Chapter 1
Rachel
Sheputthestressonhourinstead ofquiet, and something behind my back teeth went tight.
It was the fourth time in two paragraphs.The quiet HOUR.As though the noun were the surprise. As though the adjective hadn’t done all the work. I had written that sentence in March, on the kitchen linoleum, with my back against the dishwasher and a mug of cold peppermint tea going scummy beside my hip, and the rhythm had landed on the second syllable ofquietthe way a hand lands on the small of someone’s back.The QUI-et hour.Soft on the front, a held breath in the middle, the noun a kind of exhale.
But that is not how she read it. She read it like a weather report. A dull one.
I mouthed the right rhythm against the rim of my glass. Tap water with a wedge of lemon. Warm.
The ballroom on the second floor of the Crosby Street Hotel had been done up. Low, gold lamps on every fifth surface, whitepeonies past their best in tall clear vases, a hundred and twenty velvet chairs arranged in a polite arc, and standing room at the back for those of us who were here because we had been told to be. I had taken up my position behind the last row of chairs, against the wall, just to the left of a column.
At the lectern, in the warm pool of one of those gold lamps, stood the woman whose name was on the book.
The bookIhad written.
Cream Khaite suit, single-breasted, the trousers cropped a perfect inch above the ankle to show off the slim oxblood Manolo. Her grandmother’s freshwater pearls, three strands, knotted just below the throat. Lipstick to match the shoes, a satin finish, applied in the bathroom of her Brooklyn townhouse forty minutes before the car came. I knew because I had reminded her about the pearls in a text at four-fifteen—the freshwater, not the South Sea, the South Sea reads cold under the lamps—and she had sent back a thumbs-up emoji and the wordsyou are a saint.She had never, in nine years, used my name in a thank-you.
She turned the page. The audience leaned in by half an inch in unison, the way audiences always did at her readings, the way they had been leaning in since the first prize longlist when she was thirty-five.
“She had spent her thirties,” she read, “understanding that grief was a country with no embassy.”
She skipped the next line.
The next line was the whole point! That line had taken me three drafts. I wrote it weeping, which was embarrassing because writers weren’t meant to cry at their own words, especially ghostwriters!
How could she skip it?
I mouthed it, under my breath. “There was no appeal, no repatriation, only the slow administrative business of becoming someone who could survive there.”
She had skipped it.
She went straight fromembassyto the paragraph about the husband’s coat in the hallway, and the audience, of course, didn’t notice, because they had not read the book, they had only read the pieces of the book that her publicist had circled in advance galleys for them to quote at parties.
The omission landed under my sternum. A soft, specific pain.
I bit the inside of my left cheek. I had developed, somewhere in the last decade, the bad habit of biting it on the same molar every time, so that there was a permanent small ridge of scar tissue I could find with my tongue without thinking. I found it now. I held my tap water steady. I did not, under any circumstances, allow my face to do anything.
A waiter came past me on my left, threading the gap between the column and the wall with a tray of champagne flutes balanced flat. He was young, very thin, and he had got his tray half a degree off true, the kind of half-degree that became, in three more steps, an inevitability. I reached out without looking and put two fingers under the lip of the tray and steadied it.
He stopped. He looked at my fingers, and then at my face, and then—with real surprise— he mouthedthank you.
I gave him a half-inch of smile, the smile I kept in a drawer for emergencies, and lifted my fingers away.
When Margot finished, the applause was polite and restrained. It almost felt managed. It rose, hit a respectable peak, settled into a hum of compliments and clinking, and then the ballroom broke into archipelagoes. Little islands of three and four, drinks held at sternum height, heads tilted at the angle that meantgo on, I’m fascinated.
I made for the bar.
It was at the far wall, between two columns, and there was, by my reckoning, a column at the far end I could stand behind for the duration of the Q&A. I had identified it during the third paragraph. I had scoped the route. I was halfway across the carpet, my tap water emptied into a flower vase as I passed, when a young woman in a green velvet blazer stepped sideways into my path with the air of someone who had been timing me from across the room.
She was not tall. She had the kind of immaculate brows that took forty minutes a fortnight, and a small gold hoop in the helix of her left ear, and she was holding a glass of something clear with a lime in it.
“Rachel,” she said. “Hi.”
She knew my name? I rarely gave it.
“Priya Shah,” she said. “The Cut.Books.” She gave me a half-second of the brow and a half-second of the smile and then leaned her elbow on the bar in a way that closed the angle between us and made the conversation, in one small movement, private. “You don’t know me. I know you. Sort of.”
