My computer finishes its startup , and I open my email. There is one from Charlotte Blanton, and it takes my mind a moment to place the name. Charlotte. My doorbell-ringing, husband-inquiring, intruder. I click on her email with the heavy finger of the doomed. Any fantasies of long-lost sisterhood fly out the window as soon as it opens. It is short and cuts to the point, which I appreciate. Everything else about it, I hate.
Helena,
I am a journalist for the New York Post, and am writing an article on your husband. I have some questions to ask you, and some information to share. Please call me.
Charlotte Blanton
Investigative Journalist, New York Post
I’ve waited four years for something like this. For someone to pull a loose thread, a gentle tug that turns into more, everything unraveling until our secrets are bare to the world. This could turn into a media shitstorm. This could be the biggest story of the year, amplified by my pending death. I can see the headlines now. I can see the papers flying off the shelves, my cul-de-sac filled with news vans and microphones.
I can’t let her do this. I can’t let Charlotte Blanton ruin everything when I am finally ready to tell the story for myself.
I carefully drag her email into the SPAM folder, then block her as a contact. There. Done. Kate’s phone rings, and she picks it up, her eyes connecting with mine.
“It’s Ron Pilar.”
“No.” I press my fingers against my forehead, feeling nauseous, the condition either caused by the recent pill or the words that just tumbled out of Kate’s dark red lips. “No way.” It’s one thing for me to reach out to Marka Vantly with a business proposition. It’s another for us to meet, face-to-face, which is what she wants.
“We aren’t exactly negotiating from a place of power,” Kate says carefully, perched on the office couch. We moved upstairs after the call, me wanting to get to my calendar, my files, and out of that damn kitchen. She’s wearing the same blouse, and it’s a reminder that it’s the same day as when I walked to the mailbox and watched her car pull in. It feels like a week has passed, her presence already turned from stranger to… not friend, but something in between the two. Thirty minutes ago, she walked straight to the bathroom without asking where it was. During my nap, she must have wandered around the house, discovering the empty rooms, the occasional bits of habitation. Did she try to open the door to the media room? Probably. No doubt she found Bethany’s room, my bed there. From the change in her eyes, the softening in her speech, the fragile way she’s handling me—she thinks she knows. Maybe, before she woke me, she did an Internet search on my married name. Maybe she knows about everything, or thinks she does.
She follows my eyes, looking down at her blouse, and smooths it self-consciously. “They said Marka will come here. You won’t have to travel.”
“No,” I snap, my irritation rising, as much over her invasion as Marka’s. “I’ll outline everything, and we can communicate through email.” Anything to prevent Marka Freakin’ Vantly’s sky-high stilettos clipping across my floor, her eyes on my empty house, on my sweatpants and greasy hair, a stupid smirk playing across her face as she taps those perfect fingernails against her sexy lips. Screw that.
“She hasn’t agreed to anything; she just wants to talk.”
Marka doesn’t want to talk. She wants to ask questions, to peel back the layers of my soul and understand why, after a decade of insults, I chose her to write this story. She’ll want to know about the ridiculously short timeline and my motivations. She’ll want to know about the story and why it is so important—my next inhale is a struggle, panic tightening its grip around my heart. “No.” I manage. “I can’t.”
“Are you intimidated by her?” Oh, the bitter irony, my earlier question so easily thrown back in my face. It is manipulative, same as it had been with me, my backbone straightening despite my knowledge of her motives.
“Of course not,” I snap. “She’s just not worth my time.” I spin slowly in my chair, my eyes moving over the corkboard, focusing on the worn piece of paper, the blurb, stuck prominently in the center of the board. If Kate looked hard enough, she’d see it. If she thought hard enough, she’d figure things out.
“We could get a different author,” Kate offers. “Maybe Vera Wilson or Kennedy—”
“No.” I say, my eyes stuck on the opening line of the blurb. If you lie enough times, no one believes your truth.
