Elliot rubs his jaw thoughtfully, in a way that suggests my feedback is critical to him.
“You don’t like Evie?” he says, his tone light. “You think she’s awful? Or ‘urgh’ even?”
“Everyonethinks she’s awful,” I correct him. “Everyonethinks she’s ‘urgh’.That’s why everyone laughs at me. Well, everyone who knows she’s supposed tobeme, anyway. And that includes Maisie Poole, so, you know…everyone.”
Elliot shrugs.
“Ilike her,” he says simply. “I like her a lot. And I don’t think she’s ‘awful’ at all. I don’t think it’s strange in the slightest that he falls for her. I think she’s feisty. I think she’s brave. I think she’s hurt, and damaged, and I think sometimes she does things because she doesn’t want to be hurt any more than she already is.”
I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Anyway,” he goes on, before I can reply. “It’s done now. I can’t go back and change it, as much as I’d like to. So I’m sorry you hated the book, but trust me; you’re not the only one who was disappointed in it.”
I swallow again. It seems to be the only thing I’m capable of doing right now. Because one thing’s for sure; I have no idea what to say tohim. My mind is a blank page; one that I can’t help wishing someone else would write on, just to tell me how to feel about everything he’s just said
I don’t know how I feel anymore.
Not about Elliot, not about his book, not about anything.
And I really thought I did. When I came storming into this office earlier, I had Elliot firmly cast as the villain in this story; the Machiavellian, scheming liar who gas-lit me into thinking he loved me, then wrote a book that guaranteed I’d spend the rest of my life as a joke.
But now I’ve been completely wrong-footed. The Elliot standing in front of me isn’t the two-dimensional character he’s been in my head all these years. He’s a real, whole person; one with thoughts and feelings that I absolutely haven’t taken into account, because it was too easy to just resent him instead.
“I didn’t say Ihatedit,” I tell him, my voice almost a whisper. “I didn’t… I don’thateit.”
“Oh, yeah? You could’ve fooled me.”
There’s an edge to his voice that I’ve never heard in it before. It reminds me of how much I don’t know about him; how I never really did know him. Howcanyou know someone in the space of three weeks? Why did I ever think I did?
“I don’t hate it,” I say carefully, “I just don’t understand it, is all. I don’t understand why you made so much of it up. You were the one who was so set on figuring out the truth. Remember how hard we tried to find the mystery woman from the photo?”
“I remember. The visit to the library. Maisie and her Hercule Poirot novels. Hey, I walked past the library a couple days ago,” he adds,grinning at the memory. “I see it’s had a bit of a makeover, too. It didn’t smell musty at all. Maisie must be delighted.”
“It’s the snow globe effect,” I tell him, remembering what Elsie said in the coffee shop a few days ago. “It makes everything better — unless you’re actuallyinthe book, then it just makes everything much,muchweirder. But don’t change the subject. Why’d you spend all that time trying to find her if you were just going to make it all up, anyway?”
Elliot shrugs.
“It was fun,” he says at last. “Wasn’t it? It gave us something else to focus on. It made us a team.”
“And we wouldn’t have been one without that? Wait: what am I saying? Of course we wouldn’t. You don’t become a ‘team’ in 23 days, do you? You don’t really becomeanythingin 23 days. We weren’t even a couple; not really. It was barely even a relationship.”
I put my drink down so quickly the coffee sloshes out of the lid and onto my hand. I think I get it now; why he changed so many of the details that ended up in his book. He did it because the ‘mystery woman’ was better as a blank slate. She was more useful that way, because if he didn’t know who she really was, he could turn her into whoever he wanted her to be. And I guess the same goes for me. Twenty-three days wasn’t enough for him to know me, let alone love me. So he had to pretend.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to that, Holly,” Elliot says, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Do you want me to argue with you? Do you want me to apologize?”
I want to say yes to this. Yes to all of it. Because I do. I want him to tell me I’m wrong; that we were every bit the ‘team’ I thought we were, and I want him to apologize for not living up to the imaginedversion of himself that existed only in my head. Imagination is always better than reality, though, isn’t it? And, unfortunately for us, no one’s writing this script for us, so we’re having to make it up as we go along.
“Holly, are you in there?”
The door swings open and Dad’s head appears, his hair now doing a passable impression of Albert Einstein’s.
“Oh!” he says, looking surprised to see Elliot standing in the corner of the room, as if he’s haunting it. “I thought you’d gone, Elliot? Your publicist has been looking for you.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” says Elliot, sounding normal again. “Tell her I’m on my way, would you?”
Dad’s head disappears again, and Elliot and I face each other, neither of sure what happens next.
“For what it’s worth,” he says. “Iamsorry. I didn’t mean for the book to ruin your life. I really didn’t.”
