“Fuck that,” Huong said. “If he read the book, he knows he’s doing a hit job.”
The sweat on Merritt’s neck and back was immediate.
“What? Have you read the book?”
“Yes,” Huong said flatly, as if it were obvious.
“Is it awful?”
“The book or the grad student part?”
“Both.”
Huong exhaled, then looked at the fire before finally forcing her eyes back to meet Merritt’s.
“The book is unfortunately good. And it’s not nice. The character, Isabel, she becomes pretty unsympathetic. And by the end, it’s clear that she’s been fooling everyone about her talents and that she’s actually more or less insubstantial as a writer. And there are some gratuitous descriptions of her boobs and ass and ‘curvy hips’ and comparatively few mentions of the professor’s presumably flabby old-man body.”
Merritt clenched the armrests while Huong continued.
“And if Ian Hoult knows that, then he knows that revealing the source material isn’t going to do that person any favors.”
“But...” Merritt had to force herself to say it. “Does she seem... like me? Is it obvious?”
Huong actually closed her eyes to think. She hesitated.
“Be honest,” Merritt urged.
Huong sighed. “Yeah, a little. She looks like you, and there are elements of the plot that sound like the story you just told. She approaches him at a party. On one of their trips to London, the professor tells her she’d make a great protagonist for his next novel. At the end, she drops out and moves home with her parents.”
For the first time in their acquaintance, Huong offered her a look of pained sympathy. Merritt hardly noticed.
“Fuck,” she said again.
Diana nodded. “Fuckhim.”
“Diana!”
Even Huong laughed at that. The older woman shrugged again.
“Fuck them both. Pigs.”
“If Ian comes around here again,” Huong said, “we’ll just lay him out. It wouldn’t be hard to push a bookshelf onto him.”
“Don’t,” Merritt said, managing to laugh. “Then he’d just know he was on to something.”
The bell above the door rang, and all three women’s heads whipped around to see Moishe arriving for his shift.
“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I know a coven meeting when I see one.”
He doffed his messenger cap and moved quickly into the break room.
That meant Merritt’s shift was over, and anyway, the spell was broken. The three women stood, and Diana briefly put a hand on Merritt’s shoulder.
“Maybe nothing will come of it.”
“Maybe,” Merritt said, nodding her thanks with a small, hollow smile.
Well, this was a new experience. Whit’s phone was ringing. The name on his screen saidjoan eaton—work. Yet Whit was not panicking. In fact, he wasexcited.
