Page 57 of The One That I Want

‘She’s having a crisis of conscience. She’s told Ewan she’s writing a series of articles on obsessions, rather than dating, shehates Anjali not knowing thatsheknows the real objective for the writing assignment, and yesterday, she told her parents she’s already dating Harrison. The only person in her life who knows the truth is her best friend, Tiggy, and, apparently, Greta’s not as comfortable with lying as I am. She’s reconsidering every aspect of the case.’

‘First off,’ he says, ‘I’m going to need a spreadsheet to keep track of who knows what in this case.’

‘Wanna get on that?’ I quip.

‘Er, no, thanks. And second, did she really say it like that, the part about lying?’

He’s asking if she meant to insult me. In the business of matchmaking, we tend to use the term ‘fibbing’ instead of ‘lying’, even though we recognise they’re the same thing and we’re just playing semantics. Still, Greta wouldn’t be the first person to mention their discomfort with ‘fibbing’ and I never take it as an insult if it comes up.

‘She did, but I doubt she meant to offend me. Idothink we need to help untangle some of the threads for her, though,’ I add. ‘Otherwise, she’ll confess to Anjali she’s in the know about her true intentions and tell her parents she and Harrison broke up before she’s even met him.’

‘But what if Harrison turns out to be her match?’ he asks, aghast.

‘Exactly. She shoots herself in the foot. “Hey, Mum and Dad, you know how I said I broke up with Harrison? Well, we’re back together!”.’

‘You realise Harrison will need to be read in as well, right?’ asks George.

‘Oh, you’re right. If HarrisonisGreta’s match, she’s going to have to explain that she lied to her parents about when they started dating.’

‘Mmm-hmm,’ he replies.

We both think for a moment.

‘How about?—’

‘What if?—’

‘You go,’ I say.

‘What if we convince her to stay the course by fast-tracking the kissing-frogs part of the case?’ says George.

‘But aren’t we doing that already? She’s had two of the four dates and she’s meeting the part-time naturist on the weekend. I suppose wecouldsqueeze in Sir Dates-A-Lot this week. What was his name?’

George’s fingers fly over the keyboard of his laptop. ‘Travis.’

‘Right, Travis. If we can convince her to keep going with the current plan, she knocks off two more dates by the end of the week, writes some articles, which appeases Anjali, then we move Greta onto the next phase.’

‘Meeting Harrison,’ says George.

‘Yep. Oh!’ I point at his laptop. ‘Can you just check…’

‘Oh, good point.’ His fingers fly again, and he angles the laptop towards me so I can see the screen. ‘Still available,’ he says, referring to Harrison’s status in our system. Although, he may be using other services, and sometimes our potentials don’t update us right away when they become unavailable.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks me, peering at me with concern.

‘Yes. Just… there are a lot of moving parts with this case.’

‘Poppy, remember: how do you eat an elephant?’ he asks, raising something Ursula told us on a particularly tricky case we all worked on together.

‘One bite at a time,’ I answer.

‘Precisely. Let’s meet with Greta atNouveauand?—’

‘George, I no longer work there. We’renotgoing toNouveau. If you want to see Mimi, just call her and set it up.’

‘All right,fair. But we do need to meet with Greta.’

‘Agreed, but I think I’d prefer to do it alone.’

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