talking about the challenge? I think we both won; it was a great weekend away and we’ve had a lovely time since.’
Jake follows my lead and we bat everything that she says away, until eventually the hideous, hideous, hideous stupid live experience draws to an end.
We do platitudes while we’re leaving, and then we’re finally outside.
‘See you this evening?’ Jake says, as he begins a speed walk in the direction of a cab, aiming a kiss at my lips.
The kiss misses because I turn my head away, and lands half on my ear, half on my hair.
He stops. ‘Freya?’
I don’t care who’s looking or videoing us now.
‘See me this evening? Are you insane? You slept with me for abet.’
‘I what? No, I didn’t. Obviously.’
‘Er, you won two hundred pounds?’
‘I didn’twintwo hundred pounds. That was all a joke. But a week or two ago, when Pete realised we were staying over at each other’s places a lot and deduced from that that we were having sex, he insisted that I’d won the bet and forced the cash on me, so in the end I gave the money to charity.’
‘Fuck you,’ I say, very clearly.
And then I wave down a black cab and get into it. ‘That stuff was edited very misleadingly,’ Jake yells, ‘and alsosayingsomething doesn’t mean anything. The bet meant nothing. It was a joke before I got to know you.I love you.’
‘Fuck you,’ I repeat as I slam the door.
My phone rings just as I’ve given the driver my address.
It’s Jake.
‘What?’ I hiss into the phone.
‘Why are you so ready to believe the worst?’ he says. ‘That footage was heavily edited. Like all the other footage.’
