“Oh. Er…”
I frantically wrack my brain for a good reasonnotto do this, but Chloe’s already out of her seat and en route to the bathroom, so I reluctantly get to my feet and go over to the bar, where I manage to get the attention of one of the staff.
“Can I speak to the owner, please?” I ask her, cringing as I realize how stupid I sound.
“Is there something wrong?” the woman asks. She has shiny black hair piled up in one of those effortless looking topknots I can never seem to manage, and a slightly harassed expression, which I’ve just made worse. “Can I help?”
“Oh, no!” I assure her. “Everything was great. It’s just, Jamie’s a friend of mine. Well, sort of.”
“Jamie?” The woman’s eyebrows rise in disbelief. “Jamie isn’t the owner; he just works here, like the rest of us. Did he tell you he owned the place?”
“I… I…”
I open and close my mouth like a confused goldfish as I take this in.
Jamiedoesn’town the bar?
So why did he let me think he did?
“It’s okay, Lina, I’ll handle this.”
I turn around to find Jamie standing behind me. His hair flops sweatily into his eyes, and there’s a large blob of mustard on the front of his t-shirt.
At least, I hope it’s mustard.
“Summer! Didn’t expect to see you here; having breakfast, are you?”
Jamie’s being deliberately upbeat, trying to pretend he hasn’t just been caught out in one whopper of a lie. He thinks that if he doesn’t mention it, I won’t either; that I’ll go along with it, just to avoid the awkwardness of calling him out. Just to benice.
I almost do it, too.
Every instinct in my body is telling me to nod, and smile, and pretend nothing happened. Because that’s exactly what Old Summer would do. She would put Jamie’s feelings above her own, and then she’d go home and wonder why she’d rather let someone take her for a fool than tell them what she really thinks.
But no more.
“Yeah, Chloe and I thought we’d pop in to see you,” I reply, looking him dead in the eye. “To your bar. That you told me you owned.”
The smile falls from Jamie’s face
“Now, I didn’t actuallysaythat,” he says, looking at his feet. “You just assumed.”
“Oh, come on, Jamie. You deliberately made it sound like you owned the place. And even if Ihadjust somehow got the wrong end of the stick, you had so many opportunities to tell me the truth. So why didn’t you?”
I’m angry now; not because he’s just a lowly barman, rather than the entrepreneur he made himself out to be — I couldn’t care less about that. But because he lied. Because he’s not the person I thought he was; and I’m starting to wonder if he ever was. And, most of all, because I don’t think I deserve to be treated like this.
“It’s just such a pointless lie,” I go on, not giving him a chance to make excuses. “And it’s not just me you lied to, it’s Chloe, too. What else did you tell us that wasn’t real?”
There’s a lot more I could say here. I’m just getting warmed up, in fact. But, luckily for Jamie, before I can really get into it, a little girl with her hair tied up in pigtails comes bounding towards us.
“Daddy!” she says, throwing her arms around Jamie’s legs. “Hi, Daddy!”
Daddy?
Okay, so maybe this particular interruptionisn’tso lucky for Jamie, after all. And he obviously doesn’t think so either, because his face turns scarlet with embarrassment as he reaches down and takes the child by the hand.
A daughter.
Jamie has a daughter.
