She watches the window from her thin mattress bed, attentive, ready.
When the fluffy gray cat first arrived, she panicked, unable to believe her luck. She could barely think straight, so desperate not to mess up this one chance. She fed him, scratched her message into the red leather of his collar, and let him go.Someone is going to see it,she promised herself.They have to.
Someone will read her cry for help.
Someone will come looking.
The million-dollar question, though, is whether or not the very little she was able to scrawl was enough, and whether the cat will ever come back.
Day Three
Chapter 8
The Local Celebrity
I wake up early, feeling refreshedand hopeful; this is a sensation I cannot recall having since before I discovered Ben’s affair. I can cleave my life in two this way: who I was before, and who I am after.
But this is what your new life is all about,I tell myself, stretching out under the covers, yawning loudly and unselfconsciously: early to bed, early up, and all the time in the world to myself.
I spring from the bed, Blue sleeping on, unbothered, beside my rumpled covers. He came home late last night; he must be exhausted. I shower, dress, and head down to the living room to open the shutters, letting the light stream in.
Down the street, a shiny black Mercedes glides silently into an empty parking spot outside Number 21, a house with heavy purple wisteria drooping romantically around its buttery front door. The house whose package I have in my hall.
I wonder if I should pop out and let them know I have it.
But the idea vanishes immediately as a chauffeur gets out and leans against the car door.
He looks up at the house, tapping out a message on his phone. He’s mid-twenties, with light-brown skin and short dark hair, and something about his posture and the tilt of his head tells me that he’s ambitious. And his calm, unhurried lean tells me he has picked up from this address before.
My gaze rises up to the top window of the house. The curtains whip open; it’s a woman. The lights burst on, from window towindow, with the resident’s progression through her home. She overslept; I can tell.
I look back at him. He’s watching the light show, too, and smirking. He shakes his head indulgently and pops his phone back into his pocket.
Then he turns and his eyes flick suddenly to me, squinting. His smile falters as we stare each other down. I feel exposed, mortified—like a voyeur, a peeping Tom. I don’t know what to do, so I smile like a crazy person.
He frowns slightly and slips back into the car to fiddle with his radio. Could he even see me through the morning glare?
The butter-yellow door flies open. The driver jumps out again and goes to open the car’s back door.
She appears, and I recognize her immediately.
I draw in a sharp breath, so tart is my surprise. When the estate agent mentioned a celebrity on the street, my thoughts immediately went to the usual suspects, the everyday celebrity faces found in supermarket-till magazines: presenters, boy bands, TV chefs—not someoneproperlyfamous, not someone in real movies and on the covers of glossy magazines. The owner of Number 21 is an actress, but not justanyactress. She’s the one in the biggest show currently streaming globally—the owner of Number 21 is Aoife Doherty.
Not Mary Lamb.
I watch her, transfixed; she flashes the driver an apologetic smile, clearly flustered by oversleeping. I spy pajamas beneath the hem of her long coat. Yet even late, even disheveled, even with a baseball cap covering her trademark blond hair and no makeup there’s an inescapable glamour about her.
What I wouldn’t give to take a peek inside Aoife’s house.
She’s shorter than I expected, but she’s perfectly in proportion. A Renaissance beauty zapped into the future: cap, coat on, a mobile phone clutched firmly in hand. She bustles out her front gate to the waiting car and slips into the back seat. The driver gracefully closes her door. I watch her through the car’s glass roof: she leans forward and she and the driver fist-bump.
The car pulls away, the actress diving instantly and animatedly into some kind of story.
She looks fun. Her life looks fun.
I wonder if we could become friends. I have her package, I guess, and when she, or whoever, comes over to collect it, I’ll give making friends a go. It can’t hurt. Though given who she is, I should definitely wait for her to come to me.
I can see the friendship now: she could invite me to red-carpet events with her, we could go on shopping trips to New York. Maybe I could do set visits on her films, meet her family, have a roast with her mum—I bet she’s nice, too.
