When the bartender returns, I try to order the Greek.
She winces. “You sure?”
“Not anymore.”
“We’re not known for our salads,” she explains.
“What are you known for?”
She waves a hand toward the glowing Coors Light sign behind her shoulder.
“What are you known for, with regard to food?” I clarify.
She says, “To be known isn’t necessarily to be admired.”
“What do you recommend,” Libby tries, “other than Coors?”
“The fries are good,” she says. “Burger’s okay.”
“Veggie burger?” I ask.
She purses her lips. “It won’t kill you.”
“Sounds perfect,” I say. “I’ll have one of those, and some fries.”
“Same,” Libby adds.
Despite her insistence that the burger won’t kill us, the bartender’s shrug reads, Your funeral, bitches!
Libby seems totally fine, happy even, but there’s still a kernel of anxiety in my gut, and I accidentally drink my entire martini before our food arrives. I’m tipsy enough that everything’s taking me longer than it should. Libby scarfs her burger down and hops up to use the bathroom before I’ve made a dent in mine.
My phone vibrates on the sticky counter, and I’m one hundred percent expecting it to be Charlie.
It’s a zillion times better.
Dusty has finally turned in part of her manuscript, and not a minute too soon—her editor goes out on maternity leave in a month.
Thank you all so much for your patience—I know this schedule hasn’t been ideal for you, but it means so much that you trust me enough to let me work in the way that serves me best. I have a complete first draft, but have only had a chance to clean and tighten this first bit. I hope to have several more chapters to you within the week, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect.
I tap open the attached document, titled Frigid 1.0.
It starts with Chapter One. Always a good sign that an author hasn’t gone full Jack-Torrance-locked-up-with-his-typewriter-in-the-Overlook. I resist the urge to scroll through to the end, a tic I’ve had since I was a kid, when I realized there were too many books in the world and not enough time. I’ve always used it as a litmus test for whether I want to read a book or not, but given that this is a client’s work, I’m going be reading the whole thing no matter what.
So instead my eyes skim over the first line, and it hits like a gut punch.
They called her the Shark.
“What the fuck,” I say. An older man at the end of the bar jerks his head up from his watery soup and scowls. “Sorry,” I grumble, and train my eyes on the screen again.
They called her the Shark, but she didn’t mind. The name fit. For one thing, sharks could only swim forward. As a rule, Nadine Winters never looked back. Her life was predicated on rules, many of which served to ease her conscience.
If she looked back, she’d see the trail of blood. Moving forward, all there was to think about was hunger.
And Nadine Winters was hungry.
For a minute I’m actually hoping to discover that Nadine Winters is a literal shark. That Dusty has written the talking-animal story of Charlie Lastra’s nightmares. But four lines down, a word jumps out as if, rather than Times New Roman, it’s written in Curl Up N Dye’s bloodcurdling font.
AGENT.
Dusty’s main character, the Shark, is an agent.
I backtrack to the word right before it. Film.
Film agent. Not literary agent. The differentiation does nothing to loosen the knot in my chest, or to quiet the rush of blood in my ears.
Unlike me, Nadine Winters has jet-black hair and blunt bangs.
Like me, she only skips heels when she’s working out.
Unlike me, she takes Krav Maga every morning instead of virtual classes on her Peloton.
Like me, she orders a salad with goat cheese every time she eats out with a client and drinks her gin martinis dirty—never more than one. She hates any loss of control.
Like me, she never leaves the house without a full face of makeup and gets bimonthly manicures.
Like me, she sleeps with her phone next to her bed, sound turned to full volume.
Like me, she often forgets to say hello at the start of her conversations and skips goodbye at the end.
Like me, she has money but doesn’t enjoy spending it and would rather scroll through Net-A-Porter, filling up her cart for hours, then leave it that way until everything sells out.
Nadine didn’t enjoy most things, Dusty writes. Enjoyment was beside the point of life. As far as she could tell, staying alive was the point, and that required money and survival instincts.