“You don’t care,” she repeated. “You don’t care about the Lucozade deal. You don’t care about the BOA. You don’t care that every tabloid in the country is currently running your name alongside the words ‘sex game’ and ‘conquest spreadsheet’ and that your mum is hiding in a hotel because journalists won’t leave her doorstep. You really don’t care about any of that?”
“I care about my mum.”
“Thenact like it.” Sharon’s heel struck the tile. “Because right now, the man I’m looking at is lying on a sofa feeling sorry for himself while I try to save what’s left of his professional life, andI am telling you, as someone who has cleaned up every mess you’ve made for the last six years, that this one is different! This isn’t a tabloid sting. This isn’t a bad photo. This is a pattern of behaviour documented in writing, with screenshots, with your name on every message, and ‘boys will be boys’ stopped being a viable defence strategy fifteen years ago. The public has moved on. The sponsors have moved on. If you want any chance of getting through this without losing everything you’ve built, you need to move on too, and that starts with giving me something I can work with.”
Lex stared at the legal pad on his chest. A section of Sharon’s handwriting was visible through the torn page, circled phrases, arrows, a list of names with ticks and crosses beside them. She’d been up since before he had. She’d been doing triage on his life while he lay here looking up at the ceiling.
“What do you want me to say, Shaz?”
“I want you to tell me what you actually feel. Not what you think sounds good. Not what plays well. The truth, Lex, so I can figure out how much of it we can use and how much of it will make things worse.”
He sat up. The legal pad slid off his chest and landed on the sofa cushion. He put his elbows on his knees and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets until he saw white.
“That I’m sorry for being such a knobhead.”
Sharon’s arms uncrossed. Her weight shifted back on her heels. “Okay. That’s a start. Is that the statement? ‘I was a knobhead, I’m sorry’?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. That’s what I did, isn’t it? I treated people like points on a scoreboard, and I posted a photo of someone who trusted me while he was asleep, and I did it to show off to my mates, and there’s no version of that story where I come out looking like anything other than exactly the sort ofbloke your mum warns you about.” He dragged his hands down his face. “So yeah. I was a knobhead. That’s the statement.”
Sharon was quiet for a moment. She picked up the legal pad from the cushion, smoothed the torn page, and tucked it under her arm.
“I can work with that,” she said. “The tone needs finessing, but the bones are right. Accountability. No excuses. No ‘I was young,’ no ‘locker room talk.’ Just: I did this, I’m sorry, I know it was wrong.” She paused. “David will want to soften it. I’ll tell him no.”
Lex nodded. His hands were hanging between his knees, and the knuckles on his right hand were swollen from the heavy bag yesterday, the skin split across the second metacarpal. He’d wrapped them badly.
“Sharon.”
“Mm.”
“Shazza, I need you to get a message to Barnaby.” Lex’s throat was tight. He swallowed against it. “He’s not answering me. His mobile’s off, or he’s blocked me, or he’s just — he’s just not picking up. And I can’t go to Chester Square because there’ll be press outside, and even if there wasn’t, Perry would lamp me before I got to the front door, and he’d be right to.”
His voice cracked on the last word. He pressed his lips together and waited for it to pass.
“I just need him to know that it wasn’t a game. Not by the end. Not for a long time before the end.” He looked up at Sharon. “I don’t care about the sponsors, or the BOA, or the King’s bloody Trust. I care that I hurt someone who’d trusted me, and the first thing I did after he slept with me was take a photo and send it to a group chat for points. That’s what I did, Sharon. That’s the thing I can’t PR my way out of.”
Sharon set the legal pad down on the kitchen island. She came around the sofa and sat beside him, close enough that hershoulder pressed against his arm. “Let him be for now, Lex.” Her voice was quiet and stripped of strategy. “He needs space, and you turning up at his door or sending messages through me is only going to makeyoufeel better, not him. If Barnaby wants to hear from you, he’ll reach out when he’s ready. And if he doesn’t…” She let the sentence sit. “Then that’s his right, and you’ll respect it. That’s how you show him that he wasn’t really a part of the game.”
Lex’s jaw worked. He wanted to argue. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that Barnaby needed to hear it now, that every hour of silence was another hour of Barnaby believing the worst version of the story, curled up in his bed at Chester Square with his mobile switched off.
But Sharon was right. She was usually right. That was why he paid her fifteen per cent of everything he made.
He leaned forward and put his face in his hands.
Sharon’s palm settled between his shoulder blades. She didn’t rub. She didn’t pat. She just left her hand there, warm and steady, and let the silence do what her words couldn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Barnabygave himself two days.
This was the protocol for a minor injury. It was how he would deal with a strained flexor, or a bruised heel; two days off the horse. Two days of ice and elevation and Mrs Farrow’s chicken broth, served on a tray because the dining room felt too far away. If you allowed yourself a third day, you ran the risk of your body forgetting it was capable of going beyond the confines of your bedroom.
On the first day he didn’t get out of bed. Florence was permitted onto the mattress, which violated the rules he’d established when she was a puppy and which he enforced with diminishing conviction every time she looked at him with those liquid amber eyes. She lay along the length of his body, her nose tucked against his hip, her tail hanging off the edge. She didn’t move except to sigh at intervals that suggested she understood the gravity of the situation and was with him for the long haul.
He didn’t turn his mobile on or open the curtains. Mrs Harding brought tea and toast at eight, and again at noon.Barnaby drank the tea, left the toast. She collected the tray without comment, which was how the Chester Square staff communicated their sympathy.
His mother rang the house line twice. Barnaby heard the telephone in the hallway, heard Mrs Harding’s murmured response, and pulled the duvet over his head.
He thought about the spreadsheet a lot that first day.
