Page 49 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

Credit where it’s due: I was granted access to this foodie hellscape and encouraged to speak my unadulterated truth by one person: Fredricka, this one’s for you.

“Bollocks!” Fred sat back, reeling. She pushed the paper away, and Bella took it and began to read.

“Quite. That, my dear, is a perfect example of how to throw someone under a bus,” said Aunt Aggie.

“Can he even do that? Is this even legal?” Fred asked.

“I suppose the restaurants could try suing for slander, but I would imagine the paper’s legal team probably made sure everything was aboveboard on that front,” said Aunt Aggie.

“It’s a sensationalist piece; unkind, but outrageous enough to be classed as entertainment.

Clever lad, if I didn’t want to castrate him, I’d be impressed. ”

Fred groaned. “What a bloody mess!” She picked up her phone and tapped onto the Daily News website, finding the article online and scrolling down to the comments.

@big-tom625: whoa, this guy takes no prisoners!

@zany_nerd: nice burn! hate all that artisanal bs.

@ninetiestroll: think I’m gonna like the new guy. Say it how it is.

@friestogo : think we’ll give Pine Bluff a swerve when we do Scotland @cat_lady0

Fred scrolled down past fifty or so comments, lots of them praising Warren’s approach to food critiquing, while some were just laughing emojis—Warren, it seemed, was a hit. More comments popped up as she read. This is a car crash , she thought as she closed the app.

“I need to call Ryan,” she said, scrolling down to his number, but he was either busy or ignoring her call, because it rang out. She tried calling him on WhatsApp and Facebook, too, just in case. Nothing. She placed her phone face down on the table and puffed out a defeated breath.

Aunt Cam regarded her with concern. “It’s a bit of a sticky wicket, isn’t it?” she said, in her usual understated way.

“It’s a pile of flaming bollocks is what it is!” Aunt Aggie corrected her.

Fred puffed out another breath and put her head in her hands. “What am I going to do?”

“We could burn some sage,” said Aunt Cam. “Once we’ve cleared the negative energy, we’ll be able to think more clearly.”

“Cam, my darling, I admire your can-do attitude, but the only way burning sage is going to help this situation is if we shove it down the back of Warren Reeves’s trousers,” said Aunt Aggie.

“Violence is never the answer,” Aunt Cam reprimanded her.

“The man’s a liar, he deserves to have his pants on fire!” Aunt Aggie leaned back in her chair, arms folded.

“I need to find Ryan,” said Fred. “I have to explain that I had nothing to do with it.”

“He’ll know that,” Aunt Cam assured her.

“Will he?”

Bella closed the paper, pushing her chair back from the table without a word, and left the room.

“Mum?” Fred called after her. “Mum!”

But she didn’t answer.

“Is Bella all right?” asked Aunt Cam. “She’s pale as mist.”

The sick feeling climbed higher up Fred’s throat. “Um, we had words. We were in the middle of something…”

“What kind of words?” Aunt Aggie narrowed her eyes at her.

Fred could feel herself being pulled taut in two different directions. She needed to settle things with her mum, and she needed to find Ryan; she couldn’t help feeling that this article was her fault.

“Mum and Liam are together, kind of, and I wasn’t exactly understanding when she told me.” Fred winced as she said it; her head was in twenty different places.

The front door slammed.

“Did Mum just go out?” She ran to the door and pulled it open in time to see her mum’s car screeching out onto the road.

This was bad. If there was one rule that they absolutely abided by in this family, it was that you never walked out on an argument, and now her mum had steamed off with Fred’s harsh words still hanging in the ether.

Fred turned back to see both aunts standing in the hall, watching her with steely glares.

“What exactly did you say to your mother?” Aggie asked, her eyes fixed and narrowed.

“Um”—Fred pulled at the neck of her jumper—“I may have asked her to promise to call it off…” The breeze from the open door was cold at her back, but it was nothing compared to the chill coming from her aunts.

“But I changed my mind,” Fred continued in a rush.

“I was going to tell her to, you know, go ahead and be in love with Liam, but then you came in with the paper and it all got sidetracked.”

