Page 46 of A Very Happy Halloween

I just… If I put it off, maybe I could keep pretending for a while longer?

This wine really did taste like shit.

“Do you want me to stay?” Marissa asked after I’d been wallowing in misery for an hour or possibly two. Perhaps I should move back to Bristol? I couldn’t stay in Engleby, not with Eisen so close by.

“What’s the point?”

“I could make you dinner?” She paused for a moment, and I could feel her staring at me. Judging me. “I’ll go and pick something up from the shop. Fish fingers? Spaghetti?”

“I’m not even hungry.”

A door slammed. Gravel crunched in the driveway. Marissa drove off, and how much food was she planning to buy? The shop was only a five-minute walk away. Then I heard voices in the hallway.

“Are you the ratbag?”

“Uh, no? I don’t think so.”

Great. Not Marissa leaving. Eis arriving. Fantastic.

He burst into the living room. “Janie, what’s going on?”

“Shouldn’t that be my question?” I asked the cushion. “Brunch?”

“You want to go to brunch? It’s seven p.m.”

“No, you went to brunch. I saw a picture on the internet.”

“And?”

“With a woman.”

“So?”

“And a kid.”

“Yes, because my prick of a cousin decided a game of golf was more important than his son.”

Wait, what?

I raised my head. “The boy is your cousin’s son?”

“Well, he’s not mine, is he?”

I slumped back down.

“Fuck, no, you thought he was my kid? Ah, shit.” He must have knelt beside me because I felt his breath on my cheek. “Janie, Bex and I took Arlo to McDonald’s while Edie looked after the baby. Bex’s baby, not my baby,” he clarified. “Some movie star rented the house a couple of doors up, and there were paparazzi standing around on the pavement, waiting for a story. Don’t believe a word they write. They twist the truth, they make stuff up, they edit pictures. It’s all bullshit.”

“They said you had a great butt, and I know that part is true.”

“Okay, almost everything they write is bullshit.”

“You didn’t answer the phone.”

“Yeah, because they don’t let you keep it during surgery.”

“Surgery?” I scrambled up to sitting and blinked a few times, and I’d drunk way too much of that wine because Eis was looking back at me. Looking back at me with both eyes. “You didn’t say anything about surgery.”

“I wasn’t sure what was going to happen today. Whether I’d be able to see, or if they’d just sew everything up again. I was really fucking scared,” he admitted. “Nine months ago, I volunteered to be a guinea pig for an experimental procedure. Scientists took stem cells from my good eye and grew me a new cornea. Then they grafted it on, and it was a matter of waiting and hoping.”

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