Page 36 of A Midnight Kiss on Ever After Street
‘I don’t think Harrison Ford’s going to be very interested in satin dresses from Herefordshire,’ I say as she takes money from the till and walks towards the door.
Witt laughs. ‘We have no idea about Harrison Ford’s life choices.’
Ebony stops as if it’s the first time she’s realised he’s there. ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my shop?’
‘This is Witt, Ebony. The Cinderella Prince? You met him a few days ago?’
‘Well, get out of the way.’
He sidesteps obediently, despite the fact he wasn’t in the way. ‘The dress is helping, right? It’s pulling more customers into the shop? It’s been busy lately.’
She peers at him. ‘If only Sadie was better at talking people into parting with their money, then it might actually do some good.’
‘People can’t afford our pri—’
‘Anyone can afford anything they want – that’s what credit cards are for!’ She turns back to me. ‘Don’t burn the place to the ground while I’m gone. And don’t recycle any more of my private mail.’
‘It wasn’t private, it was to—’
The door slams and she waves without looking back.
‘—all of us,’ I finish uselessly.
I want to cry. She makes me feel about two centimetres tall. Every time I try to stick up for myself, I lapse back into being that shy ten-year-old who’s grateful for being taken in and supported through the hardest time of my life, feeling like I owe her something, and battling the constant fear that everything could be taken away from me if I step out of line.
Witt reaches out to touch my arm, and he’s so nice that it’s going to make me burst into tears, so I hurry behind the counter to put the computer on for him and start putting the sketches back into piles.
Dreams of dresses I’ll never have time to make. Dresses that would make their wearers feel like a queen, although, for the amount of fabric and hours they’d take, on top of Ebony’s minimum pricing strategy, you’d have to be an actual queen to be able to afford them, which kind of defeats the object. There’s a compromise to be had – simpler dresses that take less fabric and less time to make and therefore could be sold for lower prices, but Ebony won’t hear of it.
Witt instinctively knows not to push, and he stays quiet. The computer makes its start-up jingle and he comes over to sit down behind the counter and leans forward to start reading through today’s Cinderella applicants while I carry on tidying.
‘Over a hundred today,’ he mutters. ‘Haven’t people got anything better to do?’
He’s getting disheartened by it all. After days of trawling through emails, he’s given up hope of finding her, and I feel like I’m hurting him by letting this farce continue, but how can I tell himnow? Over a hundred people have taken the time to email himtoday– that can only be a small percentage of the number of views on our website. Our social media followers have risen on every channel. There’s a #FindCinderella hashtag on Twitter. The shop is getting more attention than it ever has. If I tell him, it all stops. And all our new followers will probably find out it was a con. The Cinderella Shop is back to square one, but with an additional tarnishing. I can’t let that happen. This was my idea and I have to see it through to the bitter end, no matter what.
‘Maybe today’s the day, eh?’ I force a shard of cheerfulness. Now he knows about the missing ticket, I can’t risk him putting two and two together.
‘Maybe.’ He looks up from his chair at the same moment I’m looking down at him, and gives me the softest smile, and… ‘Oh, for God’s sake, this woman is in prison! She’s offering to be my Cinderella in five years, seven months, and seventeen days’ time. But not to worry, she’s reassured me that her crime wasn’t anything violent, and not to read into the fact she’s already served fourteen years. Because I expect a lot of people get twenty-odd year jail sentences fornon-violent crimes, don’t you?’
I fight the urge to slip my arms around his shoulders and hug him protectively.
‘And this one appears to be from a dog. Offering me wet nose kisses and sloppy dog biscuits in exchange for walkies and tummy rubs, which is not disturbingat all.’ He thinks about it. ‘Presuming the dog didn’t write it itself anyway, in which case, it’s either a really disturbed human or a really clever dog.’
Laughter takes over and eases the frustration I was feeling with everything. I carry on stacking the pages into a pile to take upstairs with one eye on him as he goes through messages with a constant litany of nopes and hitting the delete buttonhard.
‘Oh my God. Unsee! Unsee!’ He throws his arm across his eyes, knocking his glasses sideways, and shoves the chair back with such force that both he and his chair roll through the counter access gap and halfway across the shop. ‘What iswrongwith people? I don’t want to see some random woman’s… pelvic region! That’s awful!’
Oh, bless him. He’s either really inexperienced with the internet or he really is too nice for his own good. I lean over and delete the waist-down full-frontal picture in the inbox. ‘It’s safe; you can come back now.’
He groans and scoots the chair back across so he’s next to me again, but instead of going back to the computer, he takes his glasses off, squeezes the bridge of his nose and screws his eyes tight before putting them on again and spinning the chair to face me. ‘This is ridiculous. Why am I doing this?’
‘Because somewhere in the depths of your hardened heart, you have hope?’
‘Yeah, okay, but not in the people on here.’ He gives me that pointed look again, the one that would make it so easy to crouch down, clasp his hands in mine and confess everything… but then I imagine the look on his face when he realises I’ve used him.
He makes a noise of irritation and spins a full circle in the computer chair. ‘She said she wasn’t meant to be there, so maybe she’d be in trouble if anyone found out, and that’s why she’s not coming forward? And we’ve made it all worse by turning it into a publicity campaign. What if we stopped all this and just let it be? No publicity, no find-Princess-Charming campaign, and no contact form which seems to be a magnet for weirdos.’
‘It’s too late now. People are invested in this. You saw that reaction this morning – people really care. We can’t just take it offline and expect everyone to forget about it.’
