Chapter Text
It was George's fault.
He left his iPad on her kitchen counter, which, fine, people forgot things, that wasn't a crime. The crime was the notification that lit up the screen while she was making tea, and the £435 charge on his credit card for an executive suite at a hotel in Richmond, and the room service order below that.
Champagne. Aubergine moussaka. Beef Wellington.
She stared at it for a long time.
His credit card had probably been stolen. That was the logical explanation, and Eloise was a logical person, she wasn't the type to jump to conclusions, she wasn't going to ring her boyfriend five times just because someone had nicked his card and apparently had very good taste in food.
She rang him five times anyway.
He didn't pick up.
She texted. She sat on the kitchen floor, which she never did, and watched the three dots appear and disappear until they stopped appearing at all, and she thought, okay, his credit card has been stolen and his phone is dead, those two things are unrelated and she was being completely reasonable.
She had told her family about him last week. That was the thing that kept snagging. She had told her mother, who had said finally in that particular way that managed to be both validating and deeply annoying, which was more or less her mother's signature move. She had said he was a doctor and her mother had made a sound like Eloise had personally handed her a gift. She had told Anthony, which was worse, because Anthony had opinions about everything and would have opinions about this and would never, ever let her forget it.
She had said she was bringing someone to Colin's engagement party. She had said he was lovely.
She got in a cab.
The hotel was nicer than she expected. Marble flooring, grand staircase, the kind of place that made you straighten up a bit just walking in. Nothing like the draughty hunting lodge he'd taken her to last month for a weekend away, which had been his idea of romance and had mostly involved a broken radiator and a pub that closed at nine. By comparison this won easily, which told her something she hadn't particularly wanted to know.
She put a hundred pounds on the front desk.
"Room 914," the receptionist said, sliding the note off the counter without blinking.
She took the lift.
Her reflection looked back at her from the mirrored doors. Still in her suit from the seminar, hair still pinned, lipstick mostly intact. She looked completely fine. She looked like a person who had it together and was not currently riding a lift to confront her boyfriend in a hotel room on a Thursday evening.
Deeply irritating.
When the doors opened she stepped out and stopped.
There was a man pacing outside 914. Three steps, stop, three steps back, stop, hand raised toward the door, hand dropped again. She watched him do it twice.
She checked the room numbers anyway as she walked toward him. 912… 913… 914.
Right floor.
He noticed her and stopped. "Sorry, am I in your way?"
"No." She looked at him properly. Light brown hair, blue eyes, taller than George with a beard. "I think my boyfriend is in that room."
He let out a short breath. "I think my fiancée is in there with him."
A sound came through the door then. Muffled but not muffled enough.
"That's Marina," he said. Flat, like he was reading off a receipt.
Another sound. This time she heard George's name. "For £435 a night you'd think they'd have thicker walls," she said.
He turned away from the door and looked at the ceiling.
"How long have you been standing here?"
He checked his watch. "Ten minutes."
"They'll be done soon." She heard herself say it. "George can't last long."
He stared at her. "George. George Crane?"
"Yeah."
"Your boyfriend is George Crane."
"Was, possibly. Still working that out."
He went quiet. Then, "He's my brother."
Right then.
She sat down on the floor, back against the wall, right there in the corridor of a hotel that charged £435 a night. She wasn't really thinking about it. Her legs just decided. He looked at her for a second and then he sat down too on the other side of the door, like it was the obvious thing to do, like two people sitting on expensive hotel carpet outside a room where their respective partners were shagging each other was a completely normal Thursday.
They stared at the carpet.
Another sound from 914.
They stared harder.
"I was going to introduce him to my family next week," she said, to the carpet.
"We were finalising venues for the wedding," he said, also to the carpet.
"I suppose you win."
"Win what?"
"Worst day. You're ahead on points."
He almost smiled. "What do I get?"
"The moral high ground." She paused. "Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say."
He shook his head like it didn't matter. "Do you want to get a drink? There's a bar downstairs."
"What about going in there and confronting them?"
"I need a drink first. Maybe after."
