‘I don’t know. I haven’t worked that out yet. I guess I should try to give it back somehow?’
A smile crept across Freya’s face. ‘I could try and get the details of his manager.’
Netta leaned back in her chair and surveyed her friend over the table full of the kids’ stuff they hadn’t had the energy to clear away once they’d finally gotten them all to sleep. ‘Really? You in with the A-list now, are you?’
‘Ha ha.’ Freya straightened her pasta sauce–stained top over her now forever-rounded belly. ‘I may not look like someone with connections these days, but I know people who know people, if you get what I’m saying,’ she said, raising her eyebrows.
‘Who?’
‘Remember that guy I dated just before I met Matt?’
Netta wrinkled her nose. ‘The sound engineer with the tattoo on his head?’
‘Yeah, Wes. Turns out he’s working with some pretty big bands these days,’ said Freya. ‘I could ask him if he knows how we could find out.’
‘You sure you want to reconnect with that drip?’ said Netta. ‘Didn’t he wee all over your doormat when you broke up with him?’
‘Yeah, he did. But that was ten years ago. I’m sure he’s matured a bit by now.’
Netta’s eyebrows arched. ‘You’d hope.’
‘Should we see if we can find him on Facebook?’
Netta had seen that look on her friend’s face enough times to know that the train had already left the station and there was no way of stopping it. Either Freya would do it now, while Netta was at least present to vet the message, or she would do it later—unsupervised—and that, Netta knew from experience, would be the less ideal of the two options.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Freya lunged for her phone and tapped Wes’s name into Facebook, turning the phone to show Netta.
‘Well, what do you know?’ said Netta, squinting at his profile picture. ‘The twit lives.’
Freya opened up a new message. ‘Okay, ready. What should I say?’
After numerous drafts, they settled on:Hi Wes, long time no speak. Just wondering if you know how I can get my hands on the name of Morrison Maplestone’s manager—long story.
Freya placed the phone on the table. ‘And now, we wait,’ she said gravely.
PING!
‘Or maybe we don’t!’ She swiped the phone back and rolled her eyes as she read the message. ‘He said we should try googling it,babe.’
‘So still a dickhead, then?’
‘Well, you know what Confucius said. Once a dickhead, always a dickhead.’ Within seconds, Freya triumphantly slid her phone across the table to Netta. ‘No need to thank me.’
‘Rhona van der Wilden,’ read Netta.
‘Her email address is there too. We could email her right now!’ Freya looked wildly hopeful. ‘Can we?’
‘No, not tonight. I need to think about it. To be honest, given my experience with celebrities, I kind of wish I’d never found the diary in the first place. I don’t want to dip even the tip of a toenail back into that world again.’
Freya’s gaze softened. ‘Not celebrities,’ she said. ‘Celebrity. Singular. You can’t tar them all with the same brush as Mitch. And anyway, that slug wasn’t an arsehole because he was a celebrity, Netta. He was an arsehole because he was an amoral waste of space.’
Mitch. Mitch Carlton. One-time actor, ex-host of talent showBritain’s Brightest Star, and a household name in the UK. Years ago, he’d also been Netta’s boss when she’d lived in London. Just the sound of his name was enough to make her skin prickle with shame. The almost twenty years since she’d last seen him had done nothing to dampen his effect on her. If anything, they’d magnified it into something that she had to wilfully keep buried to save herself from being consumed by the humiliation of it all. The affair had been the biggest judgement fail of Netta’s life. The tabloids had eaten it up and had made her life hell in the aftermath. She’d paid for her mistake. Double. And then some. She’d fled London knowing she could never return.
Netta unwound her arms from her body, releasing them from the protective posture they’d instinctively taken at the mention of Mitch. ‘Yeah, well … I think maybe I should head home now anyway.’ She pushed her chair out and stood. ‘It’s getting late and Pete wants to go out for breakfast before work tomorrow.’
Netta gathered her handbag and keys from the crowded bench, silently berating herself for wondering why Pete was laying the nice-guy stuff on so thick lately. He hadn’t even taken her out to celebrate their last anniversary so this just-because breakfast date felt distinctly out of character, and he’d been unusually attentive since the weekend. But, Netta conceded, the days since the toilet sex had felt a bit off kilter, and he’d obviously sensed it too. It was sweet of him to be trying to get things back on track.
