Angry at the ones who hurt you.
Angry at the world.
And angry people fight.
Now she was potentially being handed the reins to what she’d been told was a talented but stubborn old horse. So she wasn’t surprised when Arthur insisted on meeting her first. An unofficial vetting.
Most authors wouldn’t have had the power to strike an editor from the list, but Arthur Fletch wasn’t most authors, and by then he was making Merriweather enough money that they’d have given him his pick. Ava felt the pressure as she made her way uptown, the weight of the moment, one when her career would either surge forward or stall out. Depending on the humor of a middle-aged white man from the Midwest.
There was an awkward moment when she first arrived.
It had been a terrible morning, cold in a way only the city seemed to get, the buildings magnifying the chill. She’d been rained on, then splashed by a passing bus, and she was soaked to the skin by the time she strode up to the doors of the private club he’d chosen. One of those members-only places modeled on the good old days when men could drink and smoke and read the paper cocooned by wealth and safe from the intrusion of thefairer sex. These days the club admitted women, but the man at the door looked at Ava like she must be lost.
“Can I help you?” he sneered, blocking the entrance. She explained, as calmly as she could, that she was meeting someone. His gaze scraped over her like a dull blade. “Are you quite sure?” he said, and Ava felt her face go hot, a torrent of words rising like bile up her throat. She knew she shouldn’t besurprised. She’d lived in this body for thirty-two years; she’d seen and heard and felt horrible things; but she still felt the furious tears pricking her eyes.
If this was the kind of place where Arthur Fletch felt at home, then she should quit right now.
“Is there a problem?” came a low voice, edges rough.
She turned and saw him coming up the steps. Arthur wasn’t a particularly large man, but he carried himself like one, coat billowing around him, gray hair curling at his temples (this was just before the introduction of the red wide-brimmed hat).
“You must be Ava,” he said, eyeing her with curiosity but also warmth.
“Mr. Fletch!” said the man at the door. “She didn’t tell me she was withyou.”
“You didn’t ask,” Ava said through gritted teeth.
“Please,” the man continued, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Come in. Both of you.”
He pulled open the door as he spoke, revealing a hall of warm, dark wood, smelling of coffee and leather. Yet Ava felt physically repelled. And Arthur must have been in earshot longer than she realized, because he gave the man at the door the same withering look the man had leveled at Ava.
“You know,” he said, turning toward her, “I’ve lost my taste for this place. Would you mind terribly if we went somewhere else?”
Her whole body loosened in relief. But she only smiled. “Of course, Arthur.”
The man at the door visibly reddened, his mouth opening and closing like a fish as they walked away.
They’d spent the next hour trading stories over coffee at a nearby diner. And by the time she got back to her apartment, there was an email in her inbox. Attached to it was Arthur Fletch’s newest manuscript. The first in a series about a woman named Julia Petrarch. The start of a new chapter for both of them.
It wasn’t all sunshine and flowers, of course.
Arthur was a difficult man, stubborn to the point of intransigence when it came to his work, but Ava was an excellent editor, and she convinced him, word by word and scene by scene and year by year, that she was there to make it better. To make sure his ideas—his brilliant, original ideas—made it from his mind onto the page.
And he was sharp. He never forgot a plot device he’d used, or a piece of dialogue he’d given to a character. He held on to details, on and off the page. Ava once told him, in passing, that she’d lovedThe Velveteen Rabbitas a child, worn the pages thin from constant turning, and nearly a year later he handed her a first edition. Not for Christmas, or her birthday. Simply because he saw it and remembered.
He could be that kind, and then, that maddening, when it came to covers, or type treatments. He would throw a fit if a copyeditor changed an em dash to a semicolon or, god forbid, questioned the potency of a line.
And then there were the dark spots.
The patches of time where she literally couldn’t get him to answer an email or a phone call or a text. The dark spots had gotten longer in recent years. Stretching from days, to weeks, and then—
“He lived alone,” Eleanor is saying, all business again, “save for the groundskeeper and a handful of staff, all of whom have been dismissed.”
“You don’t think they’ll go public?”
The agent looks at her, affronted. “Give me some credit,” she says. “Papers were signed. And they were all well compensated. By the time the authors arrive, the island will be empty. As for the house itself...”
As Eleanor delves into the state of the building, and the necessary preparations, Ava Paulson wonders how she got here.
