‘I did think about trying to get Heather paired with me instead,’ she went on, as calmly as if she were discussing what she’d watched on TV the night before. ‘But I’m a stone-cold bitch, so if I did that, people might take Heather’s side. And I didn’t want that.’
‘No,’ Romeo-Dylan said faintly. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘But I have a fatal flaw. I’m like one of those serial killers that gets caught because they can’t resist taking credit.’
Lily turned and looked directly down the barrel of the camera. ‘So Heather,’ she purred, ‘when you watch this one day – I want you to know it was me.’
She paused for a second and put on a thoughtful expression. ‘Well, actually, no,’ she said. ‘It was you. You did this to yourself. All those little comments you made when you didn’t think anyone else was listening? That was you. But the fact you got caught? That was me, baby. All me.’
‘Is it true?’ Romeo-Dylan asked me afterwards, as we sat down to shoot his ITM. ‘What Lily said? She orchestrated that whole thing?’
Not you?was implicit, but I heard it loud and clear.
I glanced over, checking that Saurav already had the camera rolling.
‘Yeah, mate,’ I replied. ‘It’s true.’
Romeo-Dylan exhaled, shoulders unknotted in a way they hadn’t been in any of our conversations since the Heather incident. ‘That woman is terrifying.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘She is.’
Later, in the war room, I isolated the first two sentences of our ITM conversation, noting down the timecodes to go into the Episode Six rough cut. ‘Is it true? What Lily said? She orchestrated that whole thing?’ Romeo-Dylan asked on screen.
‘Yeah, mate,’ my disembodied voice replied. ‘It’s true.’
I didn’t typically like being part of the on-screen narrative. The more audiences saw of how the sausage got made, the more cynical they got about how real the romances were.
In this case, though, it was unavoidable. And it was going to beincredibleTV.
I skipped over to the footage from Lily’s ITM. I’d conducted Romeo-Dylan’s interview, so Carrie had been in charge of Lily’s. ‘That was quite a revelation,’ she said.
Lily batted her eyelashes. ‘How does it feel?’ she cooed. ‘That I can do your job better than you can?’
I paused the replay, scribbling down the timecode. That would be a perfect intercut to go after the grab from Romeo-Dylan’s interview.
She was such a drama queen. Such an incredible, perfect, flawless drama queen.
The screen was frozen on Lily’s face. One corner of her mouth was curved upwards, halfway to a smirk. Her chin was raised, the long line of her neck exposed. The glint in her eye couldn’t be described as anything other than predatory.
She was entirely in character. She was fully Lily Fireball.
But it was her too. Right there on the screen in front of me. My Lily, the woman I’d loved for years.
If Fucking Greg wanted her to be the kind of archvillain that people threw fruit at in the streets, he was going to be very disappointed. Heather, yes. Lily, not a chance.
They’ll love to hate me,Lily had said to me, three weeks ago, when I’d been trying to convince her not to get out of the limo.
She’d been wrong. If getting people invested in hating her had been a key part of her secret master plan, she’d made a major misstep.
She wasn’t a villain. She was an anti-hero. People might hate how much they loved her, but god, they were going toloveher… and she loved this.
That was it. That was the key. That was the other lever I’d use to break her.
She was addicted to pulling the strings. She couldn’t help herself. Give her a problem she had no business solving – repairing my relationship with Romeo-Dylan, for example – and she’d find a way to do it.
This would have to be a two-pronged approach. I’d have to play on her guilt about how overworked and exhausted I was – and exploit her love of puppet-mastering, make her see there was no way she could give this up.
Then I’d crack that fucking mask of hers. I’d pull Lily Ong out from behind Lily Fireball. And I’d finally get her totalk to me, to tell me why on earth she’d cut me off for a full year, only to reappear like this, flamethrower in hand as she burned everything we’d built down.
