Chapter 25

25

Today is day seven of Merritt’s Ten Days. This has to be the day I finally meet my soulmate in person. It has to be the day I save Merritt’s fate at Evermore and, you know, my entire life. Amidst the panic there’s a small, strange feeling that maybe this was exactly how it was supposed to play out. That fate doesn’t want me to meet Jonah again in a park or a drawing class or a silent disco. It wants me to meet him somewhere grand and undeniably romantic. And what’s more romantic than an opulent ballroom? Granted, there will be loads of other people there, which isn’t ideal. But there will be champagne and spectacular lighting and probably some sort of swishy orchestral music.

Last night, before I said good night to Mr. Yoon, I let him know that I’d arranged a food delivery for that evening and that all he had to do was answer the door. I told him I wouldn’t get home until after he’d gone to sleep so would see him for breakfast in the morning. In response, he wrote me a note that said, Go, be young and have fun!, which made me feel a little sad, though I’m not fully sure why.

As I leave for the pharmacy, Cooper pokes his head around his door.

“How did you do that?” I ask. “Know exactly when I’d be in the hall? Have you been poking your head out every few minutes just in case? That’s insane. Or, wait…Do you have a secret camera?” I peer up at the ceiling corners.

“You’re not exactly light-footed, Delphie,” Cooper says, his hand pressed against the top of the doorframe. “It’s known across the whole ground floor.”

“Really?”

He nods his head towards the door opposite his. “Mrs. Ernestine says she knows when you’re on your way out because it sounds like a herd of elephants making their way across the Serengeti.”

“Was there a point to this interaction?”

Cooper frowns and I immediately feel guilty about my snappishness, making a mental note to really try to address it if I get a chance to stay alive. Cooper was surprisingly willing to help me when I turned up to ask him the other night. Even when I told him that he would probably have to come to the gala with me—a pretty massive thing to ask of someone on such short notice. I should try to be nicer.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, softening my tone.

“Just wanted to lend you these,” Cooper says. “I wasn’t sure where in my flat they were, but I eventually found them at the back of a cupboard.”

He hands me a large red jewellery box, the word Cartier printed in silver on the top. Up close the box is worn and faded, marked in patches where it’s been handled time and again.

I open the box and gasp. Nestled inside is a pair of huge diamond and pearl earrings in a beautifully intricate triangular shape.

“They belonged to Em,” Cooper explains. “She bought them at one of the estate sales she used to love going to. I know this because she wouldn’t stop telling everybody how clever she was to have found them at such a bargain price. They were made in 1922, which, as you know, is the exact year in which The Great Gatsby is set.”

I absolutely did not know that. Either way the earrings are incredible, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. “You…Are you sure?”

This seems like a huge deal. These earrings must have such sentimental value to Cooper, and he doesn’t know me well enough to know that I won’t lose one, which, let’s face it, isn’t entirely unlikely.

He waves my question away. “Nothing more than clever preparation. Nobody will suspect you of being an interloper when you’re wearing vintage diamond earrings that large.”

“These diamonds are real?” I yelp.

“Of course they are. Cartier doesn’t do cubic zirconia.”

“Holy shit. They must be worth—”

“Enough that I would appreciate you being careful with them, yes.”

I picture myself wandering around the party, clutching my ears the whole time so that the earrings don’t fall out.

“They’re so heavy,” I muse, weighing them in my hands, entranced as they glitter beneath the hallway light.

“Your lobes look sturdy enough,” he replies. “I think you can handle it.”

“I will choose to take that as a compliment.”

“As intended.”

“You know, Cooper, that’s the first pleasant thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Cooper gives a swift shake of his head. “I told you I liked your cactus the first time I brought a parcel to your apartment.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything, Delphie.”

His eyes glint as he fixes me with an unsettling look that lasts a second longer than is polite. I think of his finger in the aquarium.

“Anyway!” I sort of shout in response. “Gotta go!” I hold up the earrings. “Got to do some ear strength training if I’m gonna handle these bad boys. Wonder if they make miniature kettlebells for earlobes? Haha.”

Cooper raises an eyebrow.

I give him a half wave and then spin on my heel and scarper out of the building.

---

I reach the pharmacy to find Leanne holding a pair of gold spray-painted angel wings aloft, a beam on her lineless face.

