Clare
Two years before her death
It was all a show, big talk, playing the part. Once Clare had convinced Simon she wouldn’t go online and start a public grudge match with Donna Mehan, she was free to retreat to the solitude and safety of her study. With only her little Charlie to bear witness, she locked her door, took a deep breath, and turned off her Clare Collins act.
She could be fun, for short periods of time. She could also be useful—in television interviews, for example—but largely, being Clare Collins was exhausting.
With the internet now functioning again, Clare sat at her desk and pulled up the New York Times to read for herself Donna’s “scathing” review of If You Knew Her. She didn’t have to look; it was the first one on the page.
For years, international bestselling author Clare Collins has churned out book after book that has appealed to that wide audience that is either devoted, or addicted, to Collins’s signature, if oftentimes repetitive, plot structure: love gained, love lost, love gained again with a twist. So it was with great anticipation that readers, including this reader, who generally prefers a meatier book with more depth and substance than a typical Collins book, awaited the release of If You Knew Her. It’s Collins’s first self-confessed attempt at elevating her prose and leaping the chasm between an all-you-can-eat buffet and a fine dining literary experience.
One can imagine Collins scratching at the surface of the story she wanted to tell, but when it came time to dig deep, she pulled back before truly daring to break ground with her characters. The result is a setup that makes a heady promise—a promise that Collins’s unexcavated characters are unable to deliver.
Collins has indeed leapt; however, If You Knew Her has botched the landing and unfortunately ended at the bottom of the canyon.
Clare stood up from behind her desk and crossed her expansive study to face the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that looked out over the Pacific crashing below her. The overcast sky met the gray ocean out on the horizon and promised a storm to match her mood. She would give Donna her pound of flesh and read the rest of the review, but Clare already knew two things: Donna’s review had little to do with If You Knew Her, and it wasn’t going to get any better. This was personal, and ten years in the coming. Apparently, Donna’s National Book Award and subsequent improved sales had done little to help her move on.
They had been friends, once upon a time in Brooklyn. Two struggling writers, going hungry together, sleeping on couches in an over-occupancy one-bedroom apartment. Hunting for silence, space, and the time to get words on pages. Wading through drifts of rejection, rejection, rejection, together with their other two roommates. It had been the four of them. Flynn had also been a writer back then but now worked as an editor for a midsized publisher uptown. Sergio was an actor who had eventually given up chasing off-Broadway and now lived in LA. Back then, their professional struggles were best weathered together, the pain of every “Thank you, no thank you” washed down with the biggest bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill they could scrape enough change together to afford from Roy’s Liquor around the corner.
Their miseries loved each other’s company, but the company started to shift the day she came home, bottle in hand, wanting to celebrate some success. Clare’s struggle ended first and the most dramatically, despite the fact that it was Donna who was, without question, the most singularly talented of them all.
She had her reasons to hate Clare, and in truth, Clare understood those reasons perfectly. It was easy to imagine being Donna, that very specific pain of watching your friend achieve professionally everything you ever wanted. Honestly, everything Donna deserved.
Clare looked down at Donna’s book, Messages from the Shadowlands, on the glass coffee table. It was an advance copy that Simon had requested from Donna’s publisher before the hardbacks hit the shelves, and long before the National Book Award medallions were placed on the covers. It had sat on her table ever since Clare had stayed up until three a.m. to finish it. When she had closed the book, she sat with it, silent, her pristine white-walled study dark beyond the reach of her crystal table lamp’s glow.
Stunned. Moved. Affected by Donna’s story, yes, she had been all of those things. And also, for the first time since Simon had plucked her from that wood-worn book bar in Brooklyn, the Blue Spruce, Clare felt shame creep over the grand facade of her own oversized success.
Had any of her many books, even one of them, ever made a single reader feel what Donna’s symphony had accomplished?
Clare picked the book up off the table. It was the reason Clare had reached and, as Donna so accurately pointed out, lost her footing, or perhaps worse, taken on characters and subjects beyond her ability to effectively convey. Because she had wanted to do more—she had wanted to do what Donna did, but instead she had landed at the bottom of the canyon.
Clare threw Donna’s book against the thick glass wall. The thud of its spine, first on the wall and then on the floor, broke the silence of her study. Several pages broke loose and littered the floor next to the large white shag rug and roused Charlie from his spot nearest the heating vent to sniff and investigate.
“You can go ahead and pee on those,” she told him.
He gave the pages a single snort, then trotted across the rug, under the glass table, and jumped up onto the white couch behind her. “You’re not supposed to be up there,” she said, and shook her head as she bent down to nuzzle his stupid, cute face and let him lick her cheek. She pulled the pale-blue throw from the back of the couch, laid it out, and positioned Charlie in the middle—pushing the extra fabric up and around him into a puppy nest. She kissed his face once more then headed to her desk to do the one thing Simon had expressly begged her not to.
Poised in her office chair, one hand on her mouse, she opened Facebook.
Her official author page popped up, the stream filled with her publicist’s recent posts—dates and locations for the thirty-city book tour she would still have to attend, despite her bloody, mangled corpse of a book being dead on arrival at the bottom of the canyon.
But Clare Collins wasn’t who she wanted to be right now, so she logged out of this account and typed in the user ID and password of the person who she needed to be in this moment: Sara Smith.
Sara Smith was no one. A low-profile, lurking plain Jane with a stock photo profile pic so innocuous, so truly forgettable, friend requests made by her were almost never rejected. It was easy to believe Sara Smith was someone who went to your high school, was someone you forgot. Maybe she was that wallflower in your junior year chemistry class who sat in the far corner? No, was it econ? Whatever, she’s already friends with everyone else you went to high school with—Accept Friend Request.
With Sara Smith’s help, Clare had, one by one, become social media friends with eighty-four people from her high school class. If any of them ever suspected Sara was really Clare Kaczanowski, the girl from their yearbook who had defied all their expectations and actually become “The Most Likely to Succeed” by changing her name to Clare Collins and writing loads of books, they never called Sara out on it. Which would be mortifying, especially since she had, from time to time, contributed to some of the comments when former classmates occasionally posted news stories about her.