Page 4 of Lie For Me

‘I don’t have a plus one anymore, Cassie. I replied plus one when Dan and I were seeing each other, which, of course,’ she stared into her half-full mug and swirled her coffee, ‘lasted about five minutes, and I haven’t told my family we broke up. I was trying to avoid my mother lecturing me about what I must have done wrong.’

‘Lucy Carmell, that was months ago!’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I know, I know.’ She ran a hand over her face. ‘It’s a three-day wedding, Cass. Three days with my family. I can’t remember when we were last together for three days since we all left home. Which I did as soon as I could.’ She grimaced. ‘Even Christmas is barely a twenty-four-hour affair. I go down on Christmas morning, and I am out of there after breakfast on Boxing Day. That’s as much as I can cope with.’ Her lips twisted. ‘I don’t think my mental health can take seventy-two hours of my mother and my sister. Three days of them enthusiastically telling me where I have gone wrong with my life choices and what’s wrong with my career.’

Lucy’s face fell as she looked around her and Cassie’s beloved office, tucked under the eaves in Dulcetcoombe’s ancient attics, with views for miles across parklands.

‘Or an inquisition to find out what I do to repel men.’

‘Oh Lucy, that’s intense,’ Cassie said. ‘But maybe they’ll be focused on Ollie and the wedding, and you’ll escape.’

Lucy shook her head and swirled her coffee.

‘It’ll be worse. My mother will use it as an excuse to showcase how marvellously my sister Heather and Ollie are doing, and how I am coming up short. Again. Heather has just been made partner at her law firm, and both she and my mother will be telling everyone who’ll listen. And Ollie…’

She thought of her younger brother and took a breath.

‘Well, Ollie is fine. He’s just in his own bubble. If I can take someone with me as my plus one…if they think I have a boyfriend, it’s one thing—one major thing—they won’t bully me about.’

She knotted her fingers together in her lap.

‘I know you say you feel like the black sheep, but are they really that bad?’ Cassie asked.

Lucy nodded. ‘Yes. They are. Mum had—’ she paused and corrected herself, ‘has great expectations for us all. And Heather’s a big-shot lawyer, which mum never stops going on about, and Ollie is a CFO at a big firm in Bristol. Mum lies about what I do.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘She tells her friends I am an executive events planner for a private company. She hates the idea of me working for a charity with volunteers.’ Lucy wrinkled her nose. ‘She thinks they are all old and doddery, despite her being the same age as most of them—and she never stops asking if I am done with my little job yet. Last time I was home, she gave me a business card from one of Dad’s old associates and told me to give them a call as soon as I was ready. They don’t understand what I do and don’t seem interested that it makes me happy.’

‘You know you make a difference here, Lucy.’ Cassie waved a stack of feedback cards at her. ‘To the volunteers, to the local community, to the visitors.’

‘That’s not how my family sees it. To them, I just shuffle about this old place, organise little events for kids and make very little money doing it.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s some truth in that last part. And money is how they measure success. So the prospect of showing up in my fifteen-year-old Volvo, unattached and being told all weekend how I can’t even get that right…’ She let out a weary sigh. ‘Is too much to contemplate.’

‘And besides,’ she sighed again. ‘This is my fourth wedding this year, Cassie. Fourth! Plus, one engagement party, a hen do, and a destination thirty-fifth birthday party.’

‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ Cassie sang, in an off-key soprano.

‘Exactly.’ Lucy groaned. ‘I’ve spent enough social occasions this year being patted on the arm and told that the one for me is out there somewhere.’ She reached for another Hobnob. ‘Probably in prison,’ she muttered darkly. ‘That’s why we haven’t casually bumped into one another in a local cafe. He gets his coffee from the prison canteen.’

‘Cheer up,’ Cassie said. ‘He might be on probation by now and headed your way.’

‘Tuh, that’ll be my luck. I’ll meet someone who seems charming, but it’ll turn out he’s not interested in my sunny personality—he just wants to chop me up and keep my head in a jar.’

‘At least you’ll have a solid reason to give people when they ask why you’re still single.’

Lucy rolled her eyes.

‘I need to produce a boyfriend from thin air. I cannot tell my family, especially my mother,’ Lucy shuddered, ‘that it’ll just be me. She will have a conniption if I upset her seating plans with only two weeks to go. Something else for me to get wrong. Hence the lie…’

She chewed her lip and looked at Cassie. Cassie gazed back at her, waiting.

‘I am going to find someone to go with me and pretend to be my boyfriend. It’ll be one less thing for them to find fault with, and I’ll have an ally I can escape with if it all gets too much. Is that awful?’ Shaking her head, she answered her own question. ‘No, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable course of action.’

Cassie huffed and folded her arms.

‘Oh yes. I don’t foresee any problem with this at all. No risk of embarrassment or awkwardness or your mother sniffing out that it’s a hoax. I think it’s a watertight plan, and you should press ahead.’

‘Okay, well, thanks for the sarcasm update,’ Lucy said sarcastically. ‘But really, it’s not that big a deal when you think about it. It’s a free weekend away for someone! All they have to do is hold my hand sometimes and look at me adoringly.’

Cassie wrinkled her nose and screwed up her eyes.

‘What’s that reaction for!? It can’t be that hard for someone to fake affection for me—I’m not Gollum.’

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