‘How long have you known about this? And why inholy helldidn’t you tell me?’ Anna yelled.
‘Not my secret to tell,’ Will said with a shrug. ‘And … I dunno. A couple of years, maybe? Three years tops.’
Anna’s jaw had dropped. Rachel was staring, not quite able to believe she was hearing this.
‘I mean, he’s never actually made aconfessionof love or anything,’ Will was saying. ‘I just know.’
‘This gets better and better,’ Anna said, looking at Will in a way that made Rachel fear for his safety. ‘How do you “just know”?’
Will rolled his eyes at her. Under the circumstances, Rachel considered this semi-suicidal.
‘I’ve known him since we were twelve, Anna. He’s my brother from another mother. And look at the evidence: when was the last time he had a proper girlfriend? How much has he hated everyone Rachel’s ever dated? How close did he come to laying one on Loser Laurence the night he turned up in here? He was prepared to fake a relationship for a night so she could save face. He helped to organise her birthday party. And healwaysremembers to buy her prawn cocktail crisps.’
It was in rare moments like this that Rachel understood how Will had ended up becoming a lawyer.
‘I mean, Tom’s my best mate and everything – but I think the question here is less how did I know than how the hell did you girlsnotknow?’
This was too much for Anna and she poked him in the ribs. He yelped and laughed, ‘Calm down, Scrappy-Doo. You don’t get to be right about everything. Just, like, ninety per cent of things.’
‘Are you sure about this, Will?’ Rachel asked. ‘I’ve thought he might be seeing someone. There was … well. There was what seemed like a mystery date, plus this rose-smelling stuff in your bathroom.’
‘Rach, I’ve never been surer,’ Will said. ‘The only dates he’s been on lately are with his rather unexpected little brother … Trips to Camden Market and other such places. You met him, didn’t you? Oscar? Tom told me he vommed on you, as well as on the sitting room rug. And if you mean that glass jar of gubbins on the window ledge, it was Alice’s – my sister’s. She left it last time she stayed on the futon after a weekend of West End shopping. Come on Rach,’ Will went on. ‘He looks at you like …’
Like you’re the sun coming up …
In a flash, Rachel remembered Jack’s words, spoken with scorn on the night of her birthday. She finally believed them. She just hoped they hadn’t come back to her too late.
‘Okay, but what do Ido?’ Rachel said, not waiting for Will to finish. She already knew the answer.
‘You get your arse to Soho, of course!’ Anna screeched, confirming it. ‘NOW!WHY AREN’T YOU MOVING ALREADY?’
Rachel nodded, then jumped up and ran for the door.
It was only when Rachel arrived at the gallery on Greek Street that she realised she was hideously underdressed. The event wasn’t black-tie or anything, but everywhere she looked there were women in tiny designer dresses and men in jeans that probably cost a week’s rent. There were actualbouncerson the door.
Bollocks. Her tea-dress-and-Doc-Martens combo was fine for the office, but entirely inappropriate for cool events full of photographers, journalists and famous people. Also, the majority of her make-up had melted off on the Tube and her hair had gone past the textured, sexy stage, crossing the border into ‘eighties tribute act’ territory.
Dev – looking sharp as ever in a grey double-breasted suit – raised his eyebrows at her as one of the bouncers got ready to stop her from going in. ‘She’s okay, Mike. Ithink…’
His eyes followed her as she pushed into the first room of the exhibition. Tom’s photographs, blown up in black and white and carefully hung on the clean walls, sat next to her biographies of each participant. The quotations she’d been asked to pull out were printed larger and dotted around the walls and up the stairs. They brought everything together, telling the story of the show and what it meant in just the way she’d hoped.
The photographs were incredible. As Rachel wandered through the room, then up to the next floor, she briefly forgot she was looking for Tom; she was transfixed by what he –they– had put together, and she was glad she wasn’t missing it.
Here was Zack, vivacious and smiling in his YSL suit. Here was an MP whose campaign to end the use of airbrushed images in advertising for children had recently made the news. Here was a body positivity campaigner: an Instagram influencer whose photographs of her tummy rolls, cellulite and body hair had garnered her more than a million followers.
And here was Jessica: slender, pretty and wide-eyed in the childlike pose Rachel remembered from the shoot. It was odd, seeing her and feeling unmoved by envy or anger – but where bitterness used to be, Rachel found something approaching understanding. Jessica was just a person, not the femme fatale of Rachel’s worst imaginings, nor a standard she had to be measured against. She smiled.
By the time she reached the third floor, she’d begun sweating. What was she going to say when she saw Tom? What washegoing to say when she found the words to tell him how she felt?
And where the hellwashe?
She went all the way up to the fifth floor and still couldn’t find him. Rachel felt herself starting to panic. This wasn’t the sort of place where he could have slunk past without her seeing him. Perhapshe’ddecided not to come to the press night in case she turned up. Maybe he was missing his own exhibition simply for the sake of avoiding her … In which case, it seemed to Rachel, there was surely no chance of convincing him they could be happy together.
Despair welled in Rachel’s stomach and pushed up into her throat, forming a thick lump that she couldn’t swallow away. She wandered down the gallery’s spiralling staircases, willing herself not to cry.
She was tired of crying. She wondered how, after the past few weeks, she could possibly have any tears left.
When she reached the ground floor, her last hope of finding Tom was extinguished. He wasn’t here. Feeling bereft, she left the gallery and stood on the pavement outside.