I looked down at the succulent, all but forgotten in my lap as my panic banged on the box in my head, lock rattling, to get free. I—I thought I hated this man, and if I stayed in this office any longer, I was going to either throw this cactus at him or cry.
Maybe both.
I jerked to my feet and put the succulent on the edge of the desk. “It’s a gift.”
Then I gathered my satchel and turned on my heels and left Falcon House Publishers without another word. I held myself together until I stumbled out of the revolving door of the building and into the brisk April day, and let myself crumble.
I took a deep breath—and screamed an obscenity into the perfectly blue afternoon sky, startling a flock of pigeons from the side of the building.
I needed a drink.
No, I needed abook.A murder-thriller. Hannibal. Lizzie Borden—anything would do.
Maybe I needed both.
No,definitelyboth.
2
The Breakup
IT WASN’T THATIcouldn’tfinish the book.
I just didn’t know how.
It’d been a year since The Breakup—everyone has at least one in their lives. You know the one, right? The kind of breakup from a love you thought would last your entire lifetime, only to find your heart ripped out with a spork by your former lover and placed on a silver platter with FUCK YOU written in ketchup. It’d been a year since I’d hauled my luggage out into the rain on that shitty April evening and never looked back. That’s not the part I regretted. I willneverregret ending things with him.
I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.
The time had crawled by after that. At first, I had tried to get up every day and sit down on the couch with my laptop and write, but I couldn’t. I mean, Icould—but every word felt like pulling teeth, and every one of those words I deleted a day later.
It was like one day I knew how to write; I knew the scenes, I knew the meet-cutes and the swoony moments, exactly how the hero tasted when my heroine kissed him... and then the next day, it was all gone. Iced over in a blizzard, and I didn’t know how to thaw out the words.
I couldn’t remember when I stopped opening up the Word document, when I stopped trying to look for a romance between the lines. But I did, and now I was here between a rock called despair and a hard place named Benji Andor.
Absently, I brushed my fingers along the spines of the books at McNally Jackson,a bookstore nestled in the thick of Nolita. I followed the rows of titles and last names around to the next aisle—romance—and quickly moved on to sci-fi and fantasy. If I didn’t look at them, they didn’t exist.
I never imagined being a ghostwriter. Hell, when I first got my agent and sold my first book, I thought I’d be invited to literary panels and I thought I’d go to book events, and I thought I had finally found the door to the stairs that would take me up and up and up into my forever career. But the door closed as quickly as it opened, and sent an email saying, “We regret to inform you... ,” as though my book flopping wasmyfault. As though me, a girl with a nonexistent social media following, less money, and almost no connections, was responsible for the fate of a book published by a multimillion-dollar company with every resource and connection available to it.
Maybe itwasmy fault.
Maybe I hadn’t done enough.
And anyway, I was here now, writing for a romance author I’d only ever met once, and I was about to screw that up, too, if I couldn’t finish the damn book. I knew the characters—Amelia, a smart-talking barista with dreams of being a music journalist, andJackson, a stability-shirking guitarist disgraced from the limelight—trapped together on vacation on a small Scottish isle when their Airbnb host accidentally double-books the property. The isle is magical, and the romance is as electrifying as the storms that roll in from the Atlantic. But then she finds out that he lied to her about his past, and she lied tohim, because while the booking was indeed happenstance, she decided to use it to try to win over an editor atRolling Stone.
And I guessed the plot hit too close to home. How could two people reconcile and trust each other when they fell in love with the lies the other person told them?
Where did you go from there?
Last time I tried to write that scene—the reconciliation one, the one where they face each other in a cold Scottish storm and pour their hearts out to try and repair their damage—lightning struck Jackson dead.
Which would’ve been great if I ghostwrote revenge fantasies. Which I didn’t.
I began to nose through the used J. D. Robb section when my phone started to vibrate in my satchel. I dug it out, praying it wasn’t Ann Nichols’s agent, Molly.
It wasn’t.
“Great timing,” I said, answering the phone. “I have a situation.”