Page 48 of How To Not Need You

Rebecca turns.

Her whole posture changes.

Her shoulders drop. Her expression softens. She sets the bags down on the footpath and walks straight towards him.

He hugs her.

Not a quick hello. Not the one-armed thing you do when you run into someone you vaguely know. His arms go around her waist and hers go around him. Her face presses into his shoulder.

They stay like that long enough that a woman walking past has to step around them.

Ben stops narrating.

I reach for my phone.

“Get a photo,” he says.

“Already doing it.”

I open the camera and angle it through the windscreen, bracing my wrist against the steering wheel. The first photo is shit. The second is only slightly better.

Rebecca with another man. His arms around her waist outside a grocery store. Not proof she’s cheating. But definitely not nothing.

She eventually pulls away, picks up her bags and walks to her car without so much as looking around. Either she has nothing to hide or she’s very confident nobody is watching.

She gets in and drives away.

The man watches her go, then turns and heads back towards the shop.

Ben lowers the binoculars. “That’s not nothing.”

I look at the photo again. “No.”

It isn't proof. But it's more than Natalie had yesterday.

Ben closes his ridiculous notebook and sets it on the dash. “What now?”

“Send the photo to Luca. Let him decide whether Natalie needs to see it yet.”

Ben nods, then picks the notebook back up. “Should I document the hug?”

I pull away from the curb. “Absolutely not.”

His pen scratches against the paper. “Documenting the hug.”

Chapter

Nine

Liv

The problem with design work is that it gives you too much time to think. When you’re staring at the same thing for forty minutes, trying to decide if the kerning is off by a pixel, your brain finds other things to do. Like replay the last time Jake kissed you. Or the way Tilly’s hair smells when she falls asleep on your lap.

Jesus Christ.

I need to stop this. I lean back in my chair and stare at the screen. The cover design for Harper’s latest book sits half-finished in front of me, a moody coastal landscape bleeding into abstract brushstrokes meant to represent heartbreak. It’s good. Or it will be, once I stop overthinking the spacing between the author name and the title. Harper would tell me it’s fine. I’d tell Harper she has terrible taste in typography.

We'd probably both be right.