Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘Can we stop at a McDonald's?'

‘No.'

‘Can we stop at a Starbucks?'

‘No.'

‘What about a Marks Spencer Simply Food?'

William's grip tightened on the steering wheel.

‘No.'

Charlotte hurled herself across the backseat of his car, arms folded, face furious. ‘What's the point in a road trip if we're not going to stop at the services and get treats?' she cried. ‘If I don't get a frappuccino in the next half hour, I'm going to die.'

‘I am prepared to test that theory,' William replied, smiling at the driver in the next car as he undertook our BMW then flashed a subtle wanker sign as soon as he was out of sight. ‘We're not on a road trip, you little moose. If you don't be quiet, I'll leave you at the services and you can find your own way home from there.'

‘That would be more fun than this,' she muttered behind me. ‘How come I had to sit in the back when she isn't talking anyway?'

‘I'm talking,' I said as the screen of my phone lit up with the same number for the tenth time in a row.

‘You've said three things in the last hour and none of them were particularly nice.'

‘Sophie doesn't feel like being particularly nice.' William put his foot down, ignoring the engine's protests, and the time to our destination icon on his phone dropped by five whole minutes.

‘She looks like she's having a nervy b.'

‘I'm not having a nervy b,' I said as my phone screen went dark again.

Ten missed calls. Ten voicemails. Forty-three unread texts.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out. Joe was married. Joe was married. Joe was married. Nope, that wasn't helping.

‘Still can't believe neither of you told me.'

Charlotte's right leg stuck through between mine and William's seats, just barely missing the gear stick with a black and white Nike, the same style as Gregory's, only Charlotte was eighteen and he was sixty-two. My poker face was terrible but she wouldn't even be able to hide her feelings about a game of snap. All of her emotions passed over her so clearly, it was like looking at a human mood ring.

‘Leaving me out like usual,' she pouted.

‘You're here now, aren't you?' William pointed out. ‘We could've said no when you asked to come.'

I glanced in the rear-view mirror to see her contorted around her seatbelt.

‘You don't give a toss about me,' she said. ‘You don't need to lie, I know it.'

‘That's not true, we give many tosses,' I replied, turning my phone over before it could come back to life. ‘But we're both rubbish and, if I'm being completely honest, sometimes you make me feel old.'

‘That's because you are old.'

William's eyes met mine and I silently begged him not to drive us off the road.

‘Saying things like that don't help your case,' I cautioned her. ‘I'm sorry we've made you feel that way. I definitely didn't mean to. William probably didn't.'

‘On my eighteenth, he gave me fifty pounds and a card that said "In my day this was a lot of money, you ungrateful little monster",' she replied. ‘And that was before I'd even had a chance to tell him this is my day and fifty pounds isn't a lot of money any more.'

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a smile stretch across my brother's face.

‘Insults are William's love language,' I explained. ‘You'll get used to it.'

She ran her thumb over the tip of the fingernail of her forefinger, half her nails were covered by glittery almond-shaped press-ons while the others were short and bare, and her braided hair had faded down to a silvery-grey, a few little strands framing her pretty face.

‘I can't believe you're Este Cox,' she said, gazing at me with a mixture of awe and disbelief. ‘You wrote Butterflies.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘Sorry if that ruins it.'

‘Why did you keep it a secret for so long?'

‘Because.'

It was a complete sentence. There was something about being in a car with only siblings that made it so much easier to regress to a teenage state.

‘Because the Guardian called you the author of Britain's filthiest novel?' Charlotte guessed with a wrinkled nose, trying to remember. ‘Or was that The Times?'

‘It was This Morning and it's not even true, there's much filthier stuff out there.'

‘Oh, much filthier,' she agreed readily. ‘Have you read the one about the minotaurs that have to get milked? Or the Shrek reimagining where he's a CEO and—'

‘I'm going to stop you right there,' I said as our brother began to turn as green as the swamp monster himself. ‘Ogre smut is not my thing. And no, that's not why. I just didn't want to have to deal with it all.'

‘All what?'

‘Everyone's opinions,' I confessed. ‘Mum and Dad, people at school. It's a lot.'

‘You care too much about what other people think.' She yawned without covering her mouth and grabbed hold of her feet, performing a perfect happy baby pose on the backseat of a moving vehicle. ‘Must be exhausting, seems like a waste of energy to me.'

‘It must be amazing to be you,' William said, looking at her in the mirror. ‘Promise me you'll never change.'

‘Why would I?'

I looked over at William and he shrugged. Neither of us had an answer.

