I clutched my elbows as he began to reply. “If you’re wondering,” he said, “why I never reached out. If you’re wondering why I disappeared, why I—”
“I don’t wonder about you, Tyler. I don’t think about you at all. Not every girl on this planet sits around and wonders about you. It’s been eight fucking years. I’m an adult, and I have a life now. A life I actually like. This job matters to me. And I’d appreciate it if you’d email Selma, bow out, and let me have this one good thing.”
“Okay,” he said.
“O-okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, and just like that, he closed his laptop, thanked Lola for the coffee, and was gone. Before the door swung shut behind him, he muttered something. I was lightheaded and dehydrated, and everything was still upside down and strobing and sour, and I wasn’t sure what he’d said or why he’d said it or whether he’d meant for anyone else to hear it, but it didn’t matter anyway, because all I’d picked up was a single word.
All I picked up was:
You.
4
Tyler
I called Selma that afternoon, sweat still dripping down my neck, blood still caked onto my cracked-raw, chalk-covered knuckles. I was home now, but I’d spent the past four hours at my gym across town, pummeling the shit out of a punching bag, trying to breathe. Trying to turn the past eleven years—the past twenty-four hours—inside out. Trying to pretend I’d never opened that email, stepped foot in that coffee shop, or seen that look on Katie’s face.
“You’re not quitting,” Selma said.
“What?” I’d been pacing around my shoebox of a bedroom—exactly what you’re picturing: a twin-size mess with a cluttered desk and paper-thin, probably unpermitted walls—but with that, I came to a halt. A door swung open on her end of the line. A whoosh of air. Wind chimes. Rustling.
“You’re not quitting,” she said again. Something clucked in the background. A chicken? A rooster? “You signed a contract. It’s binding. I have a deadline.”
“I understand. But it’s complicated. It’s—”
Selma cursed then. Not at me, not directly, anyway. There was more clucking, more profanity. A moment later, she exhaled. “Do you know,” she said, “how many copies of a new Meredith Bradford novel sell on publication day?”
“No, I—”
“A million,” she said. “A whole goddamn million.”
I nodded but said nothing. She could not see me, and it did not matter. It was, somehow, an audible nod.
“Do you know how I get paid, Tyler?”
Another nod. Literary agents took a standard 15 percent cut of whatever their clients brought in. In other words, they only made money when their talent made money.
“I do not,” she said, “have the luxury of finding Katie anyone else. I have a publisher breathing down my neck. I have fourteen weeks to get them a clean manuscript. I’ve got projects going to auction. I’ve got a partner who bought a hundred-acre working ranch that’s costing me an arm and a leg. I’ve got three authors in breach of contract and two others whose manuscripts I promised to have read yesterday. I need you to make my life the slightest bit less impossible. I need you and Katie to write this book.”
I did not say what I was thinking: that there must have been thousands of more qualified authors who could spin together a solid romance in a month or two, tops. I did not say anything. I didn’t get a chance to. Because Selma was still talking.
“I thought you wanted this, Tyler. I thought you were serious about your career.”
“I... I am.”
“Are you? Because publishing is a small world. And I wouldn’t want your reputation to take another hit. I wouldn’t want—”
“No, no. I’m serious. I’m so serious.” Through the stretch of afternoon light sneaking between the iron bars of my barely there, garden-level window was today’s freeze-frame: Katie’s puffed-up chest, at war with her fallen face. Her voice, firm but failing, and so, so clear:Go, quit, leave. If she just would’ve listened. If she just would’ve let me explain. “I can do this. I swear, I can do this.”
Selma sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Write me this book, and I’ll take yours back to market. Just clean it up, all right? It’s a little too weird. Make it thirty percent less disorienting and fifty pages shorter, and I’ll find a way to sell it.”
“You will? You mean it?”
She was quiet for a moment. Another chicken clucked.
“I mean it,” she said. “Do me this favor, and I’ll sell your book.”
