“Send it me.”
He nodded.
It was my phone’s wallpaper for the next year.
Caleb
Ididn’t really do anger.
As a kid, I’d apparently been good natured and easy going. My one tantrum had been over a toy car and the son of my mum’s friend refusing to let me have it, even though it was mine. Aside from that, I preferred to sort situations that were irritating the fuck out of me by either leaving them, or finding a path forward.
However, Peter Cash hadn’t been on my dance card before, which was having a boiling effect on my blood and the prospect of time inside at His Majesty’s pleasure an option if it meant I could put my hands around his throat and squeeze.
The photos we’d taken from our walk up Yr Wyddfa had been posted on her social media, so far racking up half a million views. She’d also gotten me to take a video of her reaching the summit of the mountain, one where she brought her hands together to make a heart. That’d gone viral – so far so good.
It’d taken another week for Peter Cash to get in touch, this time through the enquiries email of the Puffin Inn, and what he’d sent wasn’t pretty. It would’ve been worse, and for all he knew, it had been this bad, but Roe and his team had put a filter on the email for key words and whatever other things he was tracking, so Amelie or Alys didn’t open it. None of us knew what was actually contained in the narrative, but it was clear Cash knew where Zoey was staying.
The psychologist was back on a video call again, along with the police and members of the security team, a strategy meeting that I was invited to, because there might be some risk to me as well.
“It’s highly unlikely that someone with Cash’s profile would try to harm the people around Zoey, unless he perceives them to be likely to harm her, or as a threat towards him. But we don’t know how this would look for him, or how he’s interpreting what he’s seeing around Zoey at present.”
“So what would you advise Zoey to do to minimise any threat?”
“Carry on as she would do normally. She can’t control his reactions. He’s going to be upset she’s in a relationship, and this has seemingly brought her performances to a close, which is where he’s likely to have first felt he’d made a connection with her. My guess is he was employed as security for a gig Zoey did and maybe spoke to her, thought she was kind, and in his head it’s developed into a full-blown secret relationship. Key advice, do not let it get out that the relationship between her and Caleb isn’t real.”
That had stung.
The relationship between her and Caleb isn’t real.
The psychologist was right, of course. It wasn’t a real relationship, just a close friendship, where the lines had been crossed once.
We wanted to draw Cash out, have him do something else that we could manage the fallout from, and have him arrested for more than breaking and entering Zoey’s house, something that would see him incarcerated for a while.
Plans were made, vague ones that would be beefed up and then enacted by Roe and Killian O’Hara’s team, not ones that the police were privy to.
In the meantime, Zoey and I were off to London for a few days with two tasks on our list: meet with a team that were clearing out her house now that it’d been sold, and being seen together as much as possible in public, looking as loved up as we could.
Which was an utter paradox. It wasn’t going to be hard to act like I was loved up with Zoey. The hard part was not letting it feel real.
This last fortnight had been torture, the sort that tickled your feet to the point of making you screech, only you couldn’t pull your feet away. We’d spent time on the island, doing normal shit: going out on the boat, helping Amelie at the bar. Zoey babysat Gully’s kids and ended up hanging out with Fleur and Freya a ton, in between writing songs that sounded different from her usual stuff. I’d carried on with my research and the other projects I had fingers in, seeing some of my PhD students and starting the preparations for the trip to the Antarctic after Christmas, a trip that I didn’t know how to approach.
But I wasn’t focused on that, I was concentrating on not making it obvious that I was looking for someone in the crowd, namely Peter Cash.
We were at a gala, a celebrity one to raise money for a children’s hospital, one that had close ties to my family as Amelie’s friend’s daughter had been treated there for a heart condition – very successfully. It was one of the few events that Zoey hadn’t stripped from her diary, and it was exactly what the psychologist had suggested, agreed upon by the security team so it was a win-win.
Kind of.
“You’re sure you’re okay with this?” She asked me the same question as she had six times since we’d been picked up in the limo.
“I’m fine with it. The menu looked good, at least.”
She stuck her tongue out at me but still looked beautiful. It was a black-tie gala, an excuse for Zoey to get dressed up and have her hair and make-up done, which she didn’t exactly hate. I was in a tux, hair also attended to by hands that weren’t mine, and my stubble could be classified as designer.
“It’s always about food with you.”
“I can’t really deny that.” One of the perks was the restaurants we were down to go to while we were here. I liked eating out, trying new things. That’d been another benefit of the research I’d done; I’d travelled, tasting local delicacies and dishes, some of which I hadn’t repeated, others I’d mentioned to Amelie and hoped she’d experimented with them.
“Well, if we can get in there looking like the lovebirds we’re meant to be, you can eat as many canapés as you wish.” She patted my thigh.
