Page 24 of Dreams Come True at the Fairytale Museum

The unexpected laugh makes him choke on his crisps, and I reach across to his original spot and pass over the mug of tea he left behind in his eagerness to swap places, and he gulps it gratefully.

‘You’re very weird,’ I say when he’s got his breath back. ‘Has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Nope.’ He looks over at me. ‘I’ve never let anyone get close enough to find out.’

It’s another sentence that sounds unbearably sad and I nudge his arm with mine. ‘I didn’t say it was a bad thing.’

I see the blush sweep up his body from the uncomfortable shiver to the red blotches that colour his neck.

His cheeks go crimson, even the tips of his ears turn pink, and I’m unable to take my eyes off him.

The bashful look on his face is more endearing than it has any right to be, and he doesn’t seem to know what to say, so I force myself to look away and take another dreadful crisp.

‘You’ve criticised my museum a lot, but you’ve never told me what your favourite childhood story was… Maybe we could create an exhibit from it.’

He looks over at me again and closes his eyes, thinking about it for an abnormally long time. ‘I don’t think I had one. My mother never read me fairytales, she read me newspapers. She wanted me to grow up knowing what the real world was like, not with my head in the clouds of make-believe stories.’

‘That’s terrible! It’s unthinkable for a child not to have a favourite story. You must have been young once.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think I attended nursery school in a suit and tie. My dad was always at work and my mum didn’t have time for childish frivolities.’

‘There is no such thing as childish frivolities to a child.’ I look over at him again, and then poke his leg with my toe. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not too late to rediscover your lost childhood. Maybe you came to the right place after all.’

‘I’m a little old for children’s stories.’ He looks at me again and seems to be carefully considering his next words. ‘I did buy a subscription to the Disney online thing though so I can watch the movies. I thought it might help me to understand you… this place better.’

‘I’m surprised you want to. Me or this place.’ I deliberately draw attention to his quickly amended choice of words, enjoying the way it makes him blush again.

He seems quiet tonight, like the unexplained swapping of sides has exposed something I don’t understand, and I feel that familiar sense that I’m missing something.

‘So you’re just going to lie here all night and hope you see something?’

‘I’ll probably get uncomfortable in a while and sit up, but that is the general point of a stakeout, yes.’

‘And you’re not going to get tired or fall asleep?’

‘I’m on the clock. Getting to the bottom of the mysterious exhibits is literally my job. Trust me, I’m not going to fall asleep.’

He thinks I’m asking to make conversation, but really I’m trying to gauge how much chance I’ll have of smuggling something outside, and we lie in silence for a while, the quietness only interspersed by the occasional crunch of an unsalted baked lentil curl, and the buzzes of my phone with notifications from the shopkeepers’ WhatsApp group.

At first, I check the messages covertly, but I realise that trying to hide it will do nothing but tip him off, so I answer them as I would any other messages, like I’ve got nothing to hide.

He’s got his Tablet of Gloom in his hand, but when I catch a glimpse of the screen over his shoulder, it looks like something spreadsheety, so I assume he’s trying to get some work done, and I continue sharing updates from the stakeout with the others.

They’re trying to come up with excuses I could use to go outside for a minute and take something with me, although it would have to be something pocket-sized because he’s watching the main door, and nothing is going to get out unseen.

Mickey texts.

I could create a distraction? Make a clatter outside and then you could rush out to investigate it? Or while he goes out to investigate it, you shove something out the back door?

I glance at him and catch him watching me and he quickly averts his eyes.

Too suspicious. He is literally waiting for exactly that to happen.

‘You don’t have to stay if there’s somewhere else you need to be,’ Warren says after I send off another text and put my phone down, racking my brain for a non-suspicious way to sneak an exhibit outside.

‘Nowhere else I’d rather be.’

He looks over at me solely so he can raise a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘On a freezing cold, probably haunted landing, eating the most dire crisps in the history of the world, in the company of a demonic gerbil with no soul?’

I laugh out loud, mainly to cover the awkwardness at the reminder of my initial judgement of him.

