Page 2

Chapter 2

It didn’t take long for Arnaud to establish Alyssa wasn’t ill. She did a lot of pretending to the outside world, but she drew the line at stringing her boyfriends along. Fair was fair.

‘You can’t just say you love me?’ Arnaud asked, his body slumped against the bathroom tiles, his giraffe ears once again wonky.

‘No,’ she said simply, from her spot on top of the toilet seat lid. Her tone was gentle, but her words honest. She’d ended a good few relationships when they’d started to look too serious, but preparing to dump someone with a charming view of a Villeroy and Boch bidet was a new one. ‘And I’m sorry. It’s really not you.’ She winced at the cliché, but it was true.

‘Don’t you even have a heart?’

‘Of course I do.’

Nobody could live without such a vital organ, and she’d definitely felt it beating as she’d rushed from the crowds to lock herself in the loo. Though she knew what he meant. Their relationship had been heading towards the commit-or-run stage – especially with her being thirty-one, and him a decade older. And if he was suddenly becoming the commit sort, he deserved to find someone who could give him more.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, standing to straighten his costume for the very last time. ‘I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.’ She knew she had to make it easy on both of them, even though she had literally no clue where she would go.

There went the end of yet another era. Exactly how many eras was one person allowed? Alyssa snapped a few last shots of herself with Arnaud’s big house in the background. Not that she lived there anymore – but people didn’t need to know all of her business. She sighed at the photos, opting for one where her choppy pink waves looked decidedly more carefree than she felt, and where enough of her gym top was showing to imply she was popping out for a bracing, New Year’s Day run. Which she absolutely wasn’t, because real exercise was hard, sweaty work.

With a few prods, Alyssa uploaded the photo to social media, typing, ‘New Year, New Me!’ with as many joyful emojis as she could muster.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. Things were about to change, in a huge, nose-diving-without-a-parachute kind of way. She tried to stop her insides from plummeting. Oh, Arnaud. He’d picked his moment to start kidding himself he was falling for her. And whilst he’d half-heartedly said she could stay on for a few days in one of the spare rooms, she knew from past experience it wasn’t wise to stick around. He’d only start getting sentimental again and make it even more embarrassing for them both. It was safer to get out of there.

She blinked a few times, trying to ignore the strange stinging sensation at the backs of her eyes, which was probably just the cold weather. It was flipping freezing in London in January. She shoved her phone into her bag and wrestled herself into her pink-and-black parka, and a black beanie hat. She did not want to be recognised on this next, humiliating leg of her journey. It was a side effect of her large online following that people often spotted her – and appearances were everything. Like umbrellas on a wet day, it paid to keep them up.

Alyssa trudged along the quiet suburban streets, dragging her fake Lulu Guinness suitcase through the grey sleet. Even though the affluent area of Chelsea was postcard perfect, fluffy white festive snow was reserved for Christmas cards and those cheesy romcoms she could no longer bear to watch. Real life was never that glossy, even with an Instagram filter. She kept her gaze down, not wanting to see the glowing lights from other people’s vast and beautiful homes. At least their windows would be shut in this weather, so she didn’t have to hear jolly voices or laughter, even if most of it would surely be exaggerated. Didn’t everyone feel a bit miserable, with another long year stretching out in front of them?

She shook her head and lifted her chin, remembering what she would say if she was coaching someone. Reasons to be cheerful. She had seven whole days to get back on top of life, before she ran out of money and might have to start busking or selling her body to old men. And the place she’d managed to bag at extremely short notice hadn’t actually been listed as ‘The World’s Grottiest Flat’. There might be all sorts of reasons the rent was as cheap as itchy knock-off perfume, and the landlord had declined to share photos.

Her eyes flicked to her watch. Just a few more minutes. A few more imposing streets. Alyssa had arranged for the Uber to pick her up somewhere other than Arnaud’s house, and to drop her off a few streets from her dreaded destination. She didn’t want anyone putting two and two together and spreading unfortunate gossip online.

Was it too late to wish she was the sort of person who saved money instead of splurged it on things that temporarily cheered her up? Not that she’d earned much of it lately. As for financial planning – that was for people who thought about their future or had dependants to worry about. She had none. Which was fine. But she was innovative, wasn’t she? With her primal fear of commitment, she was always having to start afresh. Sometimes with drastically different hair and a brand-new name. Because Alyssa Heart certainly wasn’t her real one.

Spotting the Uber, she waved at the driver and when he popped the lid of the boot, she crammed her luggage in. Then she pulled her hat down as far as she could, folded herself into the back seat, and gave the man a muffled greeting.

The car reeked of stale takeaway and pine-scented Magic Tree, and it was just her luck that the driver was the sort to tape photos of his wife and kids to the dashboard, like a montage of his lovely life. She looked away.

‘Hackney, is it?’ he asked, giving her a quick glance in the mirror.

She’d already typed the exact destination into the app, hadn’t she? ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Bit of a comedown. From here, I mean.’ The driver chuckled.

Didn’t he know it was rude to make conversation in London? That was what she liked most about this place. Not like the nosy Cotswold town where she’d been born. She managed a polite ‘mmm hmm’.

‘Been staying with family?’

She didn’t mean to grit her teeth. ‘No.’ Perhaps if she kept her answers short, he’d get the hint, as harmless as he was.

‘Friends?’

Alyssa felt herself bristle. She had plenty of them, of course she did. It was just they were all online, and she’d never met most of them. That was perfectly normal these days. Real-life friends, like men, could trash your heart, if you let them.

‘No,’ she concluded. He didn’t need the full story.

He paused for a second, eyeing her in the mirror again. When was he going to start this forest-smelling car?

‘Do I know you?’

Used to people sort of recognising her, she was running out of patience. ‘I’m kind of late, so …’