“The truth hurts, but maybe you need a solid kick in the arse. Because years of wondering what might’ve happened if you hadn’t been a coward… that’s much more painful.” He falls silent and fusses with the boutonniere.
I walk slowly to an overstuffed chenille chair and sag into it. “She’s in Montreal right now for the GP anyway. It’s not like I can do anything.”
“Oh, right,” Badrick says, snapping his fingers. “You couldn’t possibly send flowers—there are no florist shops in Canada. Well, carry on, then. You know what you’re doing, clearly.”
I glare at him, and he smirks back.
His tone is gentler when he says, “Are you my best man or what? So…be your best. Quit making excuses for why it won’t work. I don’t know if you’re more afraid that you’re right about that, or afraid you’re wrong.”
My shred of laughter is bitter, and I focus on adjusting the strap of my wristwatch. “Fine. Next GP is Silverstone. Maybe I’ll… give her a shout and see if she’s willing to get together and talk in London.”
“You’ll ‘give her a shout’? Not much of a grand gesture.”
“Don’t push your luck. The flash mob can wait until I see whether she’s receptive.”
“Fine, but at least don’t make her come to you. It’s an houror two up the M1 to Silverstone. Go toher, you feckin’ bellend. Christ.” He shoots his cuffs with an expression of pure wedding-day jitters, then comes to offer me a hand up. “Right, it’s go time.”
I stand and he pulls me into a brief, back-thumping hug. “Love you, bruv. I just want you to be happy, you know that, yeah?”
“I do. And you’re not wrong about any of it.” I gnaw at my lower lip and admit, “The stakes are just so fucking high.”
“They are.” He grins, glancing at the window. Outside, the sound of Laurent’s distinctive laugh rises on the golden morning sunshine. “But the higher the stakes, the bigger the payoff.”
LONDON
It took a while to decide whether I would execute revenge on CJ Ardley. If that was my plan, I’d need access to my blog again. It has over a hundred thousand subscribers and gets a healthy amount of non-subscriber traffic as well. I asked my mother (omitting mention of a revenge plot, of course), and she reinstated my admin control because she felt sorry for me and said a bit of writing would give me something to do until the new job atCaterwaulstarts. Between the beard, the weight loss, and the shadows beneath my eyes, Mum was genuinely distraught by my appearance.
For a week, I started drafts of a post detailing what Ms. Ardley had done, painting her as the worst kind of embittered,striving, sleazy hag. I looked at the screenshots I’d saved in the secure photo-vault app on my phone, texts from her in which she said incriminating things. There were even a few where she mocked her powerful benefactor and paramour, Gavin Yates. I knew those were pure gold. He’s a vain monster, and if I published messages in which she called him “a clod with all the sex appeal of a crow eating roadkill,” their alliance would be over.
But dammit, I couldn’t do it.Who am I now?
All I could think of was how such poisonous gossip had hurt Sage. CJ Ardley may deserve payback, but I won’t stoop to her level and be the one to bestow it. I’m not that man anymore. Whatever my future holds—with or without my Salvia officinalis—knowing Sage (and knowingmyselfa little better) has changed me.
When I do publish my firstIn the Mirrorspost after the hiatus, the tone is different than it’s been in the past. Rather than gossip, it’s more race analysis, combined with some comically self-deprecating material about my travels.
I can’t help throwing in a bit of glowing praise for Sage, hoping she’ll see it.
At any rate, I end up deleting the screenshots of CJ’s messages, and to my surprise, I’m relieved. I feel free, like I can finally take a full breath, having removed some stifling, sweaty plastic Halloween mask after a lifetime of hiding behind it.
It turns out that CJ gets her comeuppance anyway, as tends to happen.
She calls me two weeks after Badrick’s wedding. I’m back in London, picking up pastries at Forno. (I can’t say a steadydiet of maritozzi, pain au chocolat, and red wine is improving my performance at the gym, but at least I’m eating again.)
I pull my mobile from a pocket, balancing the pastry box on my other arm as I exit the bakery. “Ms. Ardley, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You’re not going to get away with this,” she grits out. “I know it must’ve been you who put my daughter up to writing those things.”
I wander leisurely toward the kerb where the Austin-Healey is parked. “I assure you, I’ve never met your daughter. To what are you referring, pet?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” she rants. “What she said on her blog, obviously! About how I’ve ‘ruined our relationship’ by reportingentirely accurateinformation about Sage and Julian Sikora, how I’m ‘having a midlife crisis,’ calling me a ‘social climber’ and saying Gavin put the moves on her when we met up with her and her husband vacationing in Croatia. Making up those disgusting things he supposedly said, proposing a threesome! And worst of all, revealing private messages, stuff I’d told her confidentially about him. I can’t—”
“Carol-Jeanne, love, let me get this straight: Your child expressed that your actions, slagging off her close friends, have damaged your mother-daughter relationship. She called you out for toxic behavior. She said that the ‘No Pity Chef’—a man universally recognized to be a womanizer and bully—propositioned her. Please, a moment of self-awareness. Are you claiming thatanyof this is unlikely?”
“I’m not saying it’sunlikely. I’m saying the tone is cruel.”
“Again, listen to yourself. Does it sound strangely familiar?Like… oh, I don’t know… the logical consequences of things you set in motion?”
“Youmust have set it in motion!” she seethes. “Sage dropped you cold—everyone knows it—because she figured you’re the one who gave me those tidbits about Julian.”
