On Tuesday, Nina stopped June as she came into work.
“Do you have a number for Eli? I need to ask him about Saturday.”
June put her bag down. “He’s not coming with me.”
“Ruby’s put him on the proposed participant list. He hasn’t agreed, so I can’t advertise him.”
“Can I see what she’s put him down for?”
Nina handed her the sheet. June found his name under the discussion, then read the line above it: Original video written by Ruby Bell and Eli Mercer.
“Written by?”
“I’d assumed he only performed,” Nina said.
June read the line again. Ruby had wanted a continuation. Eli had told her he didn’t write. She wasn’t going to ask Ruby what he meant.
June took out her phone. She didn’t know whether to sit or stand. She called him while Nina was still there.
He answered on the third ring.
“Did you write the video with Ruby?” June asked.
There was no noise from his end. June looked at the cinema doors, waiting for somebody to come in and ask for a ticket.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did she give you my pages?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew they were mine?”
He breathed in. “Your name was on them. I knew.”
June lowered herself onto the bench. Nina took a step nearer, then stopped.
“Come here,” June told him. “Now. I need to see you.”
“June—”
“Can you come?”
“Yes.”
She ended the call. For a few seconds she held the phone against her knee with its screen still lit.
Nina sat beside her.
“Do you want to tell me?”
“Not yet.”
“All right. Take the time. I’ll cover the counter.”
June nodded. She went across the road before Eli arrived. She didn’t want to do this under the poster or beside the place where she had laughed at his first invitation to argue.
He found her in the café at the same table they had used on Monday five weeks earlier. She had ordered nothing. The empty chair beside her held her bag.
He sat opposite.
“I should have told you,” he said.
“You told me no.”
“I know.”
“In here. In your flat. I asked.”
He looked at her. “I lied.”
The word gave her nowhere to put what had happened except where it belonged. She gripped the edge of the chair beneath the table.
“What did you write?”
“We worked on it together. I changed passages. I put in the dinner and the ending. Some of the things she said that people responded to most were mine.”
“With my story in front of you.”
“Yes.”
“You read the party?”
“Yes.”
“You read what I told her about laughing?”
“Yes.”
June looked at his hands on the table. She knew what they felt like on her back. The memory arrived whole and unwanted.
“Why tell me you were never together?”
“Because that was true.”
“And useful.”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“You came to me because you wanted me to help you.”
“At first. I thought you’d get her to clarify the part before it got worse. I knew she’d have to tell you about me if you kept asking. I gambled I could get your help without that.” He looked at the table. “Then I liked talking to you. I didn’t plan that.”
“But you kept planning what not to tell me.”
He looked down. June waited until he looked up again.
“Why has she put the credit in now?”
“To make me join her in explaining it. A version we could both stand behind without saying all of it.”
“She thought you wouldn’t tell me?”
“She thought I’d negotiate. That I’d be too afraid of what we’d done to say where the whole story came from.”
“And were you?”
He nodded. “I was afraid.”
June let go of the chair and put her hands in her lap.
“Did she threaten you with this before?”
“After you left the cinema that Thursday. She said she’d credit me as co-writer and offer me a paid appearance in the evening. I told her I wasn’t doing a follow-up. She wanted a joint account that made it seem like a few borrowed phrases and a bit of dramatizing.”
That Thursday. June had walked home thinking he would call her later. He had called. They had talked about Saturday.
“You had another chance,” she said.
“I had a lot of them.”
She looked toward the window. A man was crossing the road with a folded newspaper under his arm. The afternoon looked perfectly ordinary from here.
“We aren’t together any more,” she said.
Eli didn’t move.
“I don’t want you to come to my flat. I don’t want another date. I don’t—” She stopped because her voice had begun to shake. She waited until she could speak. “I don’t want you deciding I might change my mind if you explain it better.”
“I love being with you,” he said.
June turned toward him. “You knew I wouldn’t choose it if I knew.”
His face changed. He didn’t answer.
She stood up. Her bag caught against the chair, and he reached to free it. She took it herself.
“Don’t.”
He drew his hand back.
June went outside. She made it across the road and into the cinema before she began to cry. Nina was coming out of the office. She didn’t ask another question. She brought June inside and closed the door.
June sat with her face in her hands. The tears weren’t only for the lie. They were for the room where she had wanted to stay, and the man who had kept it warm while knowing what she didn’t.
When she could see the phone clearly, she sent Ruby a message.
I’m coming tonight. You need to tell me all of it.