‘What if she fights?’
‘Then you’ll probably have footage of her having a screaming meltdown, and you can get boy-Dylan to mercy-cut her. But—’ she snuggled back into me, head resting in the crook of my shoulder, ‘trust me, she’ll run.’
Lily was right. Amanda ran. But the whole thing went completely sideways, and it made me feel like the worst piece of shit on earth.
The plan was complicated by the fact that at some point, unbeknownst to me, Amanda had come out to Romeo-Dylan. ‘Are you really going to do this to her?’ he demanded of me, when we shot pick-up ITMs the morning after his date with Kumiko and her ex. ‘Are you going to out Amanda on national television without any warning?’
I couldn’t tell him what I was actually planning – somehow, I didn’t think ‘Don’t worry, I’m just trying to psychologically destabilise her because I think she’s sleeping with your soon-to-be fake girlfriend and I don’t want the fact they’re obsessed with each other to show up on screen’ would go over particularly well – so I had to hedge, and it didn’t really work.
I fingered my radio. The urge to send out an SOS on what had once been mine and Lily’s private comms channel was intense. As the good cop in our partnership, she would have been much better equipped to calm Romeo-Dylan down.
But I could radio all I liked. She was in the Convent, and she wouldn’t hear me. I had to figure it out on my own.
It took a lot of work on the date shoot – and a lot of shouting – to prevent Romeo-Dylan warning Amanda about what was to come, but I managed it. I got my money shot, when Z announced that they would be Zooming with her ex and all the blood drained out of Amanda’s face. I got the destabilisation, too – the whiplash of the shock and the fear and then the relief when itwasn’ther ex-girlfriend, the pressure applied in just the right place, the one that would make her do what I wanted.
But afterwards, when she burst into loud, noisy tears, a pang of guilt snuck through my defences, sharp as a stiletto.
‘Do you care about anything?’ Romeo-Dylan demanded, glaring at me. He was holding Amanda to him, one hand on the back of her head, pressing her protectively into his shoulder.
That question hit me right in the gut, a much more brutal blow than I had ever thought this innately good, kind man could land.
‘I care,’ I said tightly, ‘about making good TV.’
At that, at least, I was good.
After I tightened the thumbscrews by telling a few strategic lies in our ITM, Amanda did exactly what I wanted. During the intimacy portion of the date, she gracefully, graciously eliminated herself from the show. ‘We both know it’s not me,’ she told Romeo-Dylan. ‘I don’t want to hang around in the background, being some side character in your love story.’
A perfect line.
It would cut together beautifully with the footage we got at what would have been the Necklace Ceremony, when we revealed to Dylan G and Kumiko that they were the last two women standing. ‘Mandie’s gone?’ Juliet-Dylan said, white-lipped.
‘I’m sorry, Dyl,’ Romeo-Dylan said. ‘I know you two were close.’
I’d stitch Amanda’s line about being a side character over the top of the Dylans hugging, I decided, writing down the timecodes and making a note. That way, I could frame herself-elimination as a heroic sacrifice, stepping aside so her best friend could have the love story she wanted.
Amanda would come out of the show looking golden. She’d get more Instagram spon-con offers than she could ever possibly manage. That was the best way I could make this up to her.
I’d paused the footage so I could make my notes. It was frozen on Juliet-Dylan’s stricken face, as Romeo-Dylan tried to comfort her.
Spiders went skittering in my stomach.
I had taken nothing from them, I told myself. Neither couple, not Juliet-Dylan and Amanda, not Romeo-Dylan and Cece.
If what they had was real, they would find their way back to each other. If their love was worth shit, then some minor psychological violence and a fake relationship would not be ruinous. If Lily and I could survive marrying other people – could survive divorce – could survive death – could surviveLily Fireball,for fuck’s sake! – then they could survive this, if they really had something.
That was love stories 101. Happy endings had to be earned. If these two couples ended up together in the long run, they would probably be stronger for what I had done to them.
The spiders were still skittering.
It was never supposed to be like this.
‘You were right,’ I murmured to myself, thinking of Lily. ‘I shouldn’t have rigged it.’
But I was alone, working late in the war room, without her there to rub it in.
25LilyTwo years ago
We weren’t in the meeting when Tony got fired, but it didn’t matter. The shouting was so loud we could hear it through the walls.
