Page 34 of The Love Hack

My phone was on the sofa next to me, dark and silent, and the telly was on, tuned to a repeat of last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which I wasn’t really watching. And then I felt a vibration coming through the sofa cushion next to me, shortly followed by the buzz of my phone.

I snatched it up and saw an incoming WhatsApp from Amelie.

I hadn’t heard from her in over a week. She’d read my messages giving her updates on my progress as Adam, although I’d carefully avoided asking for her advice on a couple of the problems he’d been sent. But she hadn’t responded in much detail at all. Just the briefest acknowledgments: All good here, miss you. Can’t read now, will try tomorrow. You’ve got this Luce, don’t worry.

But of course I was worried. Not so much about my ability to fly solo as Adam without driving his correspondents to drink, domestic violence, or involuntary celibacy – for now, at least, I was reasonably confident that wouldn’t happen on my watch. But about my sister. Her silence was unusual; Amelie was normally a multiple-times-a-day texter. She was on honeymoon. Even given the five-hour time difference, I’d have expected her to be sending me gushing updates on what she and Zack were up to – how glorious the weather was, how delicious the food, how beautiful the tropical fish they saw on their scuba dives, how off-the-scale the sex.

But there’s been nothing. And now she was calling me. Something must be wrong.

I snatched up my phone and hit the green button, after missing it a couple of times in my haste. Amelie’s familiar face filled the screen. She was half-sitting, half-lying on what looked like a deck chair or a sun lounger. She was wrapped in a fluffy white towel with the neon yellow strap of a bikini top emerging from it and circling round her neck. Her hair hung in damp tendrils around her face. Bars of sunshine fell over her body in alternating dark and light stripes.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d been eaten by a shark.’

She giggled. ‘Almost was, yesterday. At least, I thought it was a shark but apparently it was only a dolphin. Still, I’ll take it as a near miss and tell my grandchildren about it one day.’

I could only just hear her, so I turned up the sound on my phone. ‘Why are you whispering?’

‘Zack’s in the shower. We’ve called a screen ban for the honeymoon so I have to sneak online whenever he’s not around. Otherwise I’d be on social media all the time and he’d be on Teams. It’s better this way.’

‘Are you having a nice time?’

‘Off the scale. You should see our suite – there’s a free-standing bath that’s so massive I can only lie down if I jam my feet in Zack’s crotch, otherwise I’d drown. We’ve been having cocktails at lunchtime every day and yesterday I ate so much lobster I thought I’d legit burst. And isn’t it incredible how you don’t get hangovers on holiday?’

‘Amazing,’ I said, although I hadn’t been on that kind of holiday in the longest time.

‘Anyway,’ she leaned into the screen as if she was sitting next to me on my sofa, not thousands of miles away, ‘how’s it going? How’s Adam?’

‘Busy. I think I’ve been doing all right. Listen, while you’re here, what advice would you give a bloke who?—’

‘Stop.’ She held up a hand. ‘Luce, we discussed this. I’ve love to help, but it’s a slippery slope. I tell you what advice you should give this guy and the next thing you’d be asking me about the next one and the next and we’d be back to square one and Zack would probably divorce me.’

I thought, not for the first time, that if Zack would even consider divorcing her over something so trivial, he needed to take a long, hard look at himself. But I’d agreed to stop asking her for help with Adam, and I wasn’t going to break my promise.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Your loss. And it was a really juicy email, too, you’d have loved it. But I’m not going to tell you now, even if you beg me.’

Amelie giggled, softly and breathily. ‘No begging. Not a chance. But speaking of blokes, there’s another one I wanted to ask you about.’

I suspected I already knew who she meant. But I asked anyway. ‘There is? Who?’

‘Your man at work. Ross. Is he?—’

She stopped, and I saw her glance away, towards the dark shadow on the edge of the picture, which I assumed was the interior of their hotel bedroom – or suite, rather.

‘Is he what?’

‘Zack’s finished in the shower. I heard the water stop. Bollocks – he normally wallows in there for hours like a walrus, but we haven’t had breakfast yet so he must be rushing. I’ll call again when I can, okay?’

‘Okay.’ I hesitated. Amelie was fine. She was having a wonderful time on honeymoon. She hadn’t been eaten by a shark. But still, I was worried. Something about her – the whispers, the clandestine video call, the fact that it had taken (presumably) a three-line whip from Bryony for her to contact me at all – concerned me. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t like my sister. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Course! I’m brilliant. Speak soon, love you Luce.’ She was still whispering, but so quickly that the words ran together. SpeaksoonloveyouLuce.

‘Love you. Bye.’

The screen went dark again. I looked at it, puzzled. I mean, a ban on work and social media use when you were on honeymoon made sense, in a way. It was a time when, I supposed, you wanted to be gazing into each other’s eyes not at your Tiktok feed. A time when you were meant to be practising sex positions, not selfie angles.

But even so. Amelie used her phone a lot, but she wasn’t obsessive about it. When we met up, she’d talk and listen, her phone on the table next to her, vibrating or lighting up intermittently, and she’d barely give it a glance. If I was Zack, I wouldn’t feel excluded or threatened by that at all.

So who had imposed this so-called ban, and why?

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