Page 157 of The Honeymoon Affair

It’s Iseult O’Connor.

Charles’s beta-reader-slash-ex-fiancée.

Are they back together?

Charles finishes his reading and the applause is enthusiastic. People immediately start to form a queue to get their books signed. Iseult stays where she is, watching them.

I go over to her.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Welcome to Charles’s reading.’

‘Oh. It’s you.’ She looks at me in surprise. ‘I should’ve known you’d be here.’

‘I flew in specially.’

‘Of course you did. I heard you’d moved to the States.’

‘That’s right, although it’s a temporary move.’

We sit in silence for a moment, and then I ask if she and Charles are an item again. Because the last I heard from him was that she’d point-blank refused to see him and had blocked his number. He was devastated and said that he’d lost the person who mattered most to him in the whole world. I felt a twinge when he said that, but it didn’t hurt the way it once would have. Ellis had tried to talk to her too, but Iseult was having none of it. The woman has an absolute iron will. She would’ve made a great agent.

‘I’m not with Charles, but I spent a lot of time with that book,’ she replies. ‘I wanted to see the final copies.’

‘Are you going to get one signed?’ I ask.

She shakes her head.

‘Did you buy one?’

‘Not yet.’

I reach into my bag and take a book from it. I hand it to her.

‘It’s already signed,’ I say. ‘I was sent some for publicity purposes.’

She takes it and studies it, running her hands over the dark blue cover with its embossed lettering.

‘It looks good,’ she says. ‘He was so worried about it.’

‘He worries about all of them,’ I tell her. ‘It’s nothing new.’

‘I guess you know him better than I ever did.’

‘That part of him, yes.’

‘How’s he managing without you?’ she asks.

‘Perfectly well,’ I reply. ‘He has a new agent.’

‘I always knew he needed a different agent. No offence,’ she adds.

‘None taken. You were right. How d’you think he’s managing without you?’

‘Equally well, I guess.’

‘You know, nothing happened between him and me that night,’ I say. ‘Nothing was ever going to happen. I hadn’t seen him for ages and all I wanted to do was celebrate my good news.’

‘He explained all that in multiple voicemails. Over and over. A one-off, he said. Toasting your big business deal. That’s when he told me about the States.’

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