Max and I need each other; I’m his most successful client by far, so it was no surprise that he’d been trying to contain his impatience as my deadline for submitting the first draft of this book had approached, delivering pep talks and confidence boosts via phone and email. Whenever I met him, I noticed his nails were bitten to the quick.
He came back on the line after just a moment. “I’m all yours.”
“It’s done.”
“You. Bloody. Miracle.” I heard his keyboard clatter as he checked his email. “Got it,” he said. There was a double-click as he opened the document. I imagined his eyes on the first page. Seconds passed. They felt like millennia.
“Max?”
Was he reading it? Was he gripped by the first few lines of my story, or had he scanned a few pages ahead and already felt the cold wrap of horror, the clutch of disappointment? My nerves were shredded enough that I could catastrophize a three-second pause.
“I’ll read it immediately,” he said. “Right away. You must put down the phone and go directly to celebrate. Do not pass go. Treat yourself. Have a bath, open a bottle of something delectable, tell that husband of yours to spoil you. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished it.”
At the very start of my career, before I had visited Max’s office, I used to try to imagine what it was like. I thought he was the type to have a leather chair well-stuffed enough to cradle his buttocks in comfort and a big desk, its surface large and polished so that it reflected light from the window it faced, which was probably ornate, containing leaded glass perhaps, or framed with elaborate stonework. That’s the sort of person Max seemed to me to be, in spite of his bitten nails: a puppet master. Only a puppet master would have a desk like that. I shared that thought with him once—we must have sunk a few cocktails, or I wouldn’t have been brave enough to say it out loud—and he half smiled, the expression aligning his asymmetric features.
“But you’re the one who has the power of life and death,” he replied. “Fictionally speaking,” he added after a beat.
True.
Beyond the chair, the desk, and the architectural features, I also imagined that Max’s office would be messy. Beautiful bones framing disorder was how I saw it and it was a very attractive image, to me.
I could find beauty in surprising things. You have to when violence reverberates through your work. I imagine every thriller writer will have their own way of handling this.
And, by the way, when I finally got to visit Max’s office in person, I found it to be nothing at all like what I had expected.
2.
After Max, Daniel, my husband, was always the second person to know when a book was finished, but I wanted a few moments to myself before I told him, moments when I didn’t feel watched, because I felt like people watched me all the time.
My first novel had been published four years ago and exploded onto the crime fiction scene (my publisher’s words, not mine) and high onto the bestseller list, where it stayed for months. And I was introduced to the concept of a book a year—something Max and my editors insisted on as being of paramount importance. Since then people had taken extreme notice of me. They watched what I was writing next and learned to deduce how quickly I was writing it. They watched me at events. Online. They watched like hawks. They bombarded me with messages on social media. I even had one fan, so far unidentified, who had located the house in which Dan and I rented our flat—a modest building in a graffiti- and coffee-shop-speckled neighborhood of Bristol—and left gifts on the doorstep.
The presents weren’t really for me, though. The heroine of my novels was Detective Sergeant Eliza Grey. She was based on my childhood imaginary friend. (Write what you know, they say, and I did.) People were mad for Eliza and those gifts were for her. They included her favorite condiment (cloudberry jam—discovered when she was working on a case in Oslo in book two) and her favorite beverage (a caffeinated energy drink). They made me uneasy, I won’t lie, however well-intentioned they were. I asked Dan to get rid of them. They felt like an intrusion into my private life.
It had profoundly shocked me, how suddenly and completely I had become public property after the publication of my first Eliza book. I hadn’t anticipated it, and had I known it would happen, I might never have sent my novel out to literary agents in the first place. The minute I’d signed over the rights to that book, nobody cared that my natural inclination was to curl around my privacy as tightly as a pill bug.
My moment of aloneness in the office was disappointing. Instead of basking in a sense of peaceful privacy (as opposed to the fraught loneliness that usually characterized my writing days), I could only see the mess.
I’d shut myself in that room for weeks to get the book finished, working on a crazy schedule of late nights and dawn starts, sometimes a frenzy of typing in the early hours, interspersed with snatches of fractured sleep. My circadian rhythm had been more tarantella than waltz and it showed. Even my printer looked tired, its trays askew, fallen paper on the floor beneath it: A courtesan whose client has just left. She dreams of marrying him. (But I mustn’t personify my printer. What will you think of me?) The floor and coffee table were hardly visible beneath a townscape created from piles of printed drafts and research materials.
“Should you really dump your stuff on an authentic Persian rug?” Dan had asked from the doorway a few weeks ago, when the surfaces could no longer contain all the clutter and it had begun to creep over the floor. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was more used to soft furnishings from IKEA, we both were, it’s all we had ever known, but we were at a point where Dan was getting accustomed to the finer things in life and growing into the new wealth my books had brought us more quickly than I was. He had the time to luxuriate in it and to figure out how to spend it; I didn’t. My writing schedule saw to that. I couldn’t afford to look up from my work and enjoy the change in our lives. I was barely aware it was happening.
It wasn’t just the fancy rug that took some getting used to. The cottage we were renting was also a reflection of what we found ourselves newly able to afford. The weekly rate had seemed eye-watering to me when Dan first proposed the idea, an insult to my natural inclination to be economical and unflashy, but Dan had insisted that we needed to be here.
“You can’t do the final push on this book in the flat,” he’d said with an irritating air of authority, honed for years on the subjects of writing and the creative process, but recently applied more frequently to our domestic life. “It’s too claustrophobic. We’ll be on top of each other.”
He was right, and I knew it, but I loved writing in our cozy one-bed flat with its views of the little row of shops opposite, and the smells from the bakery wafting across the street every morning. And I felt superstitious. I’d written all my books so far in that flat. What if a change of routine affected my writing? What if it signaled that I had gotten above myself? Everyone knows that tall poppies are the first to be decapitated.
But even as those anxieties raised a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, I knew I had to take Dan’s wishes carefully into consideration because he worked full-time for me now, and it made the issue of who had the power in our household a delicate one. I tried to think of how to frame my objections to renting the cottage in a way that wouldn’t upset him, but I got tongue-tied. Words flow for me when I’m writing, but they can stick in my throat like a hairball when I have to speak up for myself.