“If I’m dead,” Ben proposed smartly, “then how can you see me?”
What a question.
One that Lee Marlow never asked as I told him all of my ghost stories. He simply suspended his disbelief as I weaved my memories into his fiction. Did he ever find a reason for why I could see ghosts? Did his editor ask how? Did Lee finally have to make something by himself?
I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to know.
But leave it to an editor to ask the questions that burn into plot holes.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but what I do know, Ben, is that you’re dead. Very dead. Dead-as-a-doornail sort of dead. Ghost dead—”
He held up his hand to stop me, his other massaging the bridge of his nose. “Okay, okay, I get it. I just . . . I want to know why. And why you.”
“That makes two of us, then.” I crossed the street, back toward the bed-and-breakfast, and he followed slightly behind me with his long, leisurely legs. “The only thing I can think of is that manuscript—but if you’re dead, I don’t have to turn it in anymore.”
“Not that you had it finished to begin with,” he muttered.
I opened the wrought iron gate to the inn—and froze. “Wait . . .” I turned back to him. “You knew?”
“That you were Annie’s ghostwriter? Yes,” he replied, a bit perplexed. “I’m her editor—of course I knew. I just didn’t expect . . . well, it was a surprise when you walked in.”
I blinked. “Oh. Well then.”
“No, wait, that’s not what I meant—”
I whirled around and marched up the front walk to the veranda. “No, no, I definitely get what you meant. Me, the failure that I am.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me you ghostwrote for her?”
“Would it have changed anything?” I challenged, and he pursed his lips in reply. Looked away. Because I was right—it wouldn’t have changed anything. “See? It didn’t matter anyway. Whether I told you or not, you knew I was a failure.”
“That’s not what I think of you,” he stressed somberly.
I wanted to believe him. Wished I could. But I knew myself better than someone who had talked with me for thirty minutes and kissed me behind a hipster bar, and I knew exactly what I was—who I was.
A coward who ran away from the only home she ever knew. A gullible idiot who fell for guys who promised her the world. And a failure who couldn’t finish the one thing she was good at.
Suddenly, a strange look crossed his face. Confusion. Then curiosity. He cocked his head. “Do you hear th—？”
The next second he was gone, and I was left standing on the veranda alone.
12
Emotional Support
THE PHONE RANG four and a half times before Rose picked up.
“Oh thank god you called. I was beginning to worry the town swallowed you up,” she said. In the background, I could hear bathroom noises, and realized that she must’ve been . . . at work?
I checked my watch. “What’re you still doing at the office? Isn’t this your lunch?”
“And Saturday,” she said with a tragic sigh. “But ohmygod, I have some news—but first, I want to ask how you’re doing. How’s the family? Is everything . . . well, not fine because of course not, but is everything fine?”
“As fine as it can be.” I flopped onto the bed in the Violet Suite. It creaked loudly. I would’ve hated to be in one of the neighboring rooms if any honeymooners ever got this suite. The hinges needed some WD-40 and duct tape. “Alice is rearing for a fight, but I figured she would be. We haven’t really seen eye to eye in a few years.”