“Yet.” I looked at him across the table, this man who’d almost given up on me and then decided not to, and felt the foundation settle a little further. Not certainty, not yet. But the ground it would be built on. “I’ll figure it out. I’m good at figuring things out.”
“I know you are.”
The phone rang.
Jack reached for it out of habit, but I was closer. “Hello?”
“Maggie.” Patricia’s voice—sharp, efficient, unmistakable. The kind of voice that made you sit up straighter even when she couldn’t see you. “I know it’s your day off and I don’t care. I need thirty seconds.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Your roommate. I called the apartment and she gave it to me. Lovely girl. Talks too much.”
“Patricia, I actually need to talk to you about?—”
“The Winterbrook manuscript.”
I went still. Jack looked at me, eyebrows raised. I held up a hand.Wait.
“What about it?”
“A publisher in New York. Calloway & Marsh.” Her voice had something in it I’d never heard before. Not excitement exactly, Patricia didn’t do excitement, but something close. Something almost like triumph. “Jonathan Calloway. He’s been looking for a literary debut to anchor their fall list, and I sent him the Winterbrook last week. He called me last night.”
“He wants it?”
“He wants it. He’s making an offer. A real offer, Maggie, not a polite we’ll-keep-it-on-file. He read the entire manuscript in one sitting and called me before he’d finished his coffee.” A pause. “He said the scene where the cat sits on the list made him cry. Jonathan Calloway. Crying. Over a cat.”
My hand was shaking. I pressed it flat against the table to steady it.
“That’s—Patricia, that’s incredible.”
“It is. And since you’re the one who pulled it from the slush pile, I thought you should know.” Another pause, and when she spoke again, something in her voice shifted—became almost gentle, which was terrifying coming from Patricia. “I told him about you.”
“You what?”
“Jonathan asked who found it. I told him my editorial assistant fished it out of the slush pile, championed it against my initial skepticism, and demonstrated the kind of instinct that most editors twice her age don’t have.”
“Patricia—”
“Don’t thank me. I’m not doing you a favor. I’m doing Jonathan a favor. Good instincts are rare. He should know they exist.” A click of what might have been a lighter on the other end. “He may call you. If he does, don’t be an idiot about it.”
“I—” My voice wasn’t working properly. “Thank you. For everything. Working for you has been?—”
“Don’t get sentimental on me, Shaw.” But there was warmth in it. Somewhere, under several layers of toughness. “You have good instincts. Trust them. That’s the only advice I’ve ever given that’s worth a damn.”
She hung up. Patricia never said goodbye—she just stopped talking and the line went dead, which was, in its own way, the most Patricia thing imaginable.
I set the phone down and looked at Jack.
“What?” he said.
“A publisher in New York bought the Winterbrook manuscript. The book about the librarian and the cat.”
“The one you found in the slush pile?”
“The one I found in the slush pile.” I was smiling, I could feel it, the kind of smile that starts somewhere behind your ribs and works its way out. “And Patricia told them about me.”
“Told them what?”