“I thought we said Daisy and Gatsby!”

“Do you not trust me? After all these years?”

“No!” I say, eyeing Jan, who has three different sets of heated hair implements plugged into the wall.

“Well, well, well. She’s got what she wanted, so now the sweetness and light has buggered off. I knew it was too good to last.”

“I’m just not sure about angel wings. I said I wanted to blend in!”

“You’re not going to be wearing the entire wings, you turnip. I’m plucking from them for the dress. I’ll use some of the feathers as embellishments, but I won’t know which exact feathers and where to put them until you’re in the dress.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Leanne echoes. “Oh.

“Right, come on, Mum.” Leanne claps her hands together and looks me up and down. “We’ve got some serious heavy lifting to do.”

---

It has taken three hours, and I have felt every one of them deeply. From the shapewear that Leanne insisted she help me squidge myself into (and that she promised had never been used even though she kept glancing at Jan as she said it), to Jan’s snail’s pace looping of my hair over a metal tong that came perilously close to my eye four separate times. And then there was the whole fifteen minutes in which Leanne absolutely lost her shit because I wasn’t keeping my eyelashes still enough for her to stick individual lashes onto my existing lashes and create a “cat’s-eye vibe.”

“Does it even matter?” I’d asked, to which she’d had to “step outside for some air.”

When they’re done, Leanne and Jan step back and nudge each other, smiling.

“Go into the blood pressure booth and have a look,” Jan urges.

I head into the blood pressure booth and pull open the cupboard door that has one of those wiggly Ikea mirrors glued onto the back of it. It genuinely takes me a moment of staring before I realise that the person in the mirror is me. Delphie Bookham. I look…fucking incredible. The dress hugs my body like it was custom-made for me. The silver fringing swishes when I swing from the left and then to the right. Leanne has glued the golden-tipped angel wing feathers onto the cap sleeves of the dress, making it look dramatic and glamourous. My hair has uniform waves the whole long length of it. It’s tucked behind my ears and is draped over one shoulder, showing off Em’s incredible vintage earrings.

“I didn’t have time to do actual finger waves, but I watched a YouTube tutorial on how to get the effect with tongs,” Jan says, holding up her phone and snapping pictures of my hair. “It’s come out pretty stonking! I might have a go on meself. That’ll get Dan at the deli to give me a second glance, I bet.”

I lean in to get a closer look at my face. My skin looks clear and glowy, the depth of the freckles on my nose offsetting the severity of the eye makeup. My lips are painted in a glossy burgundy colour, the tone mirrored by the pale plum blush on my cheekbones.

“How did you make my eyes look so big?” I gasp. “I look like my mum.”

“Just tricks,” Leanne says modestly. “Your eyes are already massive to begin with.”

Tears well in my massive eyes.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Leanne hisses, jumping in front of me and flapping my face with her hands.

“I…I…” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Thank you.” I look at them each in turn. “You didn’t have to do this and…you just did? Without any conditions.”

“Well, let’s say first and second round are on you.”

If this works and I get my life back, every drink Leanne and Jan ever want is on me. Forever. I’ll go to the pub with them every single week.

I say this to them. Jan pretends to faint.

“Go on. Get gone, or else you’ll be late.” Leanne grins, shooing me out the door. I give them one more round of grateful thank-yous before leaving the pharmacy.

As I walk across the road back home my face stretches into a huge smile. There is no way that Jonah won’t want to kiss me when he sees me looking like this. Absolutely no way.

I think about what kissing him might feel like. Soft, I expect. And sweet. Like chocolate mousse. Then it occurs to me that I’ve only ever kissed one person before. And that went terribly. Shit, what if it was my fault that it went badly? What if Jonny Terry was actually a great kisser and it was me who made it awkward and sloppy? My stomach lurches at the thought.

What if, after all this, I don’t know how to kiss? What if, when the time is right, I make a move towards Jonah and he can immediately spot that I have zero clue what I’m doing? And it scares him off?

I push the thought out of my head and try to focus on the way Jonah looked at me in Evermore. On the feeling of certainty I experienced in his presence.

I can do this. Merritt didn’t say it had to be the world’s most perfect kiss. Just that he had to kiss me.

It will be fine.

It has to be.