She thought about George on the other side of that door. She thought about the beef wellington. She thought about her mother's face when she'd said she was seeing someone.
"Yeah," she said. "Alright."
She took his hand and he pulled her up from the floor.
"Eloise," she said. "By the way."
"Phillip." He let go of her hand. “Nice to meet you. Unfortunate circumstances and all that."
"Quite," she said.
They walked to the bar in silence and she kept turning it over, looking for the thing she'd missed. Six months ago George'd turned up at her flat with a copy of a book she'd mentioned once, in passing, at a dinner party where they first met. She hadn't even remembered saying it. She had thought, this one pays attention. She had thought, maybe this is something.
She glanced at the man walking beside her.
She hadn't even known George had a brother. He never talked about his family. She'd put it down to him being private. Maybe she'd just wanted to believe that.
She was going to have to tell her mother. That was going to be a whole thing. Colin's engagement party was in a week and she'd said she was bringing someone and now she wasn't and her mother was going to make a sound like Eloise had taken back a gift.
She picked up her pace.
They reached the bar. Phillip caught the bartender's eye. "Two of your most expensive scotches, please."
"I don't like scotch."
"Both are for me. George is paying."
"In that case," she said, picking up the menu, "start a tab. Room 914."
The bartender nodded without comment. Very good service.
"I'll have whatever your most expensive cocktail is. I'm starving, actually. Can we order food?" She turned the page. "The seafood platter. That."
"Two," Phillip said.
The bartender nodded. "Special occasion?"
Phillip looked at her. She looked at him.
"Something like that," she said.
The drinks arrived. Pink and blue, which should have been a warning. She took a gulp and winced. "That's bloody awful."
Phillip laughed.
"It tastes like petrol."
"I didn't know George was seeing someone," he said, sipping his scotch.
Six months and she hadn't made it into a single conversation. She could imagine it. Seeing no one at the moment. Keeping busy. You know how it is. Brilliant.
"He didn't tell me he had a brother," she said.
"Things got in the way. We don't really speak anymore." He sighed and took another sip of his scotch.
She looked at him. She'd expected him to be angrier. She was furious and she wasn't even in love with George, just humiliated and annoyed at herself for not seeing it sooner. George was his brother, nine floors up fucking his fiancée, and Phillip was sitting here nursing a scotch like he was waiting for a delayed train.
"You should be angrier," she said.
"Oh, believe me, I am." He set his glass down. "I've suspected for a while. There was always something a bit off with Marina lately."
"How long have you and Marina been together?"
"Since secondary school."
"Bloody hell." She took another sip. Still petrol. "You should be absolutely fuming."
"George always gets what he wants," he sighed. "I just didn't think he'd go this far."
She didn't know what to say to that.
The seafood platter arrived then, stacked across three extravagant tiers, taller than her cocktail glass and wider than both their bar stools combined. A whole lobster occupied the bottom tier, scallops, prawns, and oysters filled the middle, and the top was devoted to tiny blinis topped with caviar.
"This is a bit much," Eloise said.
"George is paying," Phillip said.
She picked up a prawn. "Fair enough."
There was a sadness about him she couldn't quite place. Something older, settled in long before tonight. She found herself wanting to say something useful. She had no idea why. That was not like her at all.
"You're better looking than George," she said.
She felt her neck go warm immediately, which was nothing to do with the cocktail. He turned to look at her and she said, very quickly, "that wasn't a compliment, I'm just making an observation," which probably didn't help.
He shrugged as though it neither surprised nor bothered him.
"It's just that if you're better looking than George then Marina is probably better looking than me. That's a completely daft thing to care about, I know that, I'm just, I keep wondering if that's why. If I wasn't enough or if he was never really attracted to me or." She stopped. "Sorry. I can't stop talking when I'm angry. Or mortified. I’m both at the moment."
He looked at her for a moment.
"He didn't mention you because we don't really speak," he said. "This is the first time I've been in the same place as him in over a year." He paused and looked at her then, properly, and her neck felt warmer and warmer. "If we did, he wouldn't shut up about you."
"He still cheated in the end," she said, clearing her throat. "Whatever the reason."
