I blink.
Then blink again.
He definitely doesn’t remember last night. “I did.”
Lana purses her lips together, clearly trying to hide a smile. “I’m taking the boys to play a few games. Simon, don’t get into any more champagne. Bea, lovely to meet you. Don’t let this guy give you any trouble. He’s a marshmallow. A marshmallow with commitment issues, but a marshmallow.”
“Excuse me, but—” he starts, but the boys both dive on him and hug him tight.
“Bye, Dad!” Charlie says.
Eddie thumps him on the back. “It’s not that we’re abandoning you. It’s just that we want cake and we know you want to walk around with Bea, and she’s bad luck.”
“We’ll still acknowledge you if we see you when we’re all walking around. Unless it’s at musical chairs. Then you don’t exist.”
“Don’t sign too many autographs. Make the people work for it.”
And then they’re off, dragging Lana through the crowd and toward the games.
Simon looks at his security team, and even though he doesn’t say a word out loud, two of them immediately take off to follow his family.
“I was wrong,” I tell him.
“About what?”
“You definitely have it worse than me with raising teenage boys. Two at once,andthey know you have deep pockets? You’re in so much trouble.”
“Your sympathy is touching.”
He smiles at me.
I smile back.
It’s involuntary.
I don’t want to smile at him.
Mostly because I don’t want to fall for him.
But I’m starting to think it might be too late.
16
THIS IS ALL A LOAD OF OLD BOLLOCKS
Simon
I’muncertain how I feel about Lana arriving and taking over parental duties at the carnival.
On the one hand, the boys will remember this day with her rather than with me.
But on the other, I did buy them a month’s worth of food before Lana arrived.AndI pulled myself out of a drunken stupor to do it.
Plus, being without the boys gives me more freedom to do exactly what they expected I’d do, which is to sign autographs for people as Bea and I make our way through the artist tents and toward the games.
The locals will eventually stop asking as I become more familiar, and it is far easier to oblige the requests than to give myself a reputation as a crank.
And who wants to be a crank?
