Chapter 2 —Maybe, Maybe Not

• Emily's POV
• I checked my phone forty-seven times on Sunday.
• I am not exaggerating, I actually counted, because at some point it stopped feeling like hope and started feeling like a problem and I needed to know exactly how bad it was. Forty-seven times. In one day. For a man who had not texted me and probably was not going to.
• Monday was better. I only checked it thirty times.
• By Wednesday I had given myself a full internal lecture about reality and probability and the fact that Julian Styles received approximately ten thousand declarations of love per week and mine was one slip of paper in a pile of a thousand and I needed to get a grip before I lost my mind completely.
• I went to work, I did my interviews, I ate lunch at my desk like a normal professional person and I did not check my phone during a single meeting, which I considered a massive personal achievement.
• "You are still thinking about it," Vanessa said on Wednesday evening, the second I walked through her front door.
• "I am not."
• "Emily."
• "I said I am not, Vanessa."
• She gave me the look, the one she had been perfecting since we were teenagers, patient and completely unconvinced, and handed me a glass of juice and said nothing else because she did not need to. We both knew I was absolutely still thinking about it.
• "He is probably not going to text," I said, settling onto her couch.
• "Probably not," she agreed, which was not what I wanted her to say but was very on brand for Vanessa.
• "I mean he meets hundreds of fans at every single stop on this tour alone, I was just one of them, the portrait was a nice moment but that is all it was, a moment, and I need to stop treating it like it meant something it did not mean."
• "That is very mature of you."
• "Thank you."
• "Are you going to check your phone again?"
• I looked down. I had been holding it in my hand the entire time without realising.
• "No," I said, and put it face down on the cushion beside me.
• ***
• By Friday I had fully made peace with it.
• Or something close enough to peace that I could function like a normal human being without my phone in my hand.
• I got dressed, went to work, filed two interview pieces that my editor actually complimented me on, which almost never happened, and made plans with Elena for the weekend. I was fine. I was completely fine.
• I had done something bold and it had not worked out and that was okay because at least I had done it, at least I could say I tried, and that was more than most people could say.
• I was walking back to my desk after grabbing coffee when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
• I did not immediately panic. It was probably Elena confirming plans. It was probably Diana sending a voice note about something that had happened at work. It was probably Vanessa with a follow up to a conversation we had not finished. It was probably any number of entirely ordinary things that happened on entirely ordinary Friday afternoons.
• I pulled it out and looked at the screen.
• Unknown number.
• One message.
• "Hey Emily, it's Julian. Just thought to say hi."
• I stood completely still in the middle of the office hallway for what was probably three full seconds but felt considerably longer, staring at those words, reading them again, reading them a third time, because my brain was genuinely struggling to process the information my eyes were sending it.
• Then the voice note loaded beneath the message, a short one, maybe fifteen seconds, and I put my phone to my ear with a hand that was not entirely steady, and his voice came through, warm and unhurried, saying his name, saying he hoped I remembered him, saying hi like it was the easiest thing in the world, and something in my chest did something I did not have a word for.
• I turned around and walked directly to the bathroom.
• I locked the stall door, sat down on the closed lid of the toilet like a person having a completely normal Friday, pressed both hands flat against my thighs and breathed, because I needed a moment, I needed several moments, I needed to collect every single piece of myself before I did anything else.
• I listened to the voice note again.
• It was him. It was actually him.
• I called Eva first because Eva would understand the urgency.
• She picked up on the second ring and I did not even say hello, I just said, "he texted me," in a voice that came out about two octaves higher than my actual voice, and Eva's response was a sound so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear.
• "WHAT."
• "He texted me, Eva, Julian Styles texted me, there is a voice note, it is genuinely him, I am sitting in the work bathroom right now because I did not know what else to do with myself."
• "Emily." Her voice had dropped to something deadly serious. "Do not move. Do not respond yet. I am calling Diana right now and we are calling you back in two minutes, do you understand me?"
• "Yes."
• "Do not move."
• She hung up. True to her word, two minutes later my phone lit up with a group call from Eva and Diana simultaneously and Diana's first words were, "show me the message right now I need to see it with my own eyes," and Eva was already talking over her saying she knew it she knew it from the moment I gave him that number she knew exactly how this was going to go, and the three of us spent the next ten minutes in a bathroom group call that I am fairly certain the entire office heard through the door.
• Eventually I told them I needed to go back to work and they made me promise to report back the second anything else happened, and I splashed cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror for a moment, trying to look like someone whose life had not just quietly tilted on its axis.
• I walked back to my desk, sat down, picked up my phone, and typed back something casual and light and completely unbothered, because I was a grown woman and I had this completely under control.
• Then his next message came through and I read it and every last piece of that composure evaporated in an instant.
• "Are you free to FaceTime?"
• My hands were shaking.
• Not a little, actually shaking, both of them, holding my phone in the middle of my open plan office with my heart somewhere in the region of my throat, staring at three words that should not have been able to do this to a functioning adult, and yet here I was.
• This was actually happening.