Free A Hundred Ways to Break Up (Let's Make This Thing Happen 2) by PJ Adams Page B

Thom.”
    He nodded. “Cool,” he said. “I’ll haul Mo in, find out exactly what he’s been saying.” Then, with that mischievous grin again: “We could always just slip away,” he said. “Get out of the heat until it all calms down. I have a place. A chateau in the Loire valley.”
    “A chateau? ”
    “Well, yes,” he said. “Nothing too grand. It’s not quite Ronnie’s place.”
    “Ronnie’s place is a thirty-two bedroom mansion, Ray. On the scale of zero to impressive, there’s still plenty of room at the impressive end for a chateau that’s ‘not quite Ronnie’s place’...”
    Ray shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a rock star, babe. So how about it?”
    She let herself laugh. She couldn’t help it, with him standing there with that impish look on his face as he offered her a mere chateau to hide in. “No, Ray,” she finally said. “We can’t run away. You have an album to finish and I have the tatters of a life to sort out. Time to man up. Do you think they’ll be out the back, too?”
    The first time she’d come to Ray’s London house – she hadn’t even thought, but of course he must have others around the world – they’d entered through the back garden, where a door set into a high wall opened onto one of those pocket handkerchief London parks.
    “One way to find out,” he said. “You sure?”
    §
    They slipped through the back garden in darkness, the way lit only by the glow from Ray’s phone. At the door they paused. Ray turned and somehow his arms were around Emily and he was kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, the line of her jaw.
    She pressed against him, reveling in the thrill of a body against her that was still new to her. A man who had said–
    “I love you, Emily. We’ll get through this, okay?”
    She pulled away, nodded, then realized he probably couldn’t see in the gloom. “Yes,” she said. “We will.”
    He reached for the latch, and eased the door open a short way.
    There was no sign of anybody waiting out there, no sudden barrage of flashes.
    He took her hand, pulled the door open and led her out into the park. “Come on, babe,” he said. “Let’s get you into a cab.”

12
    All the way home, she clung onto Ray’s advice. Her advice.
    It’s like you told me: you have to try to understand what you can control and learn to let go of what you can’t.
    The press were clearly after Ray. Mo had been building up the buzz about his comeback album, feeding them stories about unannounced gigs and his private life, and goodness knew what else. She didn’t know what details they had, but she couldn’t control any of that. What she could control was how much she knew, so she spent the train journey home checking websites and social media for anything new about Ray.
    There was nothing. Not even on the Angry Cans Facebook page, which would be where Mo would seed things. Had Ray got to him already and stopped him, or was the over-zealous publicist just biding his time?
    So nothing was out there yet. Surely that was good? Maybe Ray was being over-dramatic, and when the press found out she was a nobody they would lose interest.
    Or maybe the hacks were talking to Thom already, getting the slighted husband’s side before they published.
    §
    She felt sick.
    She didn’t want to get into her car, so she stood there like a fool in the station car park as if she had nowhere to go.
    She took her phone out and checked for messages, but there was nothing. She’d exchanged a couple with Ray on the way home. He was being solicitous, reassuring her, trying to make sure she was okay but with nothing really to offer to convince her that they would get through this.
    She pressed the button on her key fob and the car unlocked with a flickering of lights, taking her briefly back to the stutter of camera flashes when Ray had opened his front door.
    She climbed in and started the engine.
    Control what you can and let everything else go.
    That was all she could