“I’m—sorry,” I said. The reflex came up my throat before I could stop it. “I think you might —“
“Two vodka sodas,” she said to the bartender, without taking her eyes off me. “Tito’s, lots of lime. Thanks.” Then, to me, lower: “I’m not going to keep you long. I promise. I just—please don’t move for ninety seconds.”
The bartender slid two highballs across the bar. She pushed one toward my hand. I had not asked for it. I had not said yes. The glass was very cold and the condensation soaked immediately into the pad of my thumb.
“Off the record,” she said. “Completely off. I don’t have a recorder, my phone is in my bag, my bag is at coat check. Off the record, Rachel, you’re her ghostwriter. Aren’t you.”
The ballroom did not stop. The ballroom did its hum. Somewhere behind me a man laughed too loudly at his own anecdote and a woman saidoh stopin a voice that meantgo on.
Something moved behind my ribs. I felt it the way you feel a pilot light catch—a small, blue, useful flame, tucked away in a part of the apparatus you had forgotten was wired.Yes,it said, in a voice that was not exactly mine and was unmistakably mine.Run it. Run it tomorrow. Run it Wednesday morning before the school run, with my full name in the standfirst, with the byline of the actual book underneath it, run it and let the floor go.
I felt my mouth begin to open around the syllable.
Then ten years of muscle memory took the wheel of the car.
I laughed.
It was a warm laugh. I had practiced it. I had practiced it in the bathroom of my apartment with the door closed, because there were certain laughs a person needed to be able to deploy in a publishing context and the warm-deflecting-laugh was first among them. It came out of me now without my permission and it sounded, to my own ears, mostly normal.
“Margot doesn’t need a ghostwriter, Priya.” I tilted my head a quarter inch. I let my eyes go a little tired and a little fond, the way you might look when discussing a friend who had texted you at two in the morning about a recipe. “She’s a genius. A great writer. No, what she really needs is a little less interest in her private life, and less speculation about her writing.”
Priya did not move her elbow off the bar.
“Rachel.”
“I’m — sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong —“
“I’ve watched you mouth the next linethree timestonight,” she said, very quietly. “You know what’s coming half a sentence before she does because you wrote it. I would run that piece tomorrow. I would run it Thursday at the latest. I would put your name on the masthead of the homepage for a week.” She paused.“I’m not—I’m not trying to ambush you. I’m trying to give you a door.”
The pilot light flared. I felt it in my throat. I felt it behind my eyes. I felt the heat of it in the small palmed weight of the glass she had bought me.
I thought about my rent.
I thought about the non-compete.
I thought about the agent at the most powerful agency in New York who had known the truth for ten years and had been, in every measurable way, on the other side of it. I thought about the publisher’s CEO. I thought about the woman in cream three columns away, doing her favorite anecdote about agonizing at her desk for the third time this week, and the way she had once, in a bad moment in a hotel room in Toronto, said to me, perfectly calmly,no one would publish you under your own name anyway, sweetie, that’s just how this works.
I slid the vodka soda back across the bar.
“That’s really kind of you,” I said. The warmth in my voice was so practiced it was almost convincing. “Honestly. But it’s just—it’s a good book, Priya. She wrote a good book. I’m her assistant, not her ghostwriter.”
I gave her the half-inch smile. The drawer smile. The same one I had given the waiter.
I walked away before my face could do anything I would have to live with later.
Behind me, I heard her say, very softly, almost to herself: “Okay.”
Notokaylike she believed me.
Okaylike she was filing it.
Theground-floorladies’roomof the Crosby Street Hotel was empty but for me.
Black marble, polished brass, a long basin trough with three faucets, a single low Edison bulb above each, and on a small black shelf an Aesop Resurrection Aromatique pump bottle. There was a folded stack of cotton hand towels in a brass tray. No paper towels. There was a small, expensive arrangement of three dahlias the color of dried blood in a glass cylinder on the counter.
I went to the basin.
I turned the cold tap on and put my hands under it. I washed them with the Aesop. I washed them again. The room smelled of bergamot and mandarin. My ears were still ringing very faintly from the bar.