“It doesn’t have to be Marka,” Kate persists. “I could try—”
“No,” I repeat, my words stronger. Vera Wilson or Kennedy Blake or Christina Hendlake… they are all the same. Words on pages. Well-written, their craft holds no room for criticism. But it also holds no life. This story… my last story… it needs life. It needs a soul. It needs to be powerful enough, and I don’t know if even I can do it justice. I need the next best thing, and with guidance, maybe Marka can be trained. Maybe, with a heavy hand of direction, she can pull it off in time. She writes quickly, I know that much. I’ll do the outline, she can write her ass off, and I can heavily edit it. Steer her onto better ground when she goes astray. It can be done. It has to be done.
“Helena?” Kate has been talking, her last few sentences lost in the tangle of my thoughts, and I turn to her, raising an eyebrow. “Do you want me to call it off with Marka’s people?”
“No,” I grumble. “Let me email her first.”
If you lie enough times, no one believes your truth. It is a good intro. I only wish it wasn’t so true.
My beautifully worded email to Marka, one where I refrain from any insults or profanity, goes unanswered, a status that infuriates me. I hold firm for a full day, and then crack, giving Kate permission to call her agent and agree to the meeting. I’ve spent almost a decade battling the author. Now, with the pressure of my deadline, I give up.
I don’t know why she’s insistent on coming here. To make things worse, I can feel Kate’s certainty that Marka won’t agree to the terms. It’s a legitimate possibility, one that I am afraid to consider. Hell, if Marka had reached out six months ago with a similar request, I’d have laughed at her. I would have taken perverse pleasure in turning her down, my email maliciously worded with the full intent to stab her when she was down. I would have been the biggest bitch on the planet about it.
And that’s the main reason I’d initially refused her request for a face-to-face. The most likely scenario is that she is flying here for no reason other to embarrass me to my face. She will curl up that pouty mouth and laugh at my book proposition, at my timeline, and at my life. She will judge my uneven features and stringy hair. She will be just like the popular girls from seventh grade, only this time I will care, it will matter.
I need her.
But I’m also terrified of her.
With less than twenty-four hours until our meeting, I feel a wave of nausea and stumble for a chair.
When he meets my mother, it’s like butter on hot toast, a melding of souls—an effortless union that I am merely a spectator to. I feel betrayed, seeing her laugh at his jokes, seeing him hold the door open for her, and his compliment on her work.
I prepared him for her stiff disapproval, for her judgmental stares, for her psychoanalysis. I didn’t prepare myself for them to get along, for my mother to beam at me, for the two of them to unite.
Later, it will be war—but on that cool Sunday afternoon, it is just irritating. I—
The doorbell rings, and my fingers pause above the keyboard, the paragraph half-finished on the screen before me. My eyes move to the clock, worried for a moment that I have lost track of time, and that Marka is already here. But it is a quarter ‘til four, fifteen minutes before our appointment. I can’t picture Marka as an early arrival. If anything, I expect her to be fashionably late.
The doorbell rings a second time and I stand from the desk, saving my work and moving to the door, taking the steps as quickly as I can manage, suddenly filled with an urgent need to get to the door before a third chime of the bell.
I make it to the door and jerk it open, caught off guard by the man who stands there. I immediately toss the idea that he is Ron Pilar, Marka’s agent. This man, his face ruddy, hair wild, clothes crumpled—is not an agent, and is certainly not from New York. There isn’t a polished bone inside his loose khaki shirt, one with an unnecessary number of pockets, a fish stitched onto the front breast. No salesmanship in his comfortable stance, one hand tucked in a pocket, the other lifting from the doorbell in greeting. I watch his hand move, noting the calluses on the palm, the cracks in the skin, the gold band on his left ring finger. If I look closely, there’ll probably be dirt under his nails. I hope he isn’t the driver that Kate found, showing up a day early. There’s no way I’m letting a man like this take me anywhere.