Page 119 of Read My Lips

She sighed. “Ok. Look. Mel’s given Simon until the end of the day to come up with a response to Luke’s article.”

“And? He’s already got one. He was filming everything we said at lunch.”

She grimaced. “Yeah. He was. And I’ve wasted yet another Saturday editing it so it doesn’t come across like the pair of you being ambushed.”

Sev being here was about more damage control. Simon couldn’t even be bothered to come himself.

“So what’s the problem?”

“Simon’s refusing to use it.”

“What?”

Mel Booker would be baying for Simon’s blood until something surfaced to push Luke and his inconvenient questions back into the long grass. He had the perfect solution, unearthing all my family’s dirty laundry. There should have been nothing stopping him unleashing it on the world.

“And you’re refusing to speak to him. And if he gets fired he is going to try to muscle in on Jo’s ad campaigns, and between the two of us, someone is going to murder him.”

I stared at her, cogs hamster-wheeling in my brain. “Why would he do that?”

Sev gave me a long hard look, both eyebrows up.

“You’re seriously confused about why – when you told him he’d crossed a line – he has not commenced plastering the internet with your private life?”

I scowled. “It’s his job though, isn’t it?”

“Oh my god, you might actually be beyond help.” Slipping off her backpack, Sev dug out her laptop. “Come here.”

She dragged me into my own hall like she owned the place.

And stopped abruptly in the doorway of the living room.

“Is that a garden table?”

“Don’t.”

Flipping her laptop open, she handed it over to me and slouched back into the sofa.

“What’s this?”

A slideshow flicked through on an automatic timer, spinning me pictures. The first one was a zoomed in version of a shot from a work social, or maybe a publicity event. Only me and Simon filled the frame.

Not what I wanted to see.

But Sev batted my hand away before I could slam the lid closed.

“No you don’t. I spent bloody hours trawling all the events over the last three years looking for passable shots of the pair of you together. You’re going to look at them.”

“What’s the point? We’re not together. We never had a relationship. And I really don’t want to.”

“I don’t give a flying crap what you want right now Ben. You’re going to sit down and look through all eighty-seven of these pictures, and then you can try telling me Simon doesn’t like you.”

Sheer murder glittered in Sev’s bloodshot eyes. Eighty-seven pictures must have taken forever to find.

“When did you get these?”

“When I was digging things out to put on Social. Jo may have helped me.”

Picture after picture scrolled across the screen. Both of us in all of them. I folded my arms, defensive already. She’d had a brief in mind – to make us look like a couple. She must have gone out of her way to find stills where you could trace the thread of a gaze from one of us to the other.