‘If I'd written a book like Butterflies, I'd want everyone to know,' Charlotte announced. ‘Imagine knowing there are millions of people out in the world, reading a story you wrote and it's making them happy. I don't understand how there's any more to it than that. Who cares what critics say, or pretentious twats like CJ? His book isn't inherently better than yours just because it's depressing. The whole thing where people shit on something because it's not what they're into is so messed up. When did we decide that was allowed?'

‘Probably when Eve tried to get Adam to wear a different brand of fig leaf,' William said, swerving to miss an empty KFC bucket that made my empty stomach rumble.

‘Well it's stupid. I love Mum and Dad but they don't know everything. Soph, Dad is in his sixties.' She hissed out the last word as though our father had been raised with dinosaurs. ‘He's so old.'

‘Sixty isn't old,' William clucked with dismay. ‘George Clooney is in his sixties.'

Charlotte looked to me, blank-faced. ‘Who's George Clooney?'

Before our brother could let out a wail of existential despair, she sat up and reached around the seat to grab my wrist, repeatedly whacking me in the side of the head with my own hand.

‘Pack it in!' William yelled, locking in his arms at ten to two so the car didn't swerve when she didn't stop. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?'

‘I'm not going to stop until Sophie rejects the internalised misogyny that has been propped up by our patriarchal society and the expectations placed on her by our parents,' she shouted back, the strap of my Chanel handbag, which was currently hanging across her body, clanging against my seat. ‘Why are you hitting yourself, Sophie? Sophie, why are you hitting yourself?'

‘Because I've internalised misogyny and something about the patriarchy,' I squeaked as I wrestled my wrist free, rubbing it gingerly with my injured hand. ‘You are so much stronger than you look.'

‘I don't expect you to undo a lifetime of emotional self-harm overnight,' she said, flexing her miniature biceps. ‘But you will need to figure it out before you do your first-ever author event at my bookshop.'

‘Charlotte.' William met her eyes in the mirror. ‘Leave it.'

But she wasn't about to give up that easily.

‘As her agent, you should be behind this. Do you have any idea how many views my video from the party last night got?'

He sucked in his cheeks and I could see his commission senses starting to tingle. ‘How many?'

‘Last time I looked it was a hundred and thirty thousand.'

‘Seriously?' He turned his head all the way to stare at her for a second before remembering we were doing eighty in the fast lane of the M1.

‘Half of those might be watching it for the whole bouncy castle bit, but your confession has been stitched literally thousands of times.' She really went out of her way to hit every syllable of the word ‘literally'. ‘It's out now, everyone knows who you are. You're a superstar, Sophie, like it or not.'

‘I'm an idiot,' I countered, checking my phone again as the endless grey of the motorway blurred by.

Fifty-two unread texts.

While the majority of them were from the same number that had been blowing up my phone for the last two hours, there were others from my friends, co-workers, the beleaguered head of PR at MullinsParker, and the woman who came round to steam my carpets once and ruined a rug but I didn't have the heart to tell her and paid anyway. Good news travelled fast. Salacious gossip moved like wildfire.

‘Is she still talking about the book or is this about Joe?' she stage-whispered to our brother whose face took on a grim expression.

My phone lit up again, same number, one I refused to assign a name to, not even William's suggestion of ‘Wanker the Weasel Do Not Answer'. I was so upset with myself for being so stupid and ignoring my instincts. It was a genius play when you thought about it, present yourself as an arsehole, surprise the woman by being a halfway decent human, then, once she's on the hook, briefly remind her you are in fact an arsehole so when the truth comes out and she finds out she was right in the first place, you're off scot-free, leaving her behind to wonder how she could ever have been such an idiot.

And by her, I meant me.

‘Please answer it,' Charlotte begged as the phone kept ringing. ‘Miscommunication is my least favourite trope. You're killing me with this.'

‘It's not miscommunication, it's secret wife,' I reminded her. ‘Which just replaced instalove as my personal least favourite.'

‘Then let me talk to him,' she demanded. ‘I'll end him in under a minute. Or I could post something? Set up a couple of finstas, ruin his life?'

‘Imagine getting read filth by an eighteen-year-old.' William grunted behind the wheel as she opened an app on her phone I couldn't identify in the mirror. ‘It would be easier to put your head in the oven.'

‘No one is creating finstas or reading him to anything,' I ordered. ‘His name is not to be spoken ever again by anyone in the car and that includes on the internet.'

In the backseat, Charlotte grunted something under her breath and kept her finger pressed on the delete button.

‘Secret wife in New York.' William blew out a long, surprised sigh. ‘Not even stashed away in the attic.'

‘Did you hear anything yet?' I asked, not really wanting to know.

His eyes flicked over to his phone, showing our route but nothing else. I knew he'd made some subtle enquiries before we set off for home, poking around some of the industry's more reliable gossips for details.