‘Who are you texting then? The others to warn them I’m still here?’

‘No. My little sister. Boyfriend trouble. Do you want to see?’ The lie rolls off my tongue because, more often than not, whenever I get a slew of text messages, it will be one of my younger sisters asking for love-related advice.

I hold my phone out towards him, hoping against hope that he’ll refuse, because if he really did take my phone, he certainly wouldn’t see anything about boyfriend trouble on there, and I feel that frisson of guilt again.

He hasn’t done anything to deserve being lied to.

What difference would it make if he knew who was responsible for the escaped exhibits?

‘No, of course not. That would be an unthinkable invasion of privacy.’ He sighs and shakes his head at himself.

‘I didn’t mean for that to come across as entitled and control-freak-ish as it did.

Obviously you can text anyone you want and it has nothing to do with me.

I shouldn’t have asked in the first place. Sorry, this is messing with my head.’

The Tablet of Gloom drops out of his hand and onto the padding of the dustsheets as he clonks his head down onto his arms and lets out another long sigh.

‘I know you know something.’ He doesn’t lift his head and his voice is muffled behind his arms. ‘I know it’s your friend doing all this, and obviously you’re going to be on her side and keep her secret, which is fine, of course you are, but I thought…

’ He shakes his head again, like he’s trying to shake loose the right words.

‘I don’t know what I thought. But I’m not your enemy and I’ve been enjoying my time here, getting into the swing of things, and I… I thought you knew that.’

‘I do,’ I say quietly. When it seems like he hasn’t heard me, I reach over and press the backs of my fingers against his forearm to give him a nudge and then repeat it, and it’s enough to get a smile out of him.

‘I know my job has a bad reputation, I know property developers are seen as unscrupulous and untrustworthy, but we’re not all like that. Some of us are trying to make the world better, one place at a time, and are just trying to please everyone and keep all the plates spinning at once.’

His voice is quiet and he looks away as he says it, and it feels like another big chip in his professional armour.

And it leaves me with a decision to make – share the secret with him, or stick by my friends who I’ve worked with for years, who have always bent over backwards to help me in every conceivable way, and tell him another outright lie, when he sounds vulnerable enough to really need a bit of honesty.

‘It’s not Mickey.’ I swallow hard. I have to choose my friends.

I have to stick by the people who have always stuck by me.

‘It’s not anyone here. They don’t know what’s going on either, they just saw the exhibits outside and thought it would give people a laugh on social media. That’s it, that’s all I found out.’

‘Okay.’ He looks over at me. ‘Okay. If that’s what you’re sticking with, then that’s that.

We aren’t going to get anywhere if we don’t have any trust between us, so I’m going to choose to believe you.

I do understand loyalty, and distrust of strangers, and I understand Ever After Street coming together against me, but I don’t want to see this place closed down any more than you do.

You can choose to believe that or not, it’s up to you. ’

I don’t intend to let out a scoff, but one escapes anyway because no one could possibly be as invested in this place as I am.

‘Maybe it would be easier to trust you if you were honest about what you’re doing here.

How does helping my museum benefit you? What do you really get out of this?

You’re trying to prove a point to your mother? ’

He looks at me for a long time, so long that I can almost see the war playing out behind his eyes and I hold his gaze, because I can’t tear myself away from the depths I can see hidden behind his sarcastic quips and uptight seriousness.

‘Yeah, in a way,’ he says eventually, sounding exhausted from thinking about how to word it.

‘No matter what I do, no matter how much I achieve, she always knows better. That parent-child dynamic never goes away. She never says “well done”, but only ever points out what I could have done better or handled differently, and I always feel inferior and like a child still finding my feet, even though I’ve been in this industry since I left university.

She dismisses every suggestion I make without giving it consideration, and I spend every moment of my working life desperately wanting her approval, and never getting it, and being stuck in an endless cycle of trying to prove myself only for it to never be enough because I have this thing that makes me not good enough, and—’

‘What thing?’ I didn’t mean to interrupt him, but that’s piqued my curiosity in a way that can’t be ignored.