Famously in Love

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-TWO

Is this what you pictured? In your fantasies, in your wildest dreams, is this what you pictured? Was this the goal – are you happy now? Was this the treasure – are you happy now?

– from ‘The Treasure We Buried’, by These Exiles

‘IT’S ME,’ A VOICE called, with a noise that sounded like a bag being dropped by the hotel door. ‘Jessy?’

‘She’s got to be up by now, right?’ Anna’s stage whisper was loud, even from the small kitchenette in the suite Derek had said I could stay in until, and I quote, ‘the storm has blown over’. ‘God, I’d forgotten how gorgeous this place was.’

A prickle of uncertainty crept up my spine as I leaned against the cabinet, bottle in hand. ‘Laura?’

I hadn’t left the hotel room in three days. Calling in sick on day one had made Karun huff down the phone, but honestly, I couldn’t even bear thinking about going to work.

What – sit at my desk while my heart was breaking and colour-code spreadsheets that someone else would take credit for?

No thank you.

And of course, that didn’t matter any more.

It had only been the speed of Laura’s response to my SOS earlier that got me out of bed in the first place.

Jessy

Emergency

Laura

I’ll be there in an hour

It was weird.

The text reminded me of the very one that had dragged me into this mess, all those weeks ago.

Another thump. ‘Laura?’ I called out from the kitchen. ‘Anna? I was wondering why it took you so long to – hey.’

My heart plummeted as I saw their faces freeze.

Freeze at the sight of me – which wasn’t super flattering.

I was sitting – not lying, thank God – on the kitchen floor.

I was wearing an oversized hoodie I’d grabbed at a charity shop last year when my heating had gone out.

In my left hand was a bottle of wine, half drunk and with a lipstick ring around the neck.

In the other hand was an ice cream tub. It was nearly empty.

‘Oh, Jessy,’ Laura said quietly, stepping through the doorway towards me, glasses slipping down her nose before she pushed them back up with her thumb. ‘You look … shit. Respectfully.’

I grinned through the haze of sugar and cheap booze. ‘Well, that can’t be true. Not if this wine and the ice cream are anything to go by.’

‘I’d half-expected your emergency message to be nothing more than a brilliant and tactical excuse to get me out of bed,’ Anna muttered, stepping around to my other side and dropping on to the floor beside me.

But this wasn’t an act. ‘It’s over,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s all over.’

Laura’s face dropped. ‘You haven’t – fuck, please tell me you haven’t done anything –’

‘No! No, I don’t mean – my job. It’s over,’ I said with a helpless shrug.

Anna stared as though she hadn’t heard me. ‘No.’

‘Yup.’

‘No –’

‘If you’re just going to sit on the floor and disagree with me,’ I said darkly, lifting the bottle of wine for another swig, ‘then fuck off.’

My sister’s glare was severe. ‘If you’re not going to tell me what’s happened, I’ll just leave.’ She waited. ‘Jessy?’

I just sat there. How had my whole world fallen apart in a matter of days?

‘I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong!’ Anna said sharply, eyeing me with that lawyer look of hers.

And yeah, I was well aware of the accuracy of the statement, considering that I had told Laura and Anna practically nothing about why Patrick and I … about why he and I weren’t …

They didn’t need to know.

Just that it was over.

‘And it really is over with Patrick,’ I said quietly, still not sure which hurt more – the loss of the man I really cared about, or the implosion of the only proper job I’d ever had. ‘It’s over,’ I mumbled, lifting the bottle.

‘Over – with Patrick?’ I’d never seen Laura look so outraged. ‘Like, actually over? I thought all that break-up stuff was Derek wanting bigger headlines –’

‘Yeah, he accused me of lying and messing with his … his private life.’

‘Just because your mum is dead, that doesn’t mean you can fix mine!’

Those were words that my sister absolutely did not need to hear.

