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In fact, she felt it an incredible outrage that Alfie had roped Mabel into a scheme from a romance novel, then not fallen madly in love with her. Which, while completely unfair to him, did lead to absolutely hilarious messages like this:Yes you must go so we can swan in looking fabulous and tell everyone about your mega luxury amazing book deal while totally pretending he doesn’t exist.Then two seconds later, another ping:That’s the secret publishing code for your deal right, mega luxury amazing?
And so that was how she found herself in an unapologetically pink dress and ridiculously fluffy cardigan, with Connie on one side of her in that stylish purple thing of hers, Berinder on the other in the green velvet that perfectly set off her warm brown skin and sleek black hair, and finally Beck bringing up the rear in his blue tuxedo.Like bookends, she thought.Or the nicest armed guards in the world.
Then felt as if maybe this was actually going to be okay.
And that feeling continued, even after they got inside. Mainly because the place itself didn’t seem half as intimidating as she’d thought it would be. It wasn’t a big ballroom in some fancy house, like it had been for the last book launch she’d attended. It was more like a large but pleasant cottage of the kind she could imagine someone really living in.
And apparently, this was exactly what it was.
Beck accidentally confessed to her as she was busy delighting in the many comfy chairs and the collection of romantic movies all along one wall and the cozy little nooks that would just be the best to write in.Yeah, he said.Alfie sure does have it set up nice here.Then he looked a little sheepish. Like he hadn’t been supposed to say. But god, she was glad he’d gone ahead and done it anyway.
It felt good in ways she couldn’t quite explain.
And right after that emotional whammy, she got a bunch of people being inexplicably nice. They were warm and welcoming, even when she babbled and smiled too much at them. And it didn’t even seem to matter who they were. She met several footballers’ wives, and someone who said he was a friend of Vinnie Jones. Then there was some sort of television producer, who wanted to tell her that it was a pleasure to make her acquaintance. Not to mention all the journalists.
Though she supposed that made the most sense.
They seemed to have questions for her, of the type that they couldn’t quite ask.You know any time you want to talk about you-know-what, one of them said, and tried to slip her his card. But Beck and Connie and Berinder whisked her away before things could go any further, so that was okay. Or at least, better than having to chat about what they obviously wanted to chat about.
So what was it like dating Alfie Harding, she imagined them eventually saying. Or worse:Confess, it was all a big put-on, wasn’t it.Because yes, it had been, but also no, it hadn’t been at all. And sometimes, she wasn’t really sure which she was going to blurt out. It was the reason she blocked accounts and numbers that tried to press her on it. And why she’d told Beck never to ask her about the specifics, beyond the things she was comfortable turning into fiction for this story.
Which he had abided by, bless him.
Even though she could tell, sometimes, that he desperately wanted to say something. To ask her things.Are you really sure, he’d once started with, and she’d known there was an end to that sentence. A pointed end that she probably wouldn’t like. Because then he’d trailed away into nothing.
Sometimes things just don’t work out, he’d said eventually.I know that better than anyone. Then they had sat in companionable silence, drinking warm cups of soup that he weirdlyfavored over tea or coffee. And he hadn’t raised it again—not even when she suspected he needed to know something about Alfie’s memoir.
No, when it came to that he’d just asked Alfie.
And Alfie must have answered.
Of course he had, because here the thing was. Arranged in a pyramid of hardbacks, in the glowing golden little room most people were milling around in. And thankfully, it didn’t have his face on the cover. There was just the title, in a strangely pastel-colored font.Like a romance novel, she found herself thinking, then wanted to laugh.
But she couldn’t. Because now she was processing what it was actually called. It wasn’tMy Life in Footballanymore, for some unaccountable reason. Even though it still had been, last she’d looked. She’d checked online once in a moment of weakness and seen it there for preorder on Amazon.
Yet somehow that wasn’t the case now.
No, now it wasThe Only Other Person at the School Assembly.
Which struck her as extremely odd for a memoir about footballing. But maybe just a little bit less so, in some terrified part of her brain. Because suddenly it was screaming really loudly at her about quite a lot of things that she’d pretended she didn’t know. But now had to kind of think about a bit.
In a way that was making her feel quite sweaty.
And sort of like she wanted to run away immediately.
Instead of what she was actually doing, which was picking up a copy of the book. The one she hadn’t finished writing—You didn’t even get a quarter through in any kind of reasonable shapeher brain yelled—but that nobody had ever asked her to so much as tweak in the event that things weren’t quite right.
So she kind of knew what she would see when she opened it.
And yet somehow it still completely stunned her at the same time.
She read what was in there and let out a sound like the wind dying. The man next to her actually asked her if she was feelingokay, and suggested that it was probably the crab cakes if she wasn’t. “I’ve felt iffy ever since I had one,” he said, but she couldn’t answer him. She was too busy having her brain blown out the back of her head by a book she was supposed to have at least partially ghostwritten. Or that someone else should have mostly ghostwritten.
But that Alfie Harding had almost fully written himself instead.
Nearly everything in it, every word—it was all him. And more than that:
It was all the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her god.
