“How are you feeling?” she asks.
There’s a pause, then he says, “You’re dear to ask, but I’m fine.”
“Your heart, though. You’re a little—red. Do you need to take something?”
I smile. Some men don’t mind women fussing over their vulnerabilities. William Corwyn is not one of them. Sure enough, though his tone is mild, I can hear the irritation when he says, “Dear, don’t manage me, please.”
“Sure, sorry,” she says, swiftly backtracking. “I didn’t mean to overstep. Bad old habit.”
“A spanking for every backslide,” he says, playful again. “Or backside.” There’s a light slap, then: “Feel how fine I am.”
“Jesus. You could hang a dozen coats on that thing. Heavy winter ones.”
“That’s what you do to me,” he says, his voice gruff.
“But in front of the window?”
“There’s nobody here for miles. I could f*ck you on the lawn and only the eagles would see. In case you haven’t noticed, I live in the equivalent of a castle with a moat.”
“Let’s maybe save lawn-f*cking for summer,” she suggests, and I hear the tentative hope in her voice. Testing their potential future.
“That and my lake dock,” he says. “Meanwhile... put your hands on the sill.”
As they start up again—this womanisdifferent, no nap for him today—I contemplate slipping into the basement and up the stairs. Past his study,the hallowed space so many of his fans would give their left tit to see, as one said on Instagram. They’d be disappointed if they were expecting a squirrel’s cave of creativity, a mess of papers and books and pens, evidence of genius in progress. Because it’s just a bare empty room with a lamp and a desk. And one very password-protected laptop.
But I decide I’ve heard enough for one day. I’m cold, and I’m sad, and I have to figure out what to do about this one. This woman. What I did with the others obviously wasn’t enough.
Her cries follow me back through the trees of his property, out past the gate and rocks onto the causeway, which I’ll follow down to the logging road where I hide my car. They sound like someone in pain.
Part I:
Sam (and the Rabbit)
Chapter 1
If They Only Knew
Sam Vetiver was lost.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Well, perhaps a little bit of both. But for now, it was actually having lost her way that counted. She was on the final event of her fourth book tour, and if the GPS of her rental car didn’t come back online, Sam would be late. She had a recurring nightmare about this very thing, showing up forty minutes after the start time, so two-thirds of her audience had left and the remaining one-third were disgruntled, then opening the reading copy of her novel to find her familiar prose had been replaced with woodcuts.
She hunched over the steering wheel like a jockey urging on a horse, as if by doing so she could coax the little blue arrow back onto the road from the body of water into which it had floated. The actual lake, invisible from the road, was unfamiliar to Sam, as was everything in this wealthy exurb of a midsize midwestern city she had never visited before. “Return to the route!” the stern Australian lady who lived in the car’s dashboard scolded.
“I’m trying!” Sam said.
Mercifully the GPS decided to reactivate. Sam gave thanks and cranked up the AC so perspiration wouldn’t destroy her makeup. With her first novel, she had visited three book clubs a day in person, back in the dark times when she had to rely on printed-out instructions fromthe hostess:Look for the driveway with the balloons! If you see a barn next to a pond, you’ve gone too far!She’d thought everything would get easier with technology, and it had, but there were just so many ways to lose your path.
Sam drove as fast as she dared along a winding road bordered by very high rhododendrons, like something in a fairy tale, from which anything might pop—a centaur or a child—and shot out into an area of palatial stone homes set far back on velvet lawns. She wondered, as she did everywhere: What would it be like to live here? What did peopledo? No doubt there were patios behind those houses, on which families would gather after days of... golf? Tennis? Did anyone still play croquet? There would be grilling, maybe barbecue. If she lived here, Sam could be sitting with her feet in her husband’s lap, drinking a gin and tonic, watching the kids cannonball in the pool, and smelling the fresh-cut grass the landscapers had tended that morning.
She felt the usual wistfulness and reminded herself, that wasn’t the life she had chosen. And there were specific reasons why. And maybe it didn’t exist at all, maybe Sam was telling herself a story: The husbands or wives here were having affairs or traveling on business, the kids avoiding their parents or on drugs or glued to their phones. Who knew what people did behind their castle doors, really?
A few more miles, and Sam entered a Rockwellian hamlet whose town green surrounded a limestone mansion like something in a Shirley Jackson story. That had to be—Sam checked the address—yes! The library. She turned into the drive. There it was, the marquee sign sayingAuthor Reading Here Tonight! New York TimesBestseller Sam Vetiver Reads The Sodbuster’s Wife 7 PM. They had ringed it with the big light bulbs usually seen on hipster restaurant patios, a nice touch. Sam would post a photo of it later on social.
She checked her lipstick in the rearview—one of her top ten tour hacks was never apply a red lip in haste, lest you end up with that unfortunate cannibal look, but sometimes you had no choice—and grabbed her bag with her reading copy, book cover postcards, and pens.
“Showtime,” she said, as she always did, for good luck.
She got out of the car, hitching up the bodice of her strapless red jumpsuit. All of Sam’s tour outfits were red, to match her book jackets, on which heroines of whatever century Sam was writing about gazed soulfully across historical vistas with their backs to the reader, garbed in era-accurate crimson costumes. Sam’s red clothes were branding—she loved it when she showed up at an event and a reader commented,Wow, your dress matches your cover!, and Sam said,Oh, does it?, and winked. This jumpsuit was a pain because Sam had to undress completely every time she used the ladies’ room. But it was the last clean outfit Sam had, the rest stuffed into the laundry section of her suitcase. The end of tour. Almost.