Anna swore under her breath. ‘I’m going to kill him. I warned him, I’m going to kill –’

‘First things first,’ Laura muttered, jerking her head towards me.

Me? What did I do?

Delicately, making sure she didn’t spill a drop – not in this economy – Anna pulled the bottle of wine from my mostly unresisting hands. ‘There we go.’

‘Oh, come on –’

‘Not at ten in the morning, thank you,’ Laura said severely, though with a wry smile. ‘All this time, and I’m still looking after you.’

I’m not saying I was always the one to fall apart, because I wasn’t. We were tough, Laura and I. We’d had to be.

But she was my older sister, even if only by minutes, and sometimes I was perfectly happy letting her take care of me. She always knew what to do, always resisted the urge to despair – an urge I embraced whenever I could, especially if it meant I could justify having pizza in bed.

‘I guess I should be glad you’re not dating him any more,’ Laura said lightly, slowly lowering herself so that she was sitting on the floor with us. ‘He gave this big interview. In preparation for the awards thingy this Saturday.’

A shiver of tension rippled down my spine. ‘An interview.’

See, this was the trouble when you blocked certain keywords from your social media. You missed out on things. Like the fact that your ex – fake ex? Whoever – had done a public interview in which he’d likely had to talk about you.

Fun.

‘What did he say?’

Laura sighed heavily as she took off her glasses. ‘He was being asked again and again, far as I can make out, what had happened with the two of you. If you were together or not, and if you’d broken up, whether he was back on the dating apps.’

I pulled my knees up to hug them. ‘Great.’ Exactly what I wanted to hear.

‘The prick should have kept his damned mouth shut,’ Anna said darkly, shifting over to sit next to me, her arm slung around my shoulder.

‘Again – what did he say?’

My sister’s dejected look worried me. She took a breath before saying, ‘He said he wasn’t on any of the dating apps. Not even Butterflies.’

Ah. I winced.

Yeah, that was definitely bad. The whole point of me doing this thing was to promote Butterflies.

‘Users have started to delete their accounts,’ Laura said, dropping a finger into the ice cream tub, swooping it around and bringing it to her mouth.

‘Now there’s absolutely no chance of matching with their favourite pop star.

Not that they would have been able to, with the two of you dating.

But in their minds they must have thought they were in with a chance.

Especially after everything in the press. ’

‘But what are you going to do, Laura –’

My sister’s snort halted me in my tracks. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me – your little chat with Dillon has proven that I can get funding from a wider group of people. But, yeah. Not super helpful.’

We fell into silence, sitting there on the kitchenette floor of a hotel suite that I could absolutely not afford and would most definitely have to move out of soon.

I felt awful. Butterflies was everything Laura had worked for, everything she’d sacrificed for. This had been her dream: to start apps and make money, make millions – change the world with a foundation, invest in our local communities, open a centre where we’d grown up.

Be one of those people who did something.

‘Talk to me about your job,’ my twin said quietly. ‘You said it’s over?’

I slipped my phone out of my hoodie pocket. ‘Yeah, I got a call yesterday. Karun very kindly recorded it as per GSR Financials policy and sent it to me. As an audio record. To, and I quote, “prevent any later misunderstandings”.’

Anna swore under her breath and handed me back the wine she’d so recently confiscated.

‘Wow, big corporates are really something, aren’t they?’ Laura screwed up her nose. ‘Let’s give it a listen, then.’

I pressed play and my little recorded voice started up. Oh, it was even worse hearing it the second time around.

‘I really wanted to have this conversation in person, Ms Donovan, but as we’re nearing the end of the month and the paperwork has to go through today –’

‘Paperwork? I sent you the deck on Monday for the –’

‘I am afraid we are terminating your position at GSR Financials, Ms Donovan.’

Yep, listening to it a second time was so much worse. I still couldn’t believe it. Seriously, did I break a mirror or upset the heavens or something?

Laura spoke over the end of the recording. ‘But you’d done everything they wanted!’

