“No pressure.”
He stares at the floor. I put the Rubik’s Cube back on his dresser. We stand in silence for an excruciating moment. “Have you been working on anything?”
“No time.” He shakes his head.
“Yeah. Of course.” I want him to say something—anything—to make this less awkward, but he leaves it up to me to bail us out. “I should go.”
“Okay.”
“Well, see you around, I guess.”
He nods. “Right.”
“Right.” I place my hand on the doorknob.
“Hey, Mars?”
I turn back hopefully. “Yeah?”
“Congratulations.”
Back at thehouse, Amber and Patrick are watching a movie on the couch. “I was about to send out a search warrant,” she says.
“Am I not allowed to leave the house?”
“You usually don’t,” she counters. “And you look spooked. What happened?”
I fill them in on the request from the agent—stopping every other sentence to explain to Patrick how publishing works. Amber shrieks in excitement and declares that we need to celebrate immediately. But because she’s starting her OB rotation in the morning and can’t stay up late or get drunk, she sends Patrick out to pick up fruit slushies from Eegee’s. When he leaves, she corners me in the kitchen.
“What are you going to tell West?”
“About what?” I spear a leftover meatball with a fork.
“If the book gets published?”
“That’syearsaway.”
She looks at me like I’m a very simple idiot. “What if he wants to read it?”
“He does. I sent it to him tonight.”
Her eyes widen. “You’re pulling off the Band-Aid. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I pause with the meatball halfway to my lips. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Amber blinks at me. “Fox is West.”
“What?”
“Fox Caldwell is West Emerson. They’re the same guy.”
“Amber.” I say her name likeshe’sthe very simple idiot. “Fox is immortal. But most importantly…he’s not real.”
“Black hair. Long eyelashes. Jacked-up nose. Those freaky multicolored eyes. The fidgeting. How he’s tall, tall, tall. So damn tall, it’s mentioned on every other page.” She ticks the similarities off on her fingers as icy dread slithers up my spine. “His obsession with loyalty. His protectiveness over his sister. The way his fingers are smudged with charcoal—”
My fork falls to the floor. Marinara sauce splatters like blood on the tile. “Oh no. No, no, no,no.”
“You really didn’t do it on purpose?”
