Page 57 of Going Solo

“Closure? No. But Summer—that’s my therapist—has taught me a lot about healing, and about the energy we choose to carry. She’s helped me let go of a lot of stuff and tune in to a more positive energy.”

“How lovely for you.”

“You know, I was angry with you for a long time,” Cole said.

“You were angry atme?”

“Yes. Unfairly. And I owe you an apology for that. I should have trusted you. But I was lied to, very convincingly, by the label. And I held on to that energy for far too long?—”

It twigged. “Is this about our texts?”

Cole looked uncomfortable. He ran his fingers through his hair.

“I never leaked them!”

“I know thatnow,” he said—and our eyes met. “But at the time, as far as we knew, no one else had those messages. You were the obvious suspect.”

“Well,The Bulletinwas hacking everyone back then?—”

“We weren’t hacked,” Cole said, certainty in his voice. “If we’d been hacked, they’d have printed the whole conversation. But they didn’t. Did you never notice they left out the fact that I was gay? IfThe Bulletinhad the complete messages, they’d have known that, and there’s no doubt that would have been the headline.”

He was right. But in all this time, I’d never noticed it. The leaked texts were so obviously our texts, I’d never thought to check how accurate they were.

“Which means I’m in the clear, because if I was out for revenge, surely I’d have included that detail.”

Cole shook his head. “That was the bit that convinced me it was you. Queer Code 101, remember? You promised me you’d never out me.”

“So, who leaked it, then?”

Cole sighed. “Felicity Quant.”

“Are you joking me?” You could have knocked me over with the Wi-Fi signal. “How did she even get hold of them?”

“You remember they took our phones off us and gave us new ones? Turns out they went through our old phones looking for kompromat to use whenever it was convenient.”

“And you stayed in the band after she did that to you?”

“It was years before I found out,” Cole said.

“What did she have to gain from throwing you under the bus like that?”

“Huge wave of free publicity. Lots of sympathy for me. Plenty of juicy detail for the fans. Tabloids onside. Most importantly, she knew I’d think it was you. She did it to keep us apart, Toby. She didn’t want us finding our way back to each other.”

I was shaking, again. Cole reached over and held my fingertips in his—despite the snotty tissues in my hand. The warmth of his touch was instantly familiar, like slipping on a favourite old hoodie when the evening chill comes in. This time, I didn’t pull away.

“Why?”

Cole smiled. “You were a threat to the band.”

I laughed.

“You were. You were a threat to me and my bankability. You had a gun held to my head, remember? You wouldn’t sign the NDAs. Felicity needed girls screaming for me, dreaming about marrying me.”

I let Cole’s fingers drop, putting my head in my hands. “How’d you find out it was her?”

“Robbie Johnswagger.” Cole sipped his water. “He told me about it over lunch one day. I was going through a rough patch. Truthfully, I was off the rails. This was ages after he’d been sacked fromPop Star. He’d cleaned up his act by this point. He was worried about me. He pulled me aside and explained a few things, and this was one of the things he told me. It made me so sad because I’d been angry at you for so long. And I was so upset that Mum had died thinking you’d done that to me, to her, to all of us.”

We sat in silence for a moment. When you spend a decade of your life living with an injustice, it coils around your gut like a rope, tying in all this rage. When the truth comes out, the ropes are cut, and suddenly, you’re freed from the tension, and it’s a physical relief. I felt like I could breathe, finally. But while I knew an injustice had been done to me, and what I’d been through because of it, I’d been so angry I never stopped to think about what it had done to Cole. If his boss could do something so evil to him, what had he gone through during the past ten years? Even thinking about it wound me up.

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