Page 70 of Hate You to Love You

‘London broke me,’ he says quickly, not meeting my eyes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wish I never went.’ His voice is on the verge of breaking. ‘But that’s the thing, isn’t it, you can’t just turn back time. Don’t get me wrong, taking the job offer did great things for my career. I got to be the publicist for some of the world’s most renowned authors. And some of the campaigns Redhouse assigned me were a dream. If my younger self – the one who spent recesses alone reading in A Series of Unfortunate Events in the library instead of making friends – could have seen me, he would’ve been so proud. That’s all I wanted out of life, to work in books.’

‘I don’t get it. Did something bad happen in London?’

Elliot’s mouth drops open, as if he’s about to say something. His entire body rises as he takes a slow and deep breath. ‘My career reached an all-time high. I was learning. I was growing. I saw each new author I was paired up with as an opportunity to produce a campaign better than the previous one. I was given more and more responsibility. And that’s when I was put on the campaign for M.J. Nava, a local crime author.’

Elliot looks down towards the coffee in his hand.

‘They were getting all this buzz on social media. It was right around the time that destination thrillers were really taking off – it was a huge opportunity. It was also the first time my manager had trusted me to work with an author without any guidance, and I had all these amazing events planned.’

‘What happened?’ I ask.

‘Honestly? I got cocky. I ended up taking on more than I could handle, and the tour became a rushed, chaotic nightmare. I packed in too many stops. There were event clashes. I didn’t check that every bookshop had stock, and there were a few we had to cancel. The worst part was that the author was so unhappy with how it all went down. Unhappy with me. They signed with another publisher for their second book.’

‘But Redhouse kept you on,’ I say, trying to reassure him.

Elliot glosses over my comment. ‘It took a while for me to prove myself again. But even after I was back in the good books at Redhouse, I still saw myself as this screw-up.’

‘You lost your confidence?’

‘It wasn’t just that,’ he says. ‘I started to catastrophise, obsessing over every decision. It started with little things, like triple-checking emails at work. I began looking for problems where there were none, and I just couldn’t convince myself that things were under control, even when they were.’

‘Did work notice?’ I ask.

‘Sometimes. A few other publicists on my team made jokes about me never being able to let the small things go, but I just told them it was attention to detail. And I honestly thought it was just stress, until it started to manifest as panic attacks. Some mornings, I would wake up out of breath. Every possible way things could go wrong at work would play out like a movie in my mind. No, not a movie – a hallucination. It was so real. This fear of messing up was crushing me, to the point where it made my body physically hurt.’

As he speaks, I become misty-eyed. I have a strong urge to get up and hold him. I knew about the pain of missing what was, but it’s awful knowing how much he suffered.

‘There were days when I couldn’t leave my house. It was the strangest feeling, knowing I wanted to leave but not being physically able to. I’d convince myself that if I left my house, a spark from an outlet could start a fire and burn everything to the ground. Or that because my blinds never fully shut, someone would notice I wasn’t home and break in while I was gone. These might sound like nothing, but it’s like my mind had willed them to actually happen. I came up with all kinds of reasons for why I couldn’t come into the office. I’d take a sick day here and there. Even when I was in the office, I couldn’t concentrate. I’d start one task but get sidetracked, stressing out about another. I’d end up juggling more than I could handle. It seemed like only a matter of time before they’d have to let me go.’ Elliot pauses. ‘I feel like I haven’t been able to breathe in years. Every day there’s been something gripping my chest. The only way I could cope was to collapse and scream. It was like I was angry without being angry.’

‘Did you speak to anyone about what was going on?’ I ask breathlessly. I can hardly believe that Elliot – confident, smug, smirking Elliot – is the person telling me all this.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Eventually. I went to see a psychologist who diagnosed me with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. I felt like everything changed that day – suddenly my future seemed so uncertain.’

As he tells me this, I realise something. ‘Your anxiety peaked last night, didn’t it?’

He nods. ‘Ever since the tour started, today has been at the forefront of my mind. It was Claudia’s first time meeting readers in an intimate setting, and there were a million things that could have gone wrong. I kept telling myself that it would be all right, but the closer it got, the more the pressure built up in my mind. I… I felt like I was dying. I couldn’t breathe. My mind was already there: I imagined Claudia not showing up, or the fans being cruel to her, the booksellers badgering her with personal questions… It was so real, it was like I was hallucinating.’

‘I could have helped.’

‘There’s nothing you could’ve done,’ Elliot tells me. ‘I’m the one who’s broken. It’s up to me to fix it.’

He looks slowly into my eyes, and I stare right back.

‘You’re not broken, Elliot. I know life isn’t perfect, but if there’s one person that I know who is capable of turning a bad situation around, it’s you,’ I say.

‘Only because you showed me how!’ he says with a soft laugh.

‘What?’

‘You showed me what it was like to look for magic in the mundane, the silver linings in everything. I only ever felt confident going after my dreams because you made me feel like reaching them was possible.’

A silent beat falls between us.

Elliot looks down at his watch. ‘We should go,’ he says. ‘Early flight tomorrow.’