"He's an idiot," Phillip agreed. "How did you find out?"
"He said he was in Dublin. Sent pictures of the airport, the hotel room, everything. Very thorough." She turned her glass. "But he left his iPad at my flat and I saw the credit card charge. Richmond. Thirty minutes away. And then I saw the room service order."
She huffed out a laugh. "Beef wellington. He doesn't eat red meat. Something about watching his cholesterol." She looked at him. "So I came here, slipped a hundred pounds to the receptionist, stepped out of the lift and there you were."
Phillip stared into his glass. After a moment, he said quietly, "Beef wellington is Marina's favourite dish."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"We all grew up together. Marina lived next door. Same school, same everything. When George left for med school we were eighteen and suddenly it was just the two of us." He turned his glass. "It felt like the natural thing. And then five years later we got engaged."
He stopped.
"George got absolutely blind drunk at the engagement party," he said. "We haven't really spoken since. Well." He paused. "I haven't. Apparently Marina has."
She picked up a prawn she didn't particularly want.
"Why are you with him?" Phillip asked.
"My mum always said that when you found the right person, it would be easy," she said. "And it was. He was easy to be with. He never pushed back on anything. Whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted to go, he just went along with it." She looked down at her drink. "I thought that meant we were compatible."
Phillip didn't say anything.
"My mother liked him," she continued, which was possibly the most embarrassing thing she'd ever admitted out loud. "Well, she hadn't actually met him, but she liked the idea of him. Stable, a doctor, sensible. She's been telling me for years I need someone to balance me out." She gave a small shrug. "He just... fit the picture of the sort of man you're supposed to end up with.” She heard herself say it and went quite still.
"That's not the same thing," he said softly.
"No," she said. "I'm realising that."
Silence settled between them. Eloise turned her glass slowly between her hands, watching the ice melt into the cocktail.
"How did you find her here?" she asked.
"She said she was going out with a girlfriend. Didn't make sense because that friend is meant to be in Spain for work." He picked up his scotch. "It's like she wanted to get caught. So I followed her. Waited until she went up and asked the receptionist myself."
"How much did you give him?"
"Hundred pounds."
"He made two hundred tonight," she said.
"That man needs to get fired," Phillip said.
She laughed. He laughed too. Somewhere between the lobster and her third cocktail the evening had become almost bearable.
She found out he had a doctorate in plant sciences and ran research for a vertical farming start-up company in Dalston. Lived in Bloomsbury with Marina and their spaniel Bessie. Three years engaged, wedding at the end of the year. He talked about it all evenly, like he was describing someone else's arrangements.
He frowned slightly when he was listening to her, like he was actually paying attention, which she wasn't used to.
Her observation still stood. Fuller hair, bluer eyes. And when he laughed, which wasn't often, it changed his whole face.
She put that thought somewhere very far away and left it there.
She was on her third cocktail when her phone rang.
George's face on the screen.
Phillip glanced over. "You should answer."
"And say what?"
He shrugged.
She let it ring out. A text came through.
Sorry I missed your call. Conference ran late. See you tomorrow babe.
Phillip scoffed.
She didn't know what came over her. She grabbed Phillip's collar, pulled him close, said "Smile," took a selfie, and sent it to George before any part of her brain could object.
No worries babe. Just having drinks with my new friend Phillip.
Phillip laughed, properly this time. She could imagine exactly what George's face was doing right now. The typing bubble appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared.
She waited.
Then she noticed how close they still were, her phone tipped down, his face just above hers. She looked up and he was already looking at her, and there was that sadness again, the kind she still couldn't place, except now he was close enough that she could feel the warmth of the scotch on her lips without either of them having moved at all.
He reached out and pulled her stool closer to his.
She was fairly sure he could hear her heart pounding.
Her phone rang. George's face on the screen again. They jolted apart.
She reached for her bag. "I think I should go. I'm too drunk to confront him without ending up in a police cell."
"Yeah," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Me too."
She stood up. "Good luck."
"You too, Eloise."
She turned around and didn't look back.