‘I mean, I did take like a five-week break from my grad job,’ I pointed out, not quite sure why I was defending Karun or GSR Financials.

‘I’m just relieved I recorded it so I couldn’t trick myself into thinking I’d dreamt it.

All I could hear was a buzzing as my pulse grew in volume and thump, thump, thumped in my head. ’

‘You poor thing,’ Laura said sympathetically, her face a picture of concern. ‘But you don’t look … devastated.’

‘I just got fired,’ I said, taking another swig of the insanely sweet wine. ‘But, you know, I’m strangely OK about it.’

Because the panic … still hadn’t come.

Weird. I’d sat there, preparing myself to fight it off as soon as it arrived, and it just hadn’t. Even the dread from first receiving the call was disappearing.

Weird as fuck.

Laura looked over at me with a spoon in her mouth. She was still eating what was left of my ice cream.

‘Please tell me you didn’t go in and sign a bunch of stuff?’ Anna said, like she hadn’t taught me better.

‘Nah, I knew not to go in without my legal representative.’ I grinned, nudging her and enjoying the warmth of having my sister and bestie around me. God, I loved them. ‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘Says the girl who just downed the equivalent of a large glass of wine in one pull,’ Laura said pointedly. ‘Shouldn’t you be panicking? Freaking out or something? How much have you got saved?’

‘A bit. But they’re giving me six months’ pay.’

It was bizarre. Everyone our age I knew lived in fear of exactly this: losing their job and finding themselves back on the market.

Hell, it’s not like I loved my work at GSR Financials. But it paid me a wage. Enough to live. To support myself.

And now …

‘You know, I think … I think,’ I said slowly, lifting my gaze to my clearly concerned sister, ‘I’m going to use this as a reset.’

Anna blinked. ‘A reset.’

My shrug was perhaps a little too nonchalant. ‘Yeah. I mean, I was chasing after finance because I thought that was what you were supposed to want. If you’re even halfway decent at maths, work in finance, right?’

‘That is what everyone does,’ Anna agreed.

Half my uni group were working at banks or investment firms or stuff like that, and it was just … what we did. What I’d always assumed I would do.

‘Perhaps it’s time to think about what I actually want out of my career,’ I said slowly. ‘Out of my life.’

When had I stopped dreaming and started settling?

‘You’ve got that faraway look in your eyes you used to get as a kid,’ Laura pointed out, sticking her spoon back into the ice-cream tub and scraping out the last bits. Her dedication to leaving nothing behind was impressive. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I just … my whole life has been about the next thing,’ I said. ‘Got to pass my exams at school to get to uni, got to get into the best uni, got to get the best marks to get the best grad job … it’s like I’ve been running a marathon with no finishing line.’

Anna picked up the wine bottle and took a swig herself. ‘Fuck me, do you want to be more cheerful?’

‘No, I mean – well. I can stop the marathon now, can’t I?

’ I glanced about myself and tried to take a deep breath.

‘I’ve barely spent any money but rent these last few weeks, Derek’s been covering pretty much all my expenses.

And Karun will get me six months’ pay. I can just …

stop. Work out what I actually want. At least for a little bit. ’

I wasn’t so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice Anna and Laura exchange a look.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to join a commune or backpack around the world with a guy called Gerald I barely know.’ I grinned, grabbing the wine from Anna. ‘I just … yeah. Freedom from real life for a bit would be rather nice.’

Although, of course, the last few weeks with Patrick had been the best escape from real life I’d ever find. A different world. A world of glitz and glamour … and late-night talks in chicken shops, and throwing myself off buildings.

But that was all over now. And I needed to move on.

‘The first thing we need is a better bottle of wine,’ Anna said briskly.

‘No, the first thing we need,’ Laura countered, ‘is more ice cream.’ She looked at the empty tub forlornly.

I grinned. They were both wrong. I knew exactly what I was going to do. ‘The first thing we need … is coffee.’