Page 95 of Going Solo

“Wow.” I sat back with my tea.

“If nothing else, it confirms Totally Records is behind this book.”

“But why are they doing it?”

“Because FQ doesn’t like to lose.”

Silence fell between us.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

I sighed, not wanting to have this conversation but wanting answers. I told him about “the Viking.”

“Is that how he says that night went down?” Cole scoffed and shook his head, then let it drop towards his lap like he was a condemned man. “Do you want to know the truth?”

I nodded.

“I’d just come offstage. The show had been terrible. I’d been high for days. A week maybe, I don’t know. I desperately needed sleep, so I said I was going to take a couple of downers and go to bed. But Jasper wanted to go out. ‘But it’s New York,’ he said. So, he swapped out one of my bennies with a tab of E, and before I knew it, I was flying. Funnily enough, suddenly I felt like going out.” Cole stood and started pacing around the room. “Jasper puts me in like a wig or some disguise, and we go to Punk. Then he abandons me on the dance floor to go who knows where and do God knows what. I could have died that night, Toby. In fact, I almost did.” Cole knelt beside me on the couch, the veins in his neck and his arms pulsing with anger. “It was one pill too many. That ‘Viking’ was an off-duty paramedic who broke down the toilet door to make sure I was OK. The only thing he put inside me that night was his finger—to make sure my airways were clear. The guys standing around? Regular concerned dudes. They had to hold Jasper back because he was hysterical. He’d fucked up, and he knew it. He was more worried about Felicity’s reaction than what might happen to me.”

I pulled Cole up onto the couch, and he curled up beside me like a child.

“I was lucky I didn’t have to go to hospital. Jasper nearly killed me that night.”

It was such a different version of events, it sat uncomfortably with me.

“Why go for such a big lie, though? Isn’t choking on your own vomit enough drama? Why make up the whole Viking-sex thing?”

“That’s easy,” Cole said. “Vomiting only makes me look stupid. Fucking strangers in a filthy nightclub toilet turns me into a cheat and makes him look hard done by.”

I grimaced. Cole caught it.

“You don’t believe him?” he said. He sat up. “Come on, Toby, you know me. Do Iseemlike a ‘let’s go to an orgy’ kind of guy?”

Well, no, he didn’t. And from what I’d read of it, the book couldn’t have made Jasper sound more squeaky-clean if he’d been fired out of an autoclave machine into a paddling pool of bleach. And Chase had made it clear that’s not who Jasper was. They were both probably on so many drugs, neither description of that night could be entirely believed. But, on balance, Jasper’s story didn’t ring true.

“I don’t believe him,” I said. Cole’s eyes flickered with relief. “But from tomorrow morning,TheBulletinis running bits of that book every day, and what I believe won’t matter one bit. It’s what the public believes. And they’re going to want to believe it all.”

“It’s so unfair,” Cole said. “I’d finally got control of my own narrative. My own life. I wasfree!”

“Sue him into financial Armageddon, babes,” I said. “Get the truth out of him in court. It’ll be the trial of the year.”

Cole shook his head. “Jasper’s fighting his own demons. We have to focus on the real enemy in this situation.”

My phone pinged.

Ludo Boche:You’ll never believe who’s sitting across from me in Maxime’s.

ChapterThirty-Nine

Despite Fiona’s explicit instructions not to leave the house, we left the house. I tried to talk Cole out of it, but he wasn’t having it. When he told Mitch where we were going, Mitch tried to talk him out of it. No luck. And full credit to him, because I wouldn’t say no to Mitch for love nor money nor access to Shawn Mendes’s private hard drive. Mitch was terrifying. But Cole paid his wages. So, that’s how we found ourselves parked up opposite Maxime’s in a big black SUV. Maxime’s was a ritzy members’ club for creative types that took up two floors of a renovated Victorian hospital on a quiet back street on the Saint Giles side of Soho.

“There she is,” Cole said, throwing open the door and bounding across the street to confront Felicity Quant.

Felicity wore a beaded, champagne-coloured minidress that glittered in the streetlights. Her oversized sunglasses were staked through her severe bob. A small handbag hung from one skinny arm, while the other skinny arm flew up in the air in search of a black cab. As Cole reached her, she looked startled.

Mitch opened his door. “Stay in the car.”

Thanks to the SUV’s soundproofing, I missed the first volley of exchanges. But I didn’t miss the look on Felicity’s face. Her initial shock dissipated, and she seemed to grow in height and confidence—like a cobra rising in warning above a threat. As I lowered the electric window, I could hear Cole shouting.

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