“If you make me a cup of tea, I’ll have to kill you,” I said, “or at the very least, divorce you. Let’s open a bottle of something very cold and very good.”
Dan went to find champagne. We’d brought some with us. The good stuff. Nothing fake. Another upgrade. I didn’t dare admit to him that I disliked the way champagne sent a metallic sparkle up my nose when I drank it, and how a second glass of it sometimes made me cry, and that part of me missed the cheap alcohol we used to enjoy.
My spirits dipped a little after Dan left the room, because it was impossible to forget the secret I’d been keeping about the new book, and I felt the corners of my mouth droop. When I heard him coming back, I made the effort to plaster that smile back on, though. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. First we needed our celebration.
I watched as he filled our glasses. The champagne was the palest, most fragile gold. One of the windows was cracked open, and I could hear the ocean and see the sun creeping behind the edge of the barn, a watery orb, spilling yellow light. Dan placed a bowl of roasted nuts on the table, homemade, my favorite. He kissed me with dry lips and picked up his drink.
“Congratulations,” he said. I registered the lovely sparkle in his eye that I hadn’t seen for a while, and that made me melt a little, and the gentle tilt of his glass toward mine, but I also had to swallow my nerves because he was giving me a cue and I knew what I should say. I should toast Detective Sergeant Eliza Grey.
I wrote about the Eliza Grey toast for a Sunday newspaper once, describing how Dan and I made it whenever the first draft of a new Eliza book was complete. Fans read the interview and picked up on our little ritual, sending me photographs of themselves raising a glass once they’d finished reading the latest Eliza Grey novel. It became a thing on bookish social media. It had its own hashtag: #CheersEliza.
I couldn’t bring myself to say the words Dan was expecting, though, because it would have been tantamount to a lie after I’d effectively removed Eliza from this book completely by incapacitating her. I’ll spare you the details. No spoilers. But that was my secret, the reason anxiety was pinching even as I was supposed to be celebrating.
“Why did you do this?” Eliza had whispered when it happened. I found it hard to get used to the way her voice had been altered by her injuries. It made me feel horribly guilty. Nobody wants to hurt their childhood friend. The problem was, she’d become something more disruptive.
When I had decided to base the character of Detective Sergeant Eliza Grey on her, five years ago, Eliza had been a voice in my head, my friend, confidante, and protector. It had been amazing to bring her to life on the page. But she had evolved, somehow becoming more than words. It was as if she had been formed from clay and life breathed into her. When I was writing my third novel, she stepped right out of the pages and into my life.
“I see you everywhere,” I told her. “I can’t handle it.”
At first it had been manageable, but it had begun to happen more and more frequently, until Dan had noticed me being distracted by her. He’d asked awkward questions, accused me of behaving strangely. I didn’t know how to explain.
“I’ll disappear whenever you want me to,” Eliza had pleaded, “you just have to say,” but we both knew that wasn’t true. She was too much of a maverick and it had been far too long since I’d had her under control. “I don’t want to be out of the books. Please don’t do it.”
She’d sounded desperate but I’d ignored her plea. It wasn’t easy, because it hurt me to hurt her, but it was the way it had to be. Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. And it had worked. Eliza hadn’t appeared to me in person since I’d written the scene that took her out of the book. I still heard her voice, but that was fine, I was used to it. I couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case.
Dan, left hanging, his glass in midair, confusion creasing his forehead, decided to speak for me, though it wasn’t his place to, not really, but he said it anyway: “Cheers, Eliza!”
He clinked his glass against mine and I smiled and swallowed my discomfort along with the champagne. How was I going to explain to him what I’d done when I could never tell him the truth about her, because he’d never understand?
After all, what kind of person creates a character who walks right out of their books and into their life?
He would think I’d lost my mind.
4.
Dan didn’t notice my discomfort. In his haste to offer me a refill, he knocked over the bowl of nuts, but I’d almost emptied it. He was buzzing.
A completed first draft of the book didn’t just mean a measure of freedom for us both, it also meant delivery payments. Not right away—the book would have to be dragged through edits and fully finished for that—but soon. Dan kept spreadsheets tracking my income. The blinking cursor he stared at on a regular basis was the one sitting in the Excel box where he would enter my delivery payment when it landed. He loved to do that.
We took our drinks outside and walked to the end of the garden to watch the sun sink toward the ocean. Waves pounded the rocks mercilessly. The surface of the ocean was a thousand shades of gray and silver, the spray foamy and angry against rocks slicked oily black, their silhouettes slicing the surface of the water after every push and pull of the tide.
I shivered from the cold and leaned into the warmth of Dan’s body. It was a balm for my sore muscles and my tired mind, for my nerves. The moment felt incredibly intimate to me after the months I’d spent in the company of fictional people.
Neither of us spoke. Even if we had, the salty wind would have whipped our words away. We sipped our drinks, and I cried after a while. The second glass of fizz guaranteed it, and the creeping feeling of dread that wouldn’t go away.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how Max felt, or would feel, when he read the scene in my new book that put Eliza out of action. How shocked would he be? How fast would he scroll frantically on through the pages, imagining money slipping through his fingers as easily as sand, hoping against hope that I had pulled off some kind of novelistic sleight of hand and Eliza would reappear within pages to continue her domination of the market?
I knew he’d be devastated initially, there was no point kidding myself. The question was whether that would abate when he read the rest of the book. My stomach curled. Hold your nerve, I told myself, this book is much better than all your others. It’s a fresh start for you. But my courage was liquefying.
Dan didn’t notice I was upset. He had his eyes fixed on the horizon, too. He would have put my tears down to exhaustion, anyway; it wouldn’t be the first time I’d wept at the end of a book. Each one found its own special way to drain me.
The wind dried my teardrops as quickly as they arrived and after a while, I laughed to myself, and thought, what was the point of them, really? What was done was done. I should be confident.
I took a bath when we got back inside. Dan went back to the kitchen to finish off dinner. He was still keyed up, energy humming off him. I thought he was happy that the book was finished and that we could finally spend some time together. I got into the claw-footed tub and basked in steaming water so bubbly that it beautifully obscured my white jelly flesh and I emptied my brain by speculating about how much the fancy taps had cost.