Page 65 of You Belong With Me

Brace for news: I saw Fraser. He knows about the insider info stories – he’d noticed himself. Crucially, he said in passing *Molly* pointed out this weekend’s one about you coming to home for an hour to see me. I don’t think therefore it can be her? xx

PS I think I’ve fallen in love with your family, too, now, FFS. Can I keep access to them in the event of any separation?

Elliot

Interesting … Equally, pointing to something, exactly as you describe, establishes your innocence? Sorry, I know you’ll think I’m an icy bastard, but this world forces you to become one. I really don’t want it to be her. I’ll bear it in mind, and thanks for the heads up, though. If Fraz knows it’shappening, that means I should speak to him. xx

PS Nope, scorched earth! The stakes are really going up for you, huh?

As Edie arrived at work, Declan bounded out the doorway of their building, an unexpected look of concern on his face. ‘Edie!’

His desk on their first floor didn’t overlook the street; he must’ve been peering out the window to know she was approaching.

‘Everything all right?’ she said.

‘Behind you!’

Edie turned to see a man with a camera, kneeling on the pavement across the road, camera with large flash held aloft.

‘Oh … Ugh,’ she said. It was both troubling and oddly anticlimactic at the same time. She realised she’d been so fearful of this prospect, and now it had arrived, and it was some middle-aged guy in a fleece with a piece of equipment you could buy from Currys.

Declan shrugged his jacket off his shoulders and held it in front of Edie, like a matador with a cape.

She started laughing.

‘We can at least ruin the wanker’s shots.’

35

‘Who’s the white whale client for us?’ Declan asked, Manic Street Preachers his soundtrack.

Edie feared this work environment would spoil her for all others. They’d introduced the rituals of Wednesday pizza and Friday afternoon cake break and were still performing well enough to get warm words of encouragement from Richard. (‘Yet he still won’t let me haveThe Face That Lunched A Thousand Shitsas my email boilerplate,’ Declan said.)

‘White whale?’ Edie said absently. It hadn’t been a morning designed to encourage her concentration.

‘Yeah, like Don Draper with Coca-Cola. Who do we really want and can’t get? I feel like a challenge. I feel like you and me could be the dynamos of regional ad agencies. I want awards. I want Richard hanging oil paintings of us as his king and queen. I want this office teeming with fresh hires to bully …’ He swept an arm at the great space.

‘Do you? Colleagues are a complication, in my experience.’ She gave an eye roll, and Declan smiled. ‘Present company excepted. Uhm, white whale … for me, Pepsi. Just their social media. Use the wholeIs Pepsi OK?joke about that beingtheir full name, and run with it. I love finding a weakness and making it a strength. Never got round to doing a proposal and putting it in front of Richard. My hubris is tempered by my laziness.’

‘Fuck, yes!’ Declan’s eyes lit up. ‘Can I start on that? You add to it, we take it to Rich as a joint project?’

‘For sure. I do think fewer people around is giving our brains more space to breathe.’

Edie relished the solitude, the two of them in a room that could comfortably fit twenty.

‘This is possibly my cue to tell you something,’ Declan said, looking tense. ‘It’s total crap, but I don’t want you to hear it any other way, in case it gets mangled. I left the work WhatsApp group with Jess and the others. Jess and I aren’t currently on the best terms.’

‘Shit! Because of me? … It was the story about me and Elliot at the party, wasn’t it?’ Edie said.

She was starting to understand Elliot’s permanent homesickness. Before that cataclysm of a wedding in Harrogate – as rubbish as her life was, and as Elliot-less – she’d had tedious anonymity, and boy, she missed it.

‘Yeah. She got snarky about it, and I defended you. She had a go at me for being “a simp”’ – Edie could see Declan judiciously editing himself as he spoke – ‘I said, you know what, I’m resigning from this discourse. Left the chat.’

‘I hate that I’m causing you trouble and losing you friends. Weren’t you and Jess quite close?’

Aww. Love you, Dunny! xxx.A penny dropped quietly somewhere for Edie: Declan was a good-looking, personableman, and Edie had Jess bracketed under ‘married’. However, she thought back to the jubilant look on Jess’s face in that picture.

‘Yeah, we were. I don’t get it. I know she’s tight with the fella’s ex-wife, and pain was caused. But everyone’s moved on. Why can’t they call it blood under the bridge?’

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