Page 4 of Famous Last Words

She’d nodded, so thankful she had married a man she could say anything to, but now she thinks about that first statement.

Everyone needs a break.It contained a darkness within it, didn’t it? IsthisLuke gettinghisbreak?

Has he actually been slightly huffy recently? Cam ponders it, trying not to spiral. Maybe. She heard him heave an irritated, lengthy sigh the other night when Polly woke; his footsteps as he got out of bed were heavy. When he’d returned, and she’d asked what Polly had wanted, he had ignored her, scrolling on his phone, his jaw tight. Uncharacteristic: Cam has remembered it for this reason.

No, but they went to a wedding last week, and he had been fine then, hadn’t he? They’d fallen into their old dynamic. He’d coaxed her on to the dance floor even though she categorically does not dance. ‘You protest,’ he’d said, waistcoat unbuttoned, ‘but you dance so well with me.’ She’d cajoled him back home at midnight; he had laughed when he saw she’d brought a pair of slippers in her handbag to wear in the taxi home.

God, she can’t concentrate. The book on submission, and Polly’s first full day away from her, and Luke’s absence. They make Cam have that strange but familiar urge to check and check and check again. Emails, the nursery app, authors’ Kindle ranks. Anything.

Something comes in from Adam.

[email protected]

21 June at 09:23

Re: Second idea

No, no idea for a second novel yet. How urgent would it be? I have a small-town whodunnit kind of thing on the back burner?

Cam hides a grimace and tells him to keep thinking, hoping he will read between the lines.

She grabs her phone and tries Luke again: ‘Welcome to the Vodafone messaging service.’

She writes another message:I’ve had loads of office biscuits as well as those Jaffas! x

And, this time, she sends it on WhatsApp, and watches for the delivered ticks.

Luke and Cam met when he walked into her office four years ago. He was a journalist who had ghostwritten a memoirby a football manager about a Premier League team’s rise to success: he’d DMed the manager on social media (as a bet on a stag do, he’d later told her) who, to his surprise, had replied saying yes. Cam had enjoyed it a lot more than she expected to. Luke’s prose was upfront, transparent, didn’t purport to be anything other than what it was: pure entertainment.

Cam had offered him representation. He had replied with a single word:Shit!It had made Cam smile. She likes language in all its forms, and a well-timed swear word is the best.

She had sold the memoir to Penguin Random House. His next gig was an autobiography for a singer-songwriter her agency represented and, after that, he was up and running, established and needing a little less agenting, which made it a lot easier for Cam to kiss him several months into their working relationship at a rainy London bus stop after too many glasses of wine. It was late summer, the mornings and evenings just beginning to smell as crisp and cold as apples. Luke had been in a T-shirt that got soaked in the downpour and, to this day, damp clothing reminds Cam of that night, that kiss, that illicit, shouldn’t-be-doing-this kiss.

Anyway. Can’t concentrate on a word, she continues to Luke. She waits eagerly for his response.Just have an easy morning today!!he will no doubt say, but she needs to hear it, needs to see his words to her. Cam makes Luke more sensible and Luke makes Cam have fun. That’s how they work. That’s the way they have always worked.

The message doesn’t deliver. She stares at it: a single grey tick. When … when do you begin to really worry?

No. He must actually be working hard. Phone off.

But the dread Cam felt in the kitchen rears its head again. She’s kidding herself. Something is off.

She calls him again.

Nothing.

At what point is he … missing?

Another text from Libby comes through, then a photo. She is running her outfit by Cam, as she often does. She catches one part of it –It’s for a party!! That’s where people get together and have fun? Are you aware? LOL– but she stops reading, because that’s when she hears it. Some sort of commotion outside. Is that sirens?

Fear runs its fingertip lightly up her spine, and Cam’s imagination fires into action, fuelled by fiction. Things that only happen to other people could happen to me, she finds herself thinking. Ambulances, fire engines, warning sirens. Dead bodies and bad news and police hats held in hands andwe tried everything we couldsaid by kind doctors in green scrubs.

She rises from her desk. She’ll just check outside, beyond the foyer. See what’s going on.

Their receptionist is sitting in silence, the only noise the television on the wall cycling through news stories. Cam can’t hear anything else.

It must be her imagination. Nothing more.

But then everything happens all at once, the way it sometimes does.

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