He doesn’t even complain when she gives him one of her withering looks, like last month when she handed him a manuscript and told him to come up with some copy, and he asked how many, thinking she wanted him to use the Xerox machine. (How was he supposed to know thatcopymeant the pitch for a book’s plot? Someone should have told him.)
He doesn’t complain, because his uncle has said that if Holden can stick it out a year, he will be promoted.
“Can’t climb too fast,” he said, patting his nephew’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t want it looking like I’m playing favorites.” He winked, like it was a joke, but Holden doesn’t get it.
Whyshouldn’the play favorites? Empires are built by keeping business in the family.
Besides, Holden is good at this! He likes books. Sometimes he even reads them for fun. It’s just, Ava keeps giving him the most boring work. He wants to do more; he wants to pick cover art, and present titles at launch, and take authors out for fancy lunches—he’s always been a people person, and he thinks his time would be better spent out there, as the future face of the company, instead of perched on a stool, pretending to take notes.
Ava eyes the manuscripts on her desk and the untouched salad. Then she sighs and scoots them both out of the way, lacing her hands in their wake to keep from fidgeting.
“What can I do for you?” she says.
Eleanor doesn’t beat around the bush; she simply comes right out and says the words.
“Arthur Fletch is dead.”
Holden’s head jerks up at the news, and Ava’s hand goes to her mouth, not fast, likeOh god!but slow, like...Oh god, the expression on her face halfway between aWhy me?and anI don’t have time for this. He scratches a tiny5in the page corner, and then the penny drops.
According to Uncle Ellis, Arthur FletchisMerriweather Press, at least as far as finances are concerned. His books had saved the house from going under once, back in the day, and ever since, they’d single-handedly kept Merriweather in the black.
If there’s no Fletch, there’s no publisher, and if there’s no publisher, what will happen to Holden? He’s not about to start over again. The thought alone is exhausting. He does have another uncle, in finance, but the prospect of that...
Ava’s voice cuts into his thoughts. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“As was I,” says Eleanor blandly, in a way that makes Holden wonder if she’s ever cried. About anything. Ever.
“When?” asks his boss.
“Yesterday.”
Ava shakes her head. “I’m amazed it hasn’t hit the press.”
Eleanor snorts. “It’s hardly luck. The groundskeeper rang me before the authorities, thank god, since I’m listed as Arthur’s next of kin.”
That strikes Holden as unbearably sad. A man of Arthur Fletch’s station, and his age, with no family of his own. Holden has family, of course—siblings, and parents, uncles and aunts and cousins—but he’ll be thirty in two months. By the time his father was thirty, he had a wife and two sons. Holden doesn’t even have a cat. How long has it been since he logged on to a dating app?
He should really make an effort.
“Of course,” Eleanor is saying, “I could barely understand a word the man said, but I got the gist of what happened.”
“What are you going to do?” asks Holden.
He isn’t supposed to talk in meetings, but he can’t help it; the question just comes spilling out. Arthur Fletch is the biggest name they have—arguably the biggest in theworld. Uncle Ellis has the covers blown up and hung as posters on his office wall.
Eleanor and Ava swivel toward Holden. He can’t read Eleanor’s expression, but Ava’s saysI should have kicked you out before this started. He smiles back in a way he hopes saysToo late now! We’re in this together, boss.
She gives him a follow-up look that saysYou are now sworn to secrecy; do not write anything down. He hasn’t actually been taking notes, just doodling his Ava Paulson Annoyance Scale numbers in the margin. But he now makes a display of laying his pencil down as his boss turns her attention back to Fletch’s agent.
“Tell me he finished the book,” she says slowly, a pleading note in her voice.
The book is The Book, apparently the last one Arthur Fletch will ever write. The one that everyone is waiting for. The one that is, at last count, eighteen months late. And the one that will keep Merriweather afloat for the foreseeable future, or at least until Ava finds the next Fletch, which she has been trying to do for as long as Holden has worked here. As if her whole job depends on it. Which, now that he thinks about it, maybe it does? Publishing is weird.
Eleanor shakes her head, and Ava groans, tucking her glasses up into her hair so she can dig her thumbs into her eyes.
“What are we going to do?” she mutters, repeating his question word for word, but for some reason no one glares ather.
“Well, the way I see it, we have two choices.” Eleanor spreads her hands, palms up, as if weighing the options. “We can let the press know that Arthur died without finishing his greatest work, the book that he and Merriweather have been hyping up for the last three and a half years, a book he was more than two years late on because even he was over his skis and couldn’t figure out how to stick the landing, and the publisher can eat tens of millions in sales, causing a cascade failure that will cost you your job before it goes on to bury the entire company.”
