I thought this was odd, another example of his proclivity for pedantry since he’d taken control of our admin, but I had to pick my battles.
It was horribly painful for me to watch Dan packing our stuff away with brisk efficiency as if the time we’d spent here had meant nothing. Every time he sealed another box, it felt as if the tape was screeching with callous disregard for every memory I’d ever made. I couldn’t bear to help him or even be a witness to it. It would be impossible to suppress the great wrench of grief that was building in me.
I told him I needed to check over something in the book. “But I’ll get out of your way,” I said. “I can go to a café.”
“Have you heard from Max yet?” he asked, but he didn’t sound worried. I’d never had anything less than an enthusiastic reception for my first drafts before.
“Not yet. I think he had another manuscript to read first.” I tried to say it lightly.
Dan frowned. I knew he wanted to ask, “Whose manuscript is more important than yours?” because I was Max’s highest-earning client, and I held my breath because I was afraid he was going to start nagging me to put pressure on Max and the conversation was going to go to a place where I’d have no choice but to tell him what I’d done, but he let it go.
I went to my favorite café, where I logged on to the WiFi and visited the Eliza Grey fan fiction page. It was something I couldn’t resist doing, a sort of masochism, given what was happening, but I was fascinated by the way people appropriated my creation. I had mixed feelings about it: a queasy combination of flattery and discomfort, but sometimes mixed feelings are the hardest to resist indulging in. They can make us feel alive.
At the top of the page was a banner:
This Is the Fan Fiction Page for Detective Sergeant Eliza Grey, Heroine of Lucy Harper’s Series. 10 Million Copies Sold and Counting! Join Us!
I read a few new stories and tutted where they had gotten details about Eliza wrong, but they were fun to read, a good distraction. I never commented on the stories but I visited the page often enough that the people who posted had become familiar to me and felt a bit like a community. I was excited to see a new post there from someone I hadn’t spotted on the site for a while: MrElizaGrey. I’d always enjoyed his stories about Eliza. Of all the people who posted, he was the one who really understood her character, who got her. Sometimes to an uncanny degree. I clicked on his post.
Woke up before Eliza today. She slept naked. Ready for me.
“Oh!” I said. I blinked at the screen. What he’d written was partly accurate. Eliza did sleep naked, that was in the books, but she never let anyone stay the night with her. She was a commitmentphobe, married to her job, in charge of her own life. Her affairs were passionate, but she kept her partners at arm’s length. I read on, pressing my fingers against my mouth, which formed an O behind them.
I reached for her, woke her the way she liked the most. She pushed back into me and spread—
“Ew!” I said, out loud. This was Eliza porn, especially shocking because MrElizaGrey had never written anything explicit before. I closed the web page and felt my cheeks redden. I glanced around the café, worried I looked as grubby as I felt, but the other customers hadn’t noticed a thing, they were all plugged in. What MrElizaGrey had written was grim; it felt like a violation. I wondered how long it would take for the page admin to take it down.
Eliza laughed. “I’ve had worse from my colleagues,” she said, and it was true. If anyone in the Criminal Investigation Department tried it with her, she gave as good as she got. My girl was braver than I ever would be, quicker with a retort, master of the crushing comeback.
“Oh,” she added. “Max is phoning.”
I looked at my phone. I’d set it to silent and now Max’s name had appeared on the screen. I snatched it up.
“How are you?” he asked. I didn’t love his tone. It seemed weighted somehow.
“What’s wrong? You don’t like the book?”
“We have a problem.”
“Why?”
“It’s a big problem. We’re very worried.”
“‘We’?” Usually, Max and I discussed the book together before involving my editor. “You talked to Angela before talking to me?”
A beat of silence resonated before he said, “You’ve delivered a book that’s in breach of contract.”
“I haven’t.” Why was he starting with this negativity? Hadn’t the book impressed him at all?
“They paid for an Eliza Grey novel. And she’s horribly incapacitated by the end of the first chapter. It’s shocking.”
“No. The contract says, ‘a book provisionally titled “The Truth.”’ There’s no mention of it being an Eliza Grey novel.”
I heard him exhale heavily. Max had a tic where he removed his glasses and massaged his forehead before replacing them and I imagined him doing it now.
He hadn’t checked the contract, clearly, and I guessed that Angela hadn’t, either. It was lazy wording. Somewhere at the publishing house, a head was going to roll and there would be a mighty thunk as it hit the floor.
“Did you like the book, though?” I asked because I believed that was the real question. If the novel was as good as I hoped, as I knew in my heart it was, the contractual stuff was a moot point because Angela would be gagging to publish it.
“Why didn’t you talk to me about cutting Eliza from the book?” The question sounded reasonable; Max’s tone of voice, not so much. “You can talk to me about anything, you know.” Except that I couldn’t. Nobody knew everything about me except Eliza.
“But did you like it?” I asked. I shouldn’t have raised my voice, I’d never raised my voice to Max before, but I did then. Please say yes, please say yes, looped through my mind in the silence that followed.
“Okay, I think this conversation got off on the wrong foot,” Max said eventually. “I did like this book you’ve written, it’s a very good book, but the problem we have is that your readers want an Eliza Grey book.”
My stomach took a swan dive. “Like this book.” “Like” was, is, a supremely dangerous word in publishing, where superlatives are the most common currency. I was being damned with faint praise.
“Lucy.” He said my name so slowly and deliberately that I was made acutely aware that he was handling me, and it was one of those times my career felt like a corset being cinched incrementally tighter. “They don’t want the book. I’m sorry.”
“What about the Americans?”
“Same story.”
“But the contract . . .”
“If you’re right about the contract, we can possibly insist that they accept this book and pay for it, but it will impact hugely on any new negotiations, as in, there might not be any. That’s the bottom line.”
I blinked back tears. “But did you like it?” I asked one more time. My voice sounded feeble and small.
“In the publishers’ opinion, and mine, it’s not sufficiently marketable.”
Worse than “like,” “not sufficiently marketable” were words of terrible doom, words a writer never wanted to hear unless she had another income.