‘Well, I can assure you it wasn’t from my fucking fairy godmother,’ I snap. ‘I mean, I’ve never had a letter from her, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t sign it with your name.’
He continues to stare at me for a moment before his eyes narrow. ‘Have you still got this letter?’ he asks.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I say, my voice dripping with sarcasm. I don’t think even Stuart’s lies made me this angry. ‘I keep it under my pillow and kiss it goodnight when I go to bed. What do you think? Do you keep letters where people make you feel like something they stepped in?’
‘I promise you, Tori, that I did not write you any letters. What, exactly, did it say?’
‘I don’t remember it verbatim,’ I tell him. ‘But it was pretty standard dumping fodder. You know, “I’ve had lots of fun but now it’s time for me to go back to my real life. Thanks for everything and good luck with your future.” That was basically the gist of it.’
To my surprise, his expression hardens even further. ‘And you didn’t question, for a moment, whether this letter was genuine?’
Now I’m the one looking confused. ‘Why would I? Who else would send it?’
‘Let me ask you a question, Tori, and think very carefully before you answer. Do you honestly think I’m the kind of person who would behave like that? After everything we shared?’
I sigh as I pull out a chair and sink into it, the anger draining out of me and being replaced by confusion. ‘I don’t know, Gabriel. I thought you were this wonderful person, but then Harvey arrived and you just seemed to morph into someone completely different. The letter fitted pretty well with Airport Gabriel.’
He sits back down as well and closes his eyes for a moment. I’m completely unable to process what’s happening here, so I just wait quietly for him to say something else.
‘Why are you here, Gabriel?’ I ask eventually, when the silence starts to become oppressive.
‘Because I thought we had something real,’ he says softly, opening his eyes to look at me again. ‘I know I messed up badly at the airport, and I should have been much firmer with Harvey, but I guess I’m so used to him running my life that I just went into autopilot. It was a blip and, as soon as I realised how it must have come across to you, I was ashamed. If it’s any consolation, I did give him a piece of my mind once I got him to his hotel. I made it his top priority to organise the car with the champagne and strawberries while I was rehearsing. I know it was a silly gesture, but I’d hoped you’d see it for what it was – the beginning of an apology that also included the Lady Gaga mashup in the concert, and which I was planning to complete at the party afterwards. It was the closest I could get to the scene at the end ofPretty Womanwhere Richard Gere turns up with his head sticking out of the limo and an enormous bunch of flowers. But you never showed up to the party, and Harvey told me he’d seen you leaving as soon as the concert was finished.’ His eyeswiden as something obviously occurs to him. ‘No,’ he mutters softly.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Was it handwritten, this letter?’ he asks.
‘I wouldn’t even be giving you the time of day if you’d typed it,’ I reply.
‘I don’t know how many times I need to tell you this before you hear it, but I never sent it, Tori. Can you remember the handwriting?’
I close my eyes. I don’t have a photographic memory, but some things just burn their way into your brain, don’t they, and it doesn’t take me long before I have a clear mental picture of the letter.
‘It was spiky, kind of spidery,’ I tell him.
‘OK, so let’s start to clear this up,’ he says, grabbing one of the pads of paper we keep on the desk in our meeting room, along with a pen. ‘Remind me, as closely as you can, what it said.’
I screw my eyes closed, trying to remember. Although the image of the letter is clear in my mind, the words aren’t.
‘Dear Tori,’ I begin slowly. ‘Something about you hoping I’d enjoyed the evening, how you’d valued our friendship, but now you had to get back to your real life and were saying goodbye. Please don’t come to the party as you’ll be busy with your precious sponsors yada yada. You get the picture.’
‘OK,’ he says, shoving the pad across to me as I open my eyes again. ‘Did it look anything like this?’
The first thing that I notice is the handwriting. Gabriel’s writing is rounded, with little flourishes on each of the capital letters. It’s beautifully legible and nothing at all like the untidy scrawl on the letter I got before. The second thing I notice is that the words he’s written are not the ones I dictated.
Dear Tori,
I’m so, so sorry for the way you have been treated, but hopefully this will reassure you that I did not and would never have written a letter like the one you’ve just described. My feelings about you were, and still are, completely genuine. If you’re able to believe this is true, I have some ideas about where this letter might have come from, and there’s something I want to show you.
Love
Gabriel x
‘Very touching,’ I say. ‘What is it you want to show me?’
He pulls out his phone and taps at it for a while, before showing me a picture of a piece of paper with what appears to be a list of piano pieces. The writing is spidery and I don’t need to have the letter in front of me to know that this is an exact match.
‘What is this?’ I ask.
