Page 79 of You Belong With Me

‘And Lucie,again. A woman who started a sock puppet account to abuse and harass me and said my dead mother must’ve killed herself through the shame of having me.’ Edie gathered herself. ‘She’s certainly not a sufferer of excess shame, eh.’

Elliot was obviously making an effort to stay calm. ‘They’re venomously amoral. It’s like dwelling in the Upside Down.’

‘Should I have stopped Jack? By answering his message?’ Edie said. ‘He contacted me recently through Facebook, trying to get me to bite, and I left him onseen.’

‘He did? Did he tell you he was going to do this?’

‘No, it was mainly trying to get me to go for a drink, saying he missed me. Kind of contradicts this version in print. Then a weird aside about how he had something “in his inbox” that I should know about. I thought it was a try on. I mean with Jack, it had to be. But what if I missed my chance to prevent this?’

‘In order for it to be worth it for him to look like a completely greasy shitbag in the nationals, to have this story live in Google searches by prospective employers and Tinder dates forever? I’d have thought he got a high six figures for this, easy.’

‘Fuck. Of course. That much …?’ Edie said. How had shenot realised this was a hard cash transaction? She’d been too blindsided to examine motive. She had thought he wouldn’t want to disgrace himself in order to disgrace her and forgot filthy lucre could change that.

‘Oh yeah. They have the resources to make it appealing to him, and they weren’t dealing with someone of firm principle – that goes without saying. I guarantee you, if he was going to say anything to you beforehand, it was only to give you an opportunity to outbid their offer – with money or some promise of sex. It’s fair to say, I don’t think we’d have gone for either? I’m not being blackmailed by anyone but certainly not by someone who dresses like a young Tory.’

Edie gave a weak laugh. God, the shame of having kissed him. She was lucky Elliot wasn’t repelled.

‘Hope I’ve not dragged you from the stag do brunch …’ Edie said.

‘Hah, no,’ Elliot said. ‘They’re all still comatose. I’m off to flip duvets in a minute and check for hen do girls.’

Edie tried for a laugh, but her rib cage was still made of lead. Yet another insight into Being Elliot Owen: he had to stay alert and sober to handle PR crises from a holiday villa.

Edie would tell Meg when she emerged and downplay it as much as she could. Should she tell her dad? She decided she wouldn’t: it was assigning Jack importance he didn’t deserve.

‘Lillian’s going to talk to you in a minute, is that OK?’ Elliot asked.

‘Yes, sure,’ Edie said in a thin voice.

‘Edie,’ Elliot said. ‘You are a spectacularly great person, andhe is spectacularly not, and one crappy pile of exploitative, coat-tail riding lies in a tabloid on a boring Sunday won’t convince anyone otherwise.’

‘Thanks … it’s just hard knowing it’ll be on my record now,’ Edie said. ‘It was one thing to have the wedding day reported last time we dated. At least it was light on detail. Now there’s Jack’s false Mills & Boon version, complete with invented dialogue from me. I feel unclean. I feel like by shoving words in my mouth, he’s assaulted me.’

‘Unless …’ Elliot said, and uncharacteristically hesitated, as if his suggestion might be too much. ‘Unless we bump it right down the searches with better and more positive stories? More … newsworthy ones?’

Edie held her breath.Sources close to the star predict …

‘You think we could?’

‘Yep … We’re going to have to get a lot of coffees and get off with each other at a lot of parties,’ Elliot concluded.

Edie breathed out.

They add those claims by rote.

After they hung up, Lillian rang within minutes, brisk as always. She wasn’t someone who Edie wanted to be vulnerable with, yet she had no choice. She’d been stripped of her outer layer of skin, left a quivering mass of nerve endings, begging for help.

‘How is it possible to print so many lies and get away with it? It’s absolute bullshit!’ Edie said. ‘Jack chased me for months. He followed me into the garden in Harrogate.Hekissedme. Lillian, I want to sue.’

‘I hear that,’ Lillian said. ‘I do. It’s galling. But you kissedhim back on his wedding day, right? His bride left him? He got the sack?’

‘Yeah,’ Edie whimpered. ‘Because he was the perp, and our boss knew it. Jack’s done it before, too. I still have an email from a woman from his past who said so. She got in touch after the last story about it.’

Edie remembered with gratitude the testimony from another Jack victim, Martha Hughes.He’s led one woman on, while seeing another. It’s his ‘thing’.

‘… I have bags of receipts. I have texts from Jack. I have a message from him from weeks ago asking me to go for a drink with him, saying he misses me!’

Lillian let a short silence elapse – aget your shit togethersubtext silence.

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