Prologue
Katie
July, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
The high afternoon sun glinted off the ocean. The sky, blue. The air, thick. The seagulls, raucous. Between Tyler and me, as usual, was a foot of easy distance—plus a few pens and pencils and two bags of stale salt-and-vinegar chips.
I closed my notebook and, for a moment, glanced over at him. At the line of his jaw, the brim of his ball cap, the way the tendons in his forearm tightened when he scribbled in his journal. It was black, of course—and college-lined.
“You good?” he said. “You stuck on that chapter again?”
“No, I’m fine, I...” I sifted a few fingers through the hot, grainy sand. “I just really like doing this. That’s all.”
“Writing?”
“Yeah. No. Well, yes, but it’s more than that.” I bit down on my bottom lip. “I really like doing this ... well, with you.”
He threw a chip at me. “Okay, weirdo. Get back to work.”
I threw the chip right back. “I’m not a weirdo! I’m just saying it’s nice! Can’t I just say something’s nice if I think it’s nice? Is that against your tortured boy code or something?”
He chuckled, shaking his head as he cracked open his soda. Both of us, now, were looking straight out toward the horizon. Hetook a long sip from his can, then another. We must have sat there for a whole minute, completely silent. When he finally spoke, he didn’t turn to me.
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine?Fine, what?”
“Fine, it’s nice, okay? You’re right. This is nice. This is nice, and I like doing it. Are you happy? Is that what you wanted, Katie?”
I grinned, then clicked my pen twice and—eyes crinkling—got back to my notebook. Got back to writing my story. But when he did the same, I swear, he shifted just a bit so that we were ten inches apart instead of twelve. So that when he reached for his next chip, when he turned to me a little more to tell me all about the very important scene he’d just drafted, his knee finally, finally grazed mine.
1
Katie
Present Day
New York City
“Still no sign of her?” Lola asked, sliding me a second cold brew. Through the café’s window, the afternoon sun beamed, warm and bright.
I shook my head, then sat back down at my usual table and refreshed my email for the thousandth time. Abigail Stephens, my new writing partner, was supposed to have been here an hour ago, at one o’clock on the dot. But she was not here, and she was not picking up her phone, answering my emails, or responding to any of the fifty very chill, emoji-drenched messages I’d sent to the half-dozen socials we both maintained.
“I’m sure she’ll show up soon,” I said, as if the café wasn’t completely deserted. As if it wasn’t just me and Lola, my rose gold laptop, and my six different feather pens in here. As if it wasn’t the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and we weren’t smack-dab in the middle of the Upper East Side. “She’s probably just stuck on the train or something.”
Lola shrugged, wiping down the counter as I pressed my laptop’s enter key yet again. This time, it actually worked. There was an email from Selma, Meredith’s agent.
Katie,
Sorry this is so last minute. Apparently, Abigail just got a job offer from HBO, and I’m afraid she’s already on a flight to LA. Unfortunately, all the other writers I’d shortlisted to help you with this next book had other projects lined up. I was able to find someone local, though—a literary fiction author whose manuscript came to my attention recently.
I know he’s not a romance writer, but he’s eager, went to an Ivy, has published a few high-profile short stories, and wrote a very strong book that, despite being about nothing, I might soon offer to represent. A few days of reading within the genre, and maybe a crash course in commercial story structure, and he’ll be as good as anyone. I promise.
Sorry again for the last-minute change of plans, but we’ve got no time to waste. I told him where to find you.
Great. Exactly what I needed, some fancy-pants pseudo-novelist who had no clue what he was doing. Of course, this was part of the deal, ghostwriting for Meredith Bradford—a job that, if we’re being completely honest, was both an absolute blessing and a total shit show. I’d never actually met Meredith, but since graduating from college three years ago, I’d penned six books under her name, and every project had come with its own set of challenges: Rapidly narrowing deadlines. A constantly swirling rumor mill about Meredith’s whereabouts. An entire year during which everything I’d written was, per her publisher’s request, pretty muchOregon Trailfan fiction. And now, thanks to a fifty-thousand-word dud left unfinished by another contractor, Selma needed this next manuscript completed in half the time, hence the whole partner thing.
