Too Much Cake and Hammer Accidents

                                    

                                          
 Ashley said he didn't mind making us another Blissful Beauty special pizza as I'd finished off most of the first one, on the house as I'm still the flavour of the month thanks to the launch. He added in an extra bowl of chips as a reward for the entertainment I'd provided via the stand-up row with Ryan, and the two slices of Chocolate Decadence cake were free too. I tell Katya about Ryan and Kirsty's unexpected arrival that morning. She dumps her rucksack on the chair beside her and rustles around it, pulling out tattered sheets of paper stapled together.
                          
"Read that," she says. "And weep. Or laugh. It explains a few things." 
                          
I glance up. "Um, this says strictly confidential at the top."
                          
She waves a hand. "Those papers have the look of a template that's been downloaded from a business website somewhere. I doubt it would hold up in a court of law. Anyway, having worked with the woman for three months, I'm so sick of her I don't care. Check out the co-signature on the back page."
                          
And this is when it all comes out. Katya, my best friend, is the official ghost writer for Kirsty, once of this parish.  
                          
"I've never met her, and she has no idea who I am," Katya says. "I have to do everything through her blasted agent. The two times I was meant to meet her to discuss the book, the first time she didn't turn up, and I'd travelled all the way to London to meet her. The second time, she was mobbed by so many people when she arrived at the hotel where we were to meet, she never got to the table where I was sat. But all the phone calls I've had with her have been awful. She never answers a question directly, and she contradicts herself all the time. Nightmare, nightmare job."
                          
The book title is, wait for it, How to Hook a Commitment Phobe: Your 10-step Guide. The steps she told me about are all official, but it's a book and not a blog. Things you do to hook a guy or a girl and the book when it comes out will benefit three hundred times twenty because Kirsty can prove her method works.
                          
Of course she can. She outlined the steps she'd take to me. Thanks to the bad boy billionaire, Dr McLatchie dropping Kirsty into conversations with her son all the time as I'm sure she now does and her promoting his tour to her online followers, the zillions of them,  Jack's weeks off proposing to her, isn't he? I can't offer that kind of influence. Nowhere near it. I'm neither beautiful nor useful; useless personified instead.
                          
My One Show nightmare flashes up again. This time, when Alex Jones asks Kirsty what other women looking for love can do, Kirsty whips the book out, a thick tome wrapped in a glossy dust jacket featuring a picture of the world's most beautiful couple locked in an embrace. "Only £20.99!" she says. "And you can get it on Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, Nook, Barnes and Noble and everywhere!"  
                          
They re-enact the embrace for the camera and the audience lets out a collective "ahhhh!", though Alex has to to step in when it looks as if the kiss might go break the dictates of the 9pm watershed.  
                          
"Kirsty vanished with Jack earlier this morning," I say, hating the way my voice cracks. "And I haven't seen them since. Maybe they're in a church or a registry office as we speak, staring lovingly at each other and repeating 'I do'."
                          
Katya, by now on her fifth slice of pizza despite shunning such stuff normally on the basis that if it features meat or dairy, it's the devil's food, sits back so she can stare at me. "Is that what you think? They are the most unconvincing couple since Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio hammed it up on the Titanic. Granted I've never seen Kirsty and Jack together in the flesh, but you should see all the photos of them online. She's too busy pouting or blowing kisses at the camera and he looks as if he'd rather be at the dentist's having teeth pulled without an anaesthetic."
                          
I've never looked at pics of them online, too scared the jealousy would hit me so hard in the guts I'd double up.  
                          
"But what if her methods work, you know—"