“A ghost asking an author to ghostwrite, that has to be a first.” I sighed, and leaned my head against his shoulder.
“What’re you going to do next?” he asked, folding his fingers through mine. He began to rub circles on my thumb knuckle thoughtfully. “You turned in Annie’s last book. Her contract’s up.”
“Well . . .” I debated my answer. I still had to get through line edits of Annie’s book, and copyedits, and pass pages, but those were all things Ben already knew. I also still had to accept Molly’s offer of representation, but I’d do that on Monday. “I think . . . I’m going to write another book.”
“What’ll it be about?”
“Oh, the usual—meet-cutes and high jinks and grave misunderstandings and conciliatory kisses.”
“Will there be a happily ever after?”
“Maybe,” I teased, “if you play your cards right.”
“I’ll be sure not to cheat.”
“Unless it’s to help me win, of course.”
“Always. I’m yours, Florence Day,” he said, and kissed my knuckles.
Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?”
“Fervently. Zealously. Keenly. Passionately yours.”
“And I’m yours,” I whispered, and kissed him in a cemetery of immaculate tombstones and old oak trees, and it was a good beginning. We were an author of love stories and an editor of romances, weaving a story about a boy who was once a little ghostly and a girl who lived with ghosts.
And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.
Eccentric Circles
IN THE DAYS Gone Funeral Home, in the back corner of the largest parlor, there was a loose floorboard where I once kept my dreams. I kept them locked tight in a box, storing them like treasure, until the day I could take them out and brush them off, like old friends coming to greet each other.
I didn’t store my dreams in a small box underneath the floorboards anymore. I didn’t need to.
But there was a girl who was a little bit tall and lanky for her age, dark hair and wide eyes, who wrote her dreams on spare pieces of paper and put them in a jar like fireflies, and when she found her mother’s old metal box and its smutty, smutty X-Files fanfic, she decided to store her dreams there, too.
And the wind that whistled through the old funeral parlor sang sweet and soft and sure.
Like love ought to be.
Acknowledgments
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it took a village to raise Benji Andor from the dead. The Dead Romantics couldn’t be possible without a lot of people, most of whom I will probably forget in these acknowledgments, but you know who you are. Thank you for giving Florence and Ben a ghost of a chance.
This book wouldn’t be possible without the tender love and necromancy of my agent, Holly Root; my phenomenal editor, Amanda Bergeron, and assistant editor, Sareer Khader; my copyeditor, Angelina Krahn; my wonderful publicist, and the whole team from managing to production to marketing, Christine Legon and Alaina Christensen and Jessica Mangicaro and everyone else. And to my critique partners—Nicole Brinkley, Rachel Strolle, Ashley Schumacher, Katherine Locke, and Kaitlyn Sage Patterson—for being the Rose to my Florence and encouraging me when I was at my lowest.
Speaking of lowest, I would also like to give a very enthusiastic fuck you to my anxiety. Thanks for, as always, being the worst.
And finally, to anyone who has proclaimed drunkenly at a bar that love is dead—I’ve been there and trust me, love is not dead. It’s simply sleeping off a raging hangover. Give it two Tylenol and tell it to call you in the morning.