Page 87 of How to Bang a Billionaire

“You like it?”

“I’ve never been.”

“Your name.”

“Oh.” I’d never really thought about it before. “Yeah, I guess so. Mum chose it. It was kind of a promise.”

“What promise?”

I wriggled. Not exactly uncomfortable but very aware we were on the outskirts of Personalville: population me. “To keep me safe.”

“People break promises.”

“Not my mum.”

We were quiet again.

I was trying to decide if I was unsettled or simply drunk, and if I minded being either, when she picked up the last oyster and said, “Going to prick your finger on a spinning wheel someday?”

“Oh no. Um. It was. Well. My dad. He wasn’t a great person.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t know him.” Could hardly remember him. Which was slightly crazy, since I’d spent the first eight years of my life in his house. But all I had were these memories of fear. His too-tall shadow staggering upon the wall. Like he was the fucking Balrog. “But he drank. And he…he wouldn’t let Mum leave.”

“How’d you get away?”

“We ran. All the way to Scotland to stay with Hazel. She was this friend of Mum’s from school. She’s married as well and stuff but…I guess they’re all together now?”

“You guess? You don’t know?”

“Well, no, they are. It’s just some people find it pretty strange.”

Ellery shrugged as if the very concept of being surprised was beneath her. “You want to get out of here?”

“Okay.”

Well, what was the alternative? No, I’d rather sit here confiding fragile, complicated stuff about my life and history to a total stranger?

Except I wasn’t exactly telling her secrets.

Secrets implied shame and I wasn’t ashamed. My mum lived for years in secrecy and shame with a man who promised her everything and took her apart piece by piece until he thought she was nothing but dust.

And she was still more than he could ever be.

The best and bravest person I knew.

By “get out of here” it turned out Ellery meant “take cocaine in the disabled toilet.” She yanked me in with her and tried to share, but I politely declined. I felt bad enough about abusing the facilities that I couldn’t really bring myself to break the law in them as well.

At least she wasn’t pushy about it.

Just terrifyingly efficient as she sandwiched the stuff between a couple of twenties and ground it to a pale powder with a Coutts bank card that matched the one Caspian had given me.

Afterward we went shopping.

I wasn’t even high but London blurred into an endless carousel of boutiques and “conceptual retail spaces” you apparently needed an appointment to be allowed into. They were the kind of places where there’d be just a shoe in a glass cabinet in the middle of a vast white room. Where the whole buying-a-thing aspect of the experience was refined and rarified to such a ludicrous extent that I had absolutely no idea how you actually, y’know, bought a thing.

We ended up in this deeply weird place—the Late Night Something or Other Cafe—located on the ground floor of this scruffy concrete block in a bit of London so wildly ugly it had to be wildly trendy. It was one of the appointment-only gigs and it was all rather too Dali for me. I certainly couldn’t remember having felt the lack of orange-lit wooden tunnels in the other shops I’d visited over the course of my life.