I guess it ran in the family.
So I gave myself a little leniency when I realized that I hadn’t brought any sort of Welcome Back! or Glad You Lived! card to go with Ben’s gift until I was already in the elevator going up to Falcon House Publishers. I bounced on my heels, quite unable to stop moving.
“Beautiful day,” I commented to a man sweating through his Armani suit. He grunted and patted his forehead.
It was summer in the city, and the men in the elevator looked like they were about to sweat to death in their ironed business suits, the women in flouncy skirts and kitten heels.
And I was in what I felt best in, an oversized blouse and straight-leg jeans with a hole in the left knee, and red Converses. I didn’t look like I fit in here, but looks were deceiving, and best of all?
I didn’t really care anymore. It didn’t matter. What mattered was where I was going.
I wasn’t scared of the looming floor number that we rose to meet. Executive editor Benji Andor had been back in the office for a little less than a month, though I was beginning to suspect he had done more than a little work from home before that. He apparently still had a lot of catching up to do, from what Erin told Rose. Then again, when did editors not have a lot of catch-up work to do? As long as I’d known Lee, he’d been majestically behind on every deadline. But I had a feeling that, unlike Lee, Ben actually wanted to catch up—but then why would he agree to entertain a meeting with me?
I was nervous. What if he thought I was some sort of weirdo who wanted to give him his favorite book? Couldn’t be any worse than a weirdo giving him a cactus, I guessed.
Because it had been three months, and I wasn’t going to lie, quite a few of those nights I spent drowning in a bottle of wine, wondering what happened with Laura. Wondering if she stayed. If he wanted her to. If they decided to try anew.
I was alone by the time the elevator stopped at the floor for Falcon House Publishers, and I stepped out into the clean white lobby. The glass-cased bookshelves looked exactly the same. Ann Nichols’s bestsellers sat on a shelf all to themselves, and the glass reflected me, freckled cheeks and dry lips and messy blond hair pinned up into twin buns.
Erin was reading a book as I came up to the front desk, but she quickly put a sticky note on the page and closed it. When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow.
It came out this week.
“Florence! Good morning!” Erin greeted. “How’s Rose? Is she alive?”
“You two really need to stop going to that wine bar,” I replied, remembering Rose stumbling into the apartment last night and immediately passing out on the soft shag rug in the living room.
Erin gave a pout. “But they have such a good cheese plate.”
Rose wasn’t going to work today; she’d already caught her flight to Charlotte, where Alice would pick her up to drive to Mairmont. After this meeting, I’d be on my way, too. I asked if I could stash my suitcase behind Erin’s desk, and she happily agreed. “I’ll ring Benji and tell him you’re here.”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
As Erin called Ben’s office phone, I leaned against the front desk to get a better look at Lee Marlow’s novel. The cover was decent, I guessed. A bit too much like The Woman in the Window for my liking. It wasn’t as if I could forget that Lee’s book came out this week. It had been everywhere in the city—on subway ads, in magazines, an entire article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and even in my favorite indie bookstore. It wasn’t something I could quite escape, but I no longer felt under the shadow of it, either.
Lee ended up not filing a police report after I’d punched him at the hospital. Probably for the best, because I had secrets that could make his life very uncomfortable for a while, and he didn’t need that sort of bad press before the release of his instant bestseller.