Aggie took a deep breath in through her nose, her lips pursed. Cam laid a hand on her arm, as though to steady or calm her.

“You changed your mind.” Aggie’s words stabbed at her like thorns. “How fucking gracious of you.”

Fred took a step backward. “I m-mean,” she began, stutteringly. “You have to admit…her track record…” She felt herself shrinking under her aunts’ scrutiny.

“Did it ever occur to you that you might be wrong?” Aunt Aggie cut her off, her voice shaking with outrage.

“Fred, dear, there is more to this than you know,” Cam added, calmly.

Fred’s phone rang out from the kitchen table, turning itself in circles as it buzzed impatiently. She rushed to it, hoping it was her mum or Ryan, the aunts stepping aside for her to pass. But it was a number Fred didn’t recognize, so she dismissed the call. It began to ring again immediately. FFS!

“Hello?” Fred answered, shortly.

“How could you?” A woman’s voice sobbed down the phone. “My parents-in-law started this restaurant. Seventy-five years we’ve been here…”

“Mrs. Doukas?”

More sobbing.

“Mrs. Doukas, I’m so sorry, I had no idea….” The line went dead. She shoved her phone into her jeans pocket and passed the aunts again. “I have to go.”

“But we need to talk about your mother!” Aunt Cam said as Fred hurriedly pulled on her coat and boots.

“I’m going to find her! I’m going to find Mum and make it right.

Then I’m going to find Ryan and make that right.

And then just basically apologize to anyone I see, until I’ve made everything all right!

” she called, shutting the door behind her and ending the conversation.

She rang her mum as she fumbled with her car keys, but it went straight to voicemail.

Once inside the car, she called Warren while she waited for the windows to demist. She put her phone on loudspeaker, and after a few rings Warren’s smug voice bounced around the interior of her small car.

“Fredricka,” he said.

For a moment she was so angry she couldn’t speak.

“Fredricka? You saw the article.” There wasn’t a hint of remorse in his voice.

“That wasn’t an article, Warren, it was an annihilation of livelihoods.”

“Don’t overreact.”

“Did you think for one second about what your lies would do to those people? How could you write those things?”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay? They were collateral damage. You knew I was going after Tenbury’s column, and thanks to this piece I’ve sealed the deal. It was nothing personal.”

“Nothing personal?” She winced at the screech in her own voice. “It seemed pretty personal to Mrs. Doukas when she was sobbing down the phone. I expect it felt personal to the Campbell family, too, and every other business you screwed over in that overwritten diatribe you put your name to.”

“Overwritten?”

“Is that all you took from what I just said? You could’ve ruined their businesses!”

“Relax! You’ve worked in advertising; you know that no publicity is bad publicity.” He sounded less sure of himself, but followed up with a belligerent, “I’ve put them on the map!”

“You think your article is going to have people rushing to book tables at these restaurants? Who in their right mind is going to book somewhere that’s gone viral for serving bad food?”

“Plenty of people; people are perverse, they love to hate. I bet they’ll be inundated with bookings. It’s the Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares effect, isn’t it? People love a car crash.”

“Oh my god, you are such a wanker!”

“You told me I needed a hook to get people interested. This is my hook.”

“You are vile.” She was shaking with rage.

“That’s a bit strong.”

“And what about the things you said about Coast Roast? That was personal.”

There was a pause before he said, “Yeah, you got me on that one.”

Fred wanted to stick her fingers down the phone and poke him in both eyes.

“Listen, we both got what we wanted. I assume you did get with Ryan?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Warren!”

She cut him off to stop him having the last word, because she knew it would rankle him, then she hit the horn to drown out the sound of her screaming.

Her phone lit up with a call from him, his picture grinning out at her.

“I can’t believe I kissed you!” she shouted at it, while it continued to ring.

Note to self: buy tongue scraper! Then she blocked his number.

She tried her mum again and then Ryan. Nothing and nothing.

All the car parks in town were full because of the market.

In desperation she pulled into the loading bay behind Frost Hardware, hoping that there was still enough goodwill between them that Martha or Diggory wouldn’t have her car towed.

Although, after what Warren had written about Coast Roast, she was likely as popular as food poisoning with the Frosts.