I looked at her, wide-eyed.
‘Delete it,’ she said. ‘You don’t need this kind of bullshit. First step to getting rid of an ex: delete everything. Lose their number. Block them.’
I bit my lip, hard.
‘You can’t let an ex’s voice stay in your head,’ she said. ‘They’ll suck you right back down into the quicksand.’
Slowly, I hovered my finger over the little text bubbles.
Don’t you dare,Jac whispered in my mind.
‘Do it,’ Dylan said. ‘I dare you.’
I swallowed.Don’t you have any self-respect?
No. Not much. Hardly any.
But enough.
I gritted my teeth. I deleted the texts.
And I blocked Jac’s number.
3
They tried to take our phones away during hotel lockdown, but Dylan pitched an absolute fit. ‘I have a seven-year-old son,’ she told Murray fiercely. ‘You’re telling me you’re going to lock me up for two weeks and not let me talk to him?’
He did indeed try to tell her that – ‘You’re not going to be able to have your phone on the show, and this is a logical extension of that policy. We can’t have any details leak.’ – but Dylan was a force of nature, and he caved. ‘And you’re going to let me have daily conversations with my kid during filming!’ she said to his retreating back. ‘Or I’m not doing the show, do you hear me?’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ Murray said, waving his hand dismissively as he walked away.
‘I want that in writing!’ she called after him.
He made another vague hand gesture without turning back.
‘Would you really have quit the show?’ I asked her, as we stood in the lift with a production assistant who was showing us to the rooms we would be locked in for the next fortnight.
‘No, but he doesn’t need to know that,’ she replied. ‘Please don’t tell him,’ she added, to the production assistant.
‘No worries,’ the PA replied.
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a parent, it’s that the first rule of getting control is acting like you already have it,’ Dylan said.
‘Would you say that’s more dad energy or daddy energy?’ I asked her, waggling my eyebrows.
Her cackle of a laugh lasted all the way up to our floor.
Our rooms were next to each other, and we leaned against the wall outside them as the PA gave us a lecture. ‘Once these doors close behind you, you won’t be coming out for two weeks,’ she warned us. ‘When meals are delivered, they’ll knock, but you should wait a full minute before you open the door. The only person you should open these doors to straight away is the nurse when they come to do testing. Is that clear?’
It was only slight, but I felt Dylan flinch when the PA mentioned nurses. I curled my fingers around hers and squeezed. She squeezed back gratefully.
‘You going to be okay?’ I asked her, when the lecture was over.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just another attack of the guilts. What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘You’ve got your phone,’ she said, gesturing. ‘I know youjust deleted your ex’s number, but you must still be connected on like fifty different kinds of social media. Are you going to be all right?’
