I have the awards and contracts to prove it.
Like the awards I’m looking at right now…
National Book Critics Circle Winner
The Thriller Award (Best Hardcover Novel)
Publisher’s Golden Pen Award
International Crime Writers’ Guild Medal
And Lily’s favorite, which isn’t an award at all, but a framed headline fromThe Timesthat says,“The Mind Behind the Murder.”
I don’t need some fanfiction writer to go on tour with me. Especially someone who took what was mine and attempted to make it hers.
Chapter 2
Rachel
Beep!Beep!Beep!
My eyes fumble, like they’re trying to hold onto a dream a little longer, but the vision is slipping between their lashes…
Just. Out. Of. Reach.
I groan. The dream is gone. A cozy dream that felt as warm as a humid summer day back home when the air wrapped itself around your skin like a heavy jacket. Except my heart felt free instead of anchored to a place that felt like drowning.
“Rachel! Turn that thing off!”
My roommate’s irritation seeps through the paper-thin walls of our apartment. She’s always up earlier than me, even lately, when she’s been teaching some late-night classes recently to fund a trip to India. We both know how to use the margins of our days to hustle for our goals, even though both of our goals seem wildly out of reach no matter how hard we work.
I toss a pillow toward my screeching alarm clock. It slams into it, knocking the clock to the floor and…it’s still beeping.
“RACHEL!” she yells again.
“I’m trying!” I yell back as I trip over my bedsheets that are tangled around my legs, causing me to fall hard to the carpeted floor.
I lay there for a few seconds, waiting for air to give breath to my lungs so I can move. It smells like musty, old fibers and Febreze that I spray too often to try to give life back to the aging apartment.
Suddenly, a large thud begins to vibrate the floor beneath my face. Again, and again, and again. Its rhythm matches the wails of the alarm.
“Turn that thing off!” A shrill shriek accompanies what I now recognize as Ms. Barney’s broomstick angrily pounding against her ceiling.
Our apartment is on the top floor of a five-story building made of brick, mortar, and code violations that are remedied with a hundred-dollar bill tucked into a handshake instead of proper permits.
Ishouldmove, but this apartment had been kindling to the fire in my soul when I’d first moved from Oklahoma. Of course, everything about New York City had seemed like a fantasy I’d only read about in books. I was twenty-four, ignorant, and on a quest to prove myself. I still am…I’m just a few years older.
Okay, six years older.
And those six years have made it take a little more energy and determination to see the same magic in the peeling wallpaper and the lifestyle that can be defined by the fact that my one-liner when going out with friends is,“I’ll just have water, please.”
Every budgeting reel on my social media feed is trying to tell me that budgeting is the new sexy, but I’m the woman shoving six dinner rolls into my purse like a gluten-smuggling raccoon. Because nothing screams financial empowerment like hoarding carbs so I don’t have to buy snacks tomorrow.
The drumming of the broom intensifies.
“Sorry, Ms. Barney!” I shout into the scratchy carpet, crawling quickly toward the wretched alarm clock, finally reaching it and turning it off.
I roll back over onto my back.
