‘Won’t that make Dylan look like an absolute dick?’ Cece was saying. ‘Dating all these other women while being with me?’
‘That’s exactly what he was doing, so if he comes across as a dick, that’s fair,’ Lily said. ‘But if you cut that together with some soppy confessionals of you two going on about how perfect and wonderful your love is, and how you’re being torn apart like a real-life Romeo and Juliet, the audience will eat that shit up. Am I right, or am I right, Murray?’
The most I could summon was a growl.
‘I’m right,’ she said. ‘As usual.’
Her tone was cheerful, but it was totally at odds with the pleading look in her eyes.I’m sorry, Murray. But let me explain.
I summoned every ounce of skill I had and closed my expression down. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of getting a single thing from me.
‘You’re both making my life extremely difficult,’ I said to Romeo-Dylan and Cece instead, turning my back on her. ‘I hope you know that.’
27LilyTwo years ago
‘All right.’ Murray added in our last agenda item, then handed me his tablet. ‘Does this look good to you?’
I scanned the list quickly as our crew for Season Nine ofMarry Me, Julietbegan to file in for our pre-season briefing. ‘We should probably add a reminder about NDAs. I don’t want us to kick off our first season as showrunners with a bunch of leaks to the press.’
‘Good idea.’ He took the tablet back. ‘Do you want to speak to it, or do you want me to?’
‘You do it. We need to scare them. Use the daddy voice.’
Murray gave me a withering look, but he didn’t say anything.
Instead, he set the tablet down on our lectern and looked out at the room. ‘Do you remember our first one of these?’
‘I’m amazed you do.’ I poked him in the shoulder. ‘You were so hungover the feedback screech from the microphone nearly made you throw up.’
He chuckled. ‘That hangover was so bad it nearly made me give up drinking.’
‘I’m not surprised. Imagine being so drunk you couldn’t remember meetingme.’
Murray didn’t say anything.
‘What?’
‘I might,’ he said, ‘have been a little less than truthful about that.’
I blinked.
‘Not that I was lying, exactly,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember speaking to you that night. But I remember seeing you, sitting there on the other side of the bar. Noticing you.’
In the grand scale of revelations, this wasn’t much of one.Can you embellish?I would ask a Romeo who had just revealed he’d once noticed a Juliet across a bar.That’s too subtle, as a storytelling beat.
It absolutely floored me.
He’d been in that bar – the bar that was now Jeff’s – eleven years ago. He’d been sitting there with his friends – with hisfiancée,god, Julia had been there! – talking and laughing and listening and drinking: and he’d noticed me.
And he’d never mentioned it. For more than a decade, he’d kept this from me.
Of course he hadn’t mentioned it. What was Murray of Murray-and-Julia going to do, mention to his new female friend he remembered noticing her across a bar, and make things weird before they even began? And what was Murray-after-Julia going to do, casually tell me out of nowhere – a Lily who was now half of Lily-and-Jeff! – that he’d actually clocked me a full twelve hours earlier than I’d thought?
What difference would it have made?
‘Of course you noticed me,’ I said, before the silence turned into a question. ‘I know how you feel about red lipstick.’
Murray rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, shut up.’
