“What’s a termagant?” Sophia asks.
Tom points at Katherine, who bats his hand away. “It’s a word for a strong woman.”
“Sure, we can go with that,” Tom says before kissing her again. On the mouth this time.
Sophia pretends to vomit but doesn’t vacate her place between them.
“Mom, what are you doing? Just open it already,” Tom’s brother demands.
Nancy Walsh clutches the half-opened red envelope to her chest, her eyes already red-rimmed and shiny. “I’m savoring the moment.”
“You don’t even know what it is yet.”
“Oh, yes, I do. A mother knows.” She tears open the rest of the envelope and peeks inside, letting out a happy squeal. “I knew it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Nancy,” the usually imperturbable Bob says impatiently as he grabs the envelope. “Let the rest of us . . .”
He fumbles the envelope, and the entire Walsh family stares at what slips out.
“What is that?” Sophia demands, unimpressed.
“That, sweetheart, is a sonogram. Auntie Katie and Uncle Tom are going to have a baby,” Meredith exclaims with a happy sniffle.
Sophia is more impressed now, wiggling off the couch and bouncing in front of them excitedly. “A cousin! Finally. Boy or girl?”
“Girl,” Katherine and Tom say at the same time before exchanging happy smiles.
“A baby girl!” Nancy is full-on crying now. “Do we have a name?”
“Not yet,” Tom says, just as Katherine says, “Yes.”
“We do?” Tom asks, frowning slightly.
Katherine rests a hand on her still-flat belly and beams at her husband for the second time. “Yeah. I was kind of thinking Gorby.”
Tom’s smile is immediate and approving. “I love it. But as a middle name.”
Katherine frowns, as ready for an argument as ever. “But—”
“I was thinking Danielle,” Tom cuts in. “Danielle Gorby Walsh?”
It takes Katherine a moment, but when realization dawns, she blinks in stunned surprise. “Danielle. You want to name her after my dad?”
“I do,” he says, pulling her closer. “I’m hoping if I name her after her grandfather, then she’ll have no choice but to take after her mother.”
“You should be so lucky,” Katherine says with a smile as she starts to move her mouth down to his. At the last minute, she pulls back and narrows her eyes. “You meant Danielle Gorby Tate, right?”
Tom smiles against her lips. “We can bicker about it later?”
Katherine’s lips curve upward as she kisses him back. “I can hardly wait.”
AUTHOR NOTE
Thank you so much for taking the time to read Emergency Contact! Every creative endeavor is a labor of love, but we’d be lying if we said that this project wasn’t extra special to us.
Who is “us”？
We’re Lauren Layne and Anthony LeDonne, and in case you missed this sneaking fact on the back cover, we are actually . . . married! And high school sweethearts! Cue the awwwwwwws.
And if you’re wondering how the heck we came to write a book together . . . so are we!
We kid, we kid. （Sort of.）
The truth is, we backed into this book from a very atypical direction. It started with, fittingly enough:
A road trip.
But not in the way you think, where we were on a road trip and thought, “Hey, we should write a book about a road trip!” It was more . . . halfway through Montana, we were desperate for entertainment—you can only count tumbleweeds for so long—and turned to our Audible library, where we’d downloaded a few screenwriting books for reasons that neither of us can remember.
Fast forward to several road trips and thousands of tumbleweeds later, and we’d devoured everything by Robert McKee, Blake Snyder, Chris Vogler, Michael Hauge, and a dozen more experts on writing screenplays. The only thing left to do? Actually write one.
So, of course, we did nothing. For years.
And then, one magical weekend （not magical like that, don’t be weird）， we drove from NYC to Lake Placid with one goal: write a screenplay.
Ambitious? Totally. But we didn’t know that going into it, and that worked in our favor. We believed it was possible, so we made it possible. Sort of.
Every morning in Lake Placid, we’d wake up at the crack of dawn and sip mediocre coffee in our room, talking about things like beat sheets and the three-act structure and whether we should shower, all while watching the clock until Starbucks opened. And the second those Lake Placid Starbucks doors opened, we were inside. Armed with Venti cold brews, breakfast sandwiches, and our Rhodia notebooks, we’d settle at a table and get to work.
The good news: we already knew the premise. We’d plucked a random idea from Lauren’s bulging idea notebook: “Woman wakes up from a coma to her estranged husband because she forgot to update her emergency contact information.”
The bad news: that was all we knew.
So, each morning, sitting at the same Starbucks table, we built the story around that premise. In painful “we don’t know what we’re doing” fits and starts, we started with a Beat Board. And when we couldn’t consume any more caffeine without vibrating, we took ourselves back to the hotel, where we opened our laptops and forced ourselves through excruciating “writing sprints,” trying to turn the plot points into a screenplay.
We’d each take the same scene and do our best to write it—remember, novice screenwriters here!—then we’d take the best dialogue and “laughs” from each version and meld them into something new, something uniquely “us.” We’d repeat that process all afternoon until cocktail hour, when we’d mix a few Manhattans, head to the deck overlooking Mirror Lake, and sit for hours discussing Katherine and Tom.
Miraculously, by the time we drove home on Monday, we had about two-thirds of a script written. And a few months after that, we had a finished screenplay! Which we nervously sent to our agent. And a few months after that, interest from actual Hollywood producers!
（And if you’re thinking, Huh, that seems easy, it totally wasn’t, and we’re skipping a ton of detail, like painful learning curves and, oh yeah, a global pandemic.）
After we’d found a home for the script, our amazing agent, Nicole Resciniti, told us what we already knew: “This story needs to be a book.”
And she was right. Lauren’s been a published romance author for a decade. Anthony? A comedian. Writing a romantic comedy? Sort of a no-brainer.
Plus, we already had the entire story and characters figured out.
How hard could it be?
Well. Honestly? Really hard.
Bringing Katherine and Tom’s story to life in novel form was an entirely different beast than it was in script form, but in some ways, it was even more rewarding. It gave us a chance to dig beneath the surface, to delve into characters that are wildly more flawed than characters in a romance are typically allowed to be. We also let ourselves embrace the comedy aspect, too, because nothing chafes us more than something labeled as a romantic comedy that isn’t actually funny.
We allowed ourselves to suspend reality and defy genre rules and simply ask ourselves the most important questions for a romantic comedy: