The woman’s greeting was so charming that I almost forgot my hatred of Will Price (almost, but not quite).
“Hi. Please call me Jo. Thanks for having me. It’s really great to be here. I hope you weren’t waiting for me long.”
“Oh, no,” Molly replied. “Not at all.”
But I couldn’t help noticing that she was shifting her weight from foot to foot, and also that she was clearly pregnant. To my untrained eye (except for many hours of watching Call the Midwife), she looked ready to pop.
“I’ll be taking you to your hotel.” Molly’s tone was as bright as her dark eyes. “Do you have any other bags to pick up from baggage claim?”
“No. Everything I need, I have right here.” I nodded proudly down at my carry-on. If they gave prizes to authors for packing instead of literary content, I would definitely have won them all.
“Oh.” Molly looked slightly disappointed, and continued to shift her weight from one foot to another. “I hope you don’t mind, but there are two other authors arriving any minute that I thought we could pick up at the same time. It would keep me from having to make three trips back and forth to the hotel. And you know, we are trying to be eco-conscious here on Little Bridge. The authors should be coming through those doors any second—”
Because of my expert packing, I’d been in this situation before. Enough times that I reached out, took the whiteboard from Molly’s hands, and said, in response to her surprised expression, “No problem. I’ll wait for them. I know you’ve been here awhile and could probably use a bathroom break.”
Molly’s cheeks went red. “Oh, no, Ms. Wright! I’m fine! I don’t want you to—”
“It’s Jo. And I’m fine with this. Will and I go way back. I’ll take good care of him while you’re gone.”
That’s what I said out loud. Inside in my head, I was saying, Will and I go way back, and if he shows up while you’re gone, I’m going to murder him, and when you return from the bathroom, all that will be left of him is a puddle of his own blood, but no one will be able to prove I’m his killer, because I will have so skillfully disposed of his body and gotten rid of all the evidence.
But of course I wouldn’t actually do that, because I’m a Wright: I’d inherited from my very British father’s side of the family an almost pathological fear of confrontation. It was because of this fear of confrontation that my father had saved no money for his retirement, and had instead given everything he had to his best friends and fellow bandmates every time they needed to be bailed out of a jam (which was frequently). His generosity was completely admirable, except that now he needed me—or, more accurately, Kitty Katz, to support him (although, again to his credit, he’d never asked me to do so. He’d have sooner withered away from starvation than ask anyone for help).
Always at odds with this, however, was what I’d inherited from my mother’s very Italian side of the family: a hot-blooded thirst for revenge.
Molly’s face crumpled with grateful relief. “Oh, thank you. If you really don’t mind—I’ve been dying to go. The baby seems to be sitting right on my bladder. I’ll only be a minute—”
“Take your time.” I hoisted up the whiteboard so that anyone coming through the doors from the tarmac would be sure to see it.
At least, that’s what I did until Molly turned her back and waddled off in the direction of the ladies’ room. Then I lowered the sign and wondered what would happen if I spat on Will’s name and wiped it away with my sleeve.
But no. I couldn’t do that. I’d only get Molly in trouble, and she seemed like a nice person. She was the one who’d written me the kind letter, offering me the ten grand and gushing over her love of Kitty Katz. I would never do something like that to a fan.
Although it would certainly serve Will Price right if someone, anyone out there showed him that he wasn’t as universally beloved as he thought he was, and that books about teenaged cats were just as important (to some people) as books about whatever his books were about, which I still didn’t actually know, because I’d never read one—at least not all the way through. Of course I’d glanced through one or two that I’d happened to spot in airport bookstores during layovers. I’d read enough to see that his prose was accessible. He wasn’t talentless.
But those endings! My God.
Will insisted in interviews—not that I’d read any of them. Well, all right, I might have skimmed one or two—that his books were tragic love stories. But not romance novels. Oh, no. Definitely not that! Because he was a man, and most male authors of adult books would slit their own throats before admitting they’d written a romance or women’s fiction or even a family drama. Everything they wrote, many of them insisted, was literary fiction (unless of course it was sci-fi, horror, or mystery).
So nauseating.
I’d tried to watch When the Heart Dies once when I’d been channel-surfing and it had turned up on HBO, but it had been so depressing—the hero died at the end (all of Will’s heroes in all of Will’s books died at the end)—that I’d had to switch to a Great British Bake Off marathon to cheer myself up.
Why did Will Price need a ride from the airport anyway? He lived on Little Bridge. Where was he even coming from? Were Lauren and her friends right? Had he really left the set of his latest movie to come to this book festival? Was he so controlling that he couldn’t allow a book festival in his own town to take place without him being there?
And if so, why couldn’t he take an Uber or a taxi or a limo or whatever entirely too highly paid authors like himself rode around in? Why did he need one of the book festival volunteers to drive him in the author bus or van (which, in my experience, was undoubtedly what would be transporting us)? Why couldn’t he—
BOOM.
The automatic doors to the tarmac parted and there he was, like some kind of god, the sun casting a golden halo all around him. Will Price, in the flesh.
BAM! My heart ricocheted off the back of my ribs.
Really? The mere sight of him caused my heart to skip a beat? Why? WHY? I didn’t even like him. He was just a man, a stupid man who wrote even stupider books.
The only reason my heart did the dumb BAM thing was because this was the first time I was seeing him (in person, as opposed to the million photos of him that I could not seem to escape, that appeared all over social media and the copies of People my dentist kept scattered around her office and in-flight magazines and even, unfortunately, Library Journal, since less discerning librarians were bonkers for him, too) since The Incident.
Unfortunately, he looked just as good now as he had then.
It was easy to spot him in the crowd, not only because of the golden light that seemed to encircle him, but because of the way the crowd appeared to part for him, too, as if everyone sensed they were in the presence of greatness. This might have been because Will stood about a head taller than most of the other passengers, and that wasn’t even counting his mass of thick, curly, dark hair, which was looking more unruly than usual. Wherever he’d been, he had apparently not had easy access to a barber, much less a razor, since he was sprouting four or five days’ growth of dark facial hair.
He was peering down at his cell-phone screen as he walked, a large backpack slung over one of his ridiculously broad shoulders. He did not, I had to admit, look like either a multimillionaire or a backstabbing bestselling author, in his gray T-shirt, jeans, and Timberlands.