Page 134 of Tears of Gold

She waves her hand at me and then comes closer and kisses me on my cheek. "I doubt anyone is going to be looking at your eyeliner anyway.”

“I know, right? Look at how this ink has stretched on my tummy.” I lift the edge of my vest and she stares in horror at the contorted ink.

“Your bonus will be me paying for you to have a restorative tummy tuck.”

“Cheeky mare!” I laugh and shake my head. “Right where is this co-star? I guess we should meet. Also, I want to see the contestants first, make sure there is nothing they are worried about.” I pause and think through the hazy mental list I have, thinking through my baby brain. “Is Dylan here?"

“Yes, yes. Telling everyone he knows you and that he thinks you would have had a thing with him if it hadn’t been for Elijah getting in the way.”

“Really?”

“Truth.” Her attention is caught over my shoulder. “Ah, here comes your co-star and Gerard.”

I turn, my stomach twisting. Remember, Faith. You can play nice now. Then the air just whooshes out of my chest as my gaze falls on Eli. Ink dark jeans and a white shirt; that is not how he left the house only an hour and a bit ago. He grins at me, those delphinium blues shining so bright they eclipse all the lighting in the room.

“What are you doing here?”

He shrugs, but his face is alive with mischief. “Change of career.”

“But what about your family? What about your job?”

He pulls me close, his scent washing over me, making my tummy flip. “Turns out the family is changing.”

I push back. “You-you are going to be here with me? Doing this?”

“Turns out, Angela was right. We have great chemistry.”

I fall into his arms and kiss him with all I’m worth and I don’t give a shit who sees.

“That’s a cut.” Someone shouts from over in the distance. I’d honestly forgotten anyone was even recording.

The contestants—all thirteen of them—are in lines. Each of them has a wide work bench to use and all sorts of kit I’d consider stealing if I could still use half of it.

“That went so fast.” I smile. The nervous tension that zapped through the air earlier seems to have dissipated and the contestants all seem to be chatting and getting on nicely. I’m assuming that will be cut out in editing—I'm not sure it makes great TV watching a bunch of people talk about what they might have for dinner while playing with clay. It was Eli who started that conversation. Fair to say I rolled my eyes—he wants pasta and a jar of sauce, apparently.

I walk over to Dylan. He’s leant down on his elbows staring at what he’s been working on. “How was that?” I ask coming up to his side.

“I think this says it all.” He frowns at the creation.

“What is it?” I stop myself from laughing.

“I have no clue.”

“So you see that there in the middle.” I point at where we’ve put some prompts for today’s theme in between the benches. There’s a toy red double-decker bus, a London Beefeater with his furry hat—not a real one obviously, a toy one—and other things that conceptualise London.

They were asked to use the prompts to create a scale monument that could be used to welcome visitors to London with just one image.

“You have to not focus on one thing, but rather squint at them,” I try to explain.

“Squint at them?” Dylan leans closer and lowers his voice. “Have you got baby brain already, Faith?”

I scowl and kick him with the toe of my Doc Marten. “No! You know when you see those illusion pictures? It looks like random dots but some people can see a perfect picture instead.”

“You mean like those things my gran used to do and I used to get so cross because I could never see what she saw?”

I look again at the props in the middle of the room. “Exactly. Don’t look at the images too closely, look at it as if it almost wasn’t there and then let your own image come in its place.”

Dylan’s expression says it all. I’m talking Martian.