‘Not yet,' he replied, gently smacking the heel of his hand against the leather-covered steering wheel. ‘I just can't believe he's married. It's shocking. I am shocked. It's one thing to be a bit of a shagger but going out your way to get in someone's knickers when you're married?'

‘Sociopath behaviour,' Charlotte, with her as-yet ungraded A level in psychology, agreed. ‘Targeting someone like Soph as well. It's not as though she's going round hopping on a different dick every weekend, is it?'

William and I both turned around at the same time to stare at our little sister.

‘What? We all know you're not a casual shagger. I don't think you were like, oh go on then, I'm DTF for the weekend then we'll never see each other again.'

‘How do you know?' I asked, trying to remind myself she was in fact eighteen and not the little girl it felt like I'd just been playing Barbies with in the back garden. ‘I might be out in London every weekend racking up my body count.'

She pulled a face and went back to her phone. ‘Don't say things like body count, you can't pull it off.'

I turned back to face the windscreen and silently added it to all the other slang she had forbidden me to use.

‘It is weird though,' William mused, gliding over into the next lane to get around a very old lady in a very large Land Rover. ‘Why would he keep it a secret? He's been here for what, three, four months?'

‘If I were a semi-reformed shagger, planning to put it about a bit until my wife left her entire life in a different country to be with me, I'd probably keep quiet about it,' Charlotte suggested from the backseat. Neither William nor I responded. It was as good a theory as any and I didn't care for it one bit.

‘He did say he had some things to work out but he didn't clarify what those things were,' I said as my phone briefly went dark. Eleven missed calls. Eleven voicemails. Fifty-five messages. ‘Was I supposed to ask if one of them was a wife?'

‘I believe the correct etiquette is still for the married party to at least mention their status before putting their penis in the unmarried party,' William confirmed before moving back into the fast lane. ‘The onus is definitely on Joe.'

‘The onus might be on him but the joke's on me,' I moaned. ‘I should've known better. This is why I'm better off single.'

In the back, Charlotte's expression shifted into something more thoughtful, a shadow I did not care for dulling the light in her eyes. ‘Is that why you wrote Eric?' she asked. ‘Because in real life all men are this terrible?'

An emphatic yes fought its way to the tip of my tongue, but I kept my lips pressed tightly together and shook my head instead. She was only eighteen, it wasn't fair, I wouldn't do it to her.

But William would.

‘Yes,' he answered before I could sugarcoat a response. ‘Straight men are human scum. And the shit-housery comes in all different shapes and sizes. They will go to any length to get what they want out of you and not a single one can be trusted, they are all, without exception … what was the word you used the other day? Chunts. They are all raging chunts, Charlotte Virginia Taylor.'

‘No, they're not,' I said as forcefully as I could manage, twisting around to look right at her. ‘Don't listen to your brother, this is his idea of being protective. I wrote Eric because I believed there had to be a man like that out there somewhere.'

She looked back at me with big eyes, traces of last night's glitter eyeshadow making them sparkle.

‘Do you still believe it?'

I thought for a second.

‘I want to,' I said, ‘even though it isn't exactly an easy task at this precise minute.'

‘Not all love stories are straightforward,' she replied with unearned wisdom as she leaned forward to pat me on the top of the head like a good dog. ‘Maybe this is one of them.'

‘Feels more like a thriller right now,' I muttered. ‘I'm not sure this one has a happily ever after.'

‘Maybe it's an epic. A grand tale for the ages where you find each other again in fifty years and realise he was your true love all along.'

‘Fuck me, that's depressing.'

William's dry delivery managed to squeeze an unexpected laugh out of me and he grinned before his eyes moved up to the rear-view mirror. ‘I can't remember the last time the three of us were on our own together. This is nice.'

‘It'd be nicer if we stopped at McDonald's,' Charlotte grumbled. ‘Sophie can pay. She's minted.'

Out the window, I saw a sign for the Watford Gap services and my stomach growled again.

‘I could go for a six-piece of nuggets,' William admitted. ‘And she's right, you are loaded.'

In the backseat, Charlotte let out an agonised gasp, suddenly pale and panicked.

‘What is it? What's wrong?' I strained against my seatbelt to reach her, grabbing hold of her hand as William hit the hazard lights and swerved across two lanes of traffic to the hard shoulder.

‘My Chanel bag,' she replied, clutching the leather and chain strap draped across her body. ‘It's real, isn't it?'

Silently seething, William turned off the hazards and pulled back into traffic.

‘Lottie, that bag is the least of my worries,' I told her, squeezing a tweaked muscle in my neck as I breathed out.

‘Good because you're not having it back either way.'

‘Just like William said,' I said, closing my eyes as he steered us along to the exit to the service station. ‘Never change.'