‘I’m not sure strawberry jam counts as a fruit.’
As I eyed the mountain of sticky red stuff piled onto the poor piece of toast, Cam did something new and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. He slathered a chunk of butter on top and then dragged his knife through it and began mixing it into the jam, smearing the concoction back and forth, making it into a speckled, congealed Frankenstein mess.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked.
‘It’s my new technique,’ he said with absolute seriousness. ‘You combine the butter and jam.’
He continued desecrating the toast while I sipped my coffee and watched. ‘Well . . . each to their own. Anyway. Back to the plan.’
‘Right. What are you thinking?’
I scrolled through the notes on my iPad, which gave me an excellent overview of just who Victor was. ‘Well, aside from sticking his dick into his masseuse, Victor’s interests include golf, big-game hunting, expensive cigars, collecting rare watches, art and vintage cars, et cetera, et cetera – basically just your normal rich-dude stuff.’
‘Lucky I’m good at golf then.’
‘You play golf? You?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘Yup.’
‘Doesn’t golf take patience and, I don’t know, some level of restraint?’ I couldn’t imagine Cam playing golf. Rugby, yes. I’d seen him run straight into a scrum, like a bull. I’d seen him on a squash court hitting balls like he was trying to break down the walls.
‘I’m not the impetuous young man I used to be,’ he said.
‘Impetuous?’ I asked, raising my eyebrows.
‘I’m also quite fond of reading now too.’
‘Books?’ I asked, shocked.
‘And I do Wordle every day.’
‘Well I never.’ I stared in disbelief at this new version of Cam. But as he began to nibble his toast like a beaver going to work on a log, making his way round the perimeter then moving inward until he’d created a perfect circle, I realised that while some things had apparently changed, others had stayed very much the same.
‘And what do we know about Amber?’ he asked.
I pulled out my phone and opened Instagram. I’d set up an account in the name of Lily Swanson, since I wasn’t on social media. I pulled up Amber’s page and passed the phone to Cam.
‘Luckily for us, Amber basically lives her entire life on here,’ I said.
He started flipping through the pictures.
‘So basically just your usual,’ I said. ‘Designer fashion, expensive spa treatments, elaborate skincare routines that require ten products with names that all sound like diseases . . . nicyanide or something—’
‘Niacinamide.’
I did a double-take. ‘Sorry . . . what?’
‘And don’t forget the retinol,’ he added with a smile.
‘Oh, I forgot, you also have a ten-step skincare routine,’ I teased.
He peered up at me, blue eyes boring into mine, and I quickly tried to act normal. I was chilled, nonchalant, not someone who’d just had the wind knocked out of them because a man with blue eyes had looked at them across a breakfast table.
‘Told you, I’m a changed man.’ He looked back down at my phone. ‘Smoothie bowls, inspirational quotes –health is wealth– and look . . .’ He held the phone up for me to see. ‘The I-just-woke-up-looking-like-this selfie.’
I leaned in and looked closely at a picture of Amber in bed looking like a million bucks, make-up done, gloss glossing and lashes flapping. ‘No one looks like that when they wake up,’ I said, stabbing sausage and mushroom with my fork and vigorously ploughing the concoction through the runny egg yolk that had just exploded across my plate.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Cam said thoughtfully, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘I know someone who wakes up looking gorgeous without even trying.’
