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I grin at him in relief, and he smiles back at me.
“Well, let’s hope so,” he says. “Assuming none o’ this lot have any further objections?”
“Och, no,” says Bella, who seems to have appointed herself unofficial spokesperson for the group. “You and Lexie seem to have it all in hand, Alfonso. Ye make a good team, the pair o’ ye.”
I glance over my shoulder, hoping Jett didn’t hear that last comment; or maybe hoping hedid, given that McTavish seems to bring out a jealous side of him that I hadn’t realized existed. But although the film’s producer and some of the assistants are still standing around in a huddle, casting the occasional glance in our direction as they talk, Jett and Violet are already walking back to their car, ready to leave.
He didn’t even wait to speak to me.
He couldn’t get away fast enough.
I shouldn’t be remotely surprised by this, and I definitely have no right to feel disappointed by it. Hedidtake out a restraining order against me, after all; he’s not going to break it just because I talked McTavish into playing middleman between the villagers and the movie-makers. All the same, though, when Jimmy suggests we all go back to the pub to celebrate what he’s describing as our “victory”(I’m not sure hetotallyunderstands what happened here…), I’m surprised to find that it doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to drown my sorrows with a group of people who might not beperfect, sure, but who at least stood up for me against Violet.
Which is no small thing to me, really.
“Come on, Lexie,” says Bella, taking my arm. “Ye look like ye could be doing wi’ a wee dram.”
“Why not?” I shrug, allowing her to propel me forward through the mud. “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do, is it?”
Twenty-Six
It’s only once I’m sitting at a table in The Crown, sandwiched between Bella McGowan and a woman called Florence, who keeps offering to read my tea leaves even though I’m not actually drinking tea, that I remember the car keys.
“Ye cannae go back up there now,” says Bella, who’s had a few glasses of sherry, and is looking rather flushed. “It’ll be dark soon. Ye’ll have no chance o’ finding a set o’ car keys in that forest.”
“I could consult the leaves for ye,” offers Florence eagerly, but I shake my head and pull out my phone.
“I’m going to have to message McTavish and tell him I’ve definitely lost them,” I say, accepting another drink from Ian, who’s assured me there are “no hard feelings” between us at least half a dozen times since we got here. “He’ll probably have a spare set somewhere. I should just have asked him for them in the first place. It would have saved me all this hassle.”
“Aye, but if there’s a hard way to do something, that’s how you’ll do it, Lexie,” says Bella kindly. “But then, if ye hadnae come looking for the keys, ye wouldnae have joined in theprotest and made that lovely speech o’ yours,” she adds, smiling at me fondly. “So all’s well that ends well.”
“I thought it was Macbeth we were protesting against, no’ All’s Well That Ends Well?” says Florence. I leave Bella to explain it to her, and send McTavish a quick text, telling him I forgot to look for the car keys.
“The car’s on my driveway at home,” I type.“If you have a spare key, maybe you could send someone to collect it, so I don’t have to bring it back to the View myself?”
I feel bad asking him for yet another favor, but I know it won’t go down well with Violet or the Carters if I show my face at Emerald View again, so I hitsend, looking up in surprise as Ian appears again to place another drink in front of me.
“Hang on,” I tell him, frowning. “I didn’t order this. I haven’t even touched the last one you brought me.”
“This one is complements o’ the gentleman at the bar,” says Ian, gesturing behind him to where one of Old Jimmy’s friends is sitting winking at me. He gives me a wave, and I smile weakly in return, trying not to think about how I once dated the hottest man on the planet, and am now being hit on by drunk pensioners. As it turns out, though, it’s not quite that bad. The drink, Ian explains, is simply a thank-you for the way I spoke out in defense of the village to the film-makers; and it’s not the last little token of appreciation, either. All night the free drinks keep coming, sent over by one person after another. At one point Jimmy leads everyone in a chorus of “For she’s a jolly good fellow,” and Tam gets so drunk he tells me a long, rambling story about this girl he knows who once fake-dated Jett Carter, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that the girl in question was me.
“Here,” he says, when he reaches the end of his story. “Have another drink.”
So I do.
And after that, I feel a lot better.
Not myoldself, exactly, but nottotallythe new one — the one I’ve been lately — either. And this is fine by me. I never really took to New Lexie, to be honest. She was a bit too meek and scared for my taste. A bit too ready to accept that everything was her fault, and that she deserved everything she got.
She wasn’t reallyme, in other words.
And now that I’m sitting here, in the warm glow of the pub’s slightly pathetic log fire, I’m not really sure why I’ve spent so long pretending she was.
“I don’t know why I let Violet get to me,” I tell the woman who’d been carrying the “Violet” sign earlier. “I know she does it on purpose. But that’s just her showing her insecurity, isn’t it?”
“Exactly!” says my new friend, nodding vigorously. Her name is Mhairi, and she was in the year below me at high school, apparently. “It just shows that she’s threatened by you. And so she should be. I mean, look at you! You’re Lexie Steele!”
“I’m Lexie Steele,” I agree, taking a large gulp of the latest drink Ian’s placed in front of me. This one’s bright yellow and smells like toilet cleaner, but it tastes okay as long as I don’t breathe in while I’m drinking it.
