“I’m sure it was wonderful just the same, Gaz,” I said, staring intently at him.
Gaz shifted under our collective gaze. “Taste it if you like—it’s over there,” he said. “Actually, I hope you won’t think I’m rude if I excuse myself to sample the other two cakes? I’m dead curious.”
Freddie blinked. “Er, yes, of course, one more handshake.” He clasped Gaz’s paw more firmly this time, and Gaz looked down at it, surprised.
“What a grip you’ve got,” he said, saluting Freddie and then walking off. Cilla, fighting laughter, trotted after him while flashing me the universal I’ll call you gesture.
“You know how all Superman does is change his outfit and put on a pair of glasses, and everyone’s fooled?” Nick said, watching them go. “I thought that was unrealistic. Then I met Gaz.”
Freddie and I laughed. I felt my phone buzz in my purse. Unknown number.
“There’s Annabelle,” I said, tapping the screen to answer. “Is the coast clear?”
“Hello, Rebecca. Are you enjoying the garden party?”
Clive. He’d found us. Somehow.
I looked around to my left and right as subtly as I could.
“Don’t panic in public. It’ll blow your marvelous disguise,” he said.
My skin crawled, and I fought my facial muscles into submission.
“Sorry, mate, wrong number, eh,” I managed in Margot’s bad Aussie accent, before hanging up with a flick of my thumb, keeping the phone up to my ear as if I were still talking—as if, by some miracle, Clive magically would think the woman he was looking at wasn’t me.
“It wasn’t Annabelle,” I rasped to Nick and Freddie. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
But what did he want?”
I looked down at the phone in my lap. My fingers were still wrapped around it.
“I told you, I don’t know,” I said to Nick. “I hung up on him. I didn’t know what else to do. What if he was only guessing that we were there?”
Freddie drummed his fingers on the car door. “Yes, maybe that is what he wanted,” he said. “To mess with us. To remind us that he’s out there.”
“As if we could forget,” I said. “He wrote a story last week that I spend two thousand pounds a month on eyelash extensions.”
“We should’ve changed our mobiles,” Nick said. “I knew we should have. It just felt like a lot of palaver at the time.” He blanched. “What if he’s tracking yours? What if he’s hacked us?”
“If he was doing that, we’d know already,” Freddie said. “For one thing, his stories would be better.”
“We still need to change them,” Nick said. “You, too, Freddie. And perhaps even Daphne.”
“Hang on a sec,” I said, releasing my phone so I could hold up my hands. “Before we go crazy here, don’t we want to know what he’s up to?”
“I suppose so,” Nick said.
“Then why don’t we let him tell us?” I asked, swiveling so I could face them both in the Range Rover’s back seat. “Clive’s real nemesis is his ego, right? Bea said she thinks people are realizing he’s a one-scoop wonder. I bet he’s stirring the shit because he’s running out of options. So maybe it’s better if he can reach me. He’s the villain in a movie who’s going to monologue himself into trouble.”
Freddie cocked his head. “You mean, if he can’t resist calling you to lord something over you, he’s actually giving you ammo.”
“Maybe,” I said. “He shouldn’t have told us anything last time, either, but he couldn’t help himself. Maybe he’ll call again and do the same thing. I bet he’ll call again. You watch.”
I settled back into the leather seat, and a companionable, if charged, hush fell over the car. My phone sat in my lap, bouncing with the wheels on the road, a little silver time bomb waiting to go off.
* * *
My phone was never far from me after that. It was next to me on the couch, it was in Stout’s pocket, it was in my purse hooked to a battery to keep it from dying. Nick started jokingly referring to it as my pet rock. Once he set a place for it at the dinner table. I jumped every time it rang, but so far, no Clive; it was usually Lacey or my mother, or Bea with some sort of persnickety complaint about something I’d done with my hands in a photograph or the way I was crossing my legs. And then, of course, sometimes it was Dr. Akhtar.
After my most recent IVF didn’t take, Dr. Akhtar called me into her office. It was bright and white, all modern edges and metal utilitarian furniture, much colder than the warmth she projected to her patients. She smiled as she gestured for me to sit in the leather rolling chairs opposite her, but it was regretful.
“You know what I’m going to say, Bex,” she said, taking a seat behind a gleaming silver desk, a file as thick as the Bible plonked on it in front of her. I realized with sinking sadness that it was mine. It was sobering to see all our failures—what felt so keenly like my failures—stacked up like that.
“I know you’d hoped all we needed to do was help with the embryos, and the rest would take care of itself,” she said. “That hasn’t been the case. We can certainly continue trying if that’s what you want, but I don’t see that changing.” She tapped her manicured nails on top of the desk. “Have you given any further thought to donor sperm?”
“No. I don’t even…” I couldn’t finish the thought. Because I genuinely didn’t know how that thought ended. “So how would that work?”
“It’s entirely up to you. Some people use a sperm bank, all of which have expertly vetted and profiled samples,” she said. “And others use a family member.”
I flinched, imagining Edwin, fertile
