“I—I know, but . . .”
“And if she can’t deliver,” he added, “then we’ll have to get the legal department involved, I’m afraid.”
The legal department. That meant a breach of contract. That meant I would have messed up so big that there would be no coming back from it. I would’ve failed not just Ann, but her publisher and her readers—everyone.
I’d already failed like that once.
The office began to get smaller, or I was having a panic attack, and I really hoped it was the former. My breath came in short bursts. It was hard to breathe.
“Miss Florence? Are you okay? You seem a little pale,” he observed, but his voice sounded a football field away. “Do you need some water?”
I shoved my panic into a small box in the back of my head, where everything else went. All of the bad things. The things I didn’t want to deal with. The things I couldn’t deal with. The box was useful. I shut everything in. Locked it tight. I pressed on a smile. “Oh, no. I’m fine. It’s a lot to take in. And—and you’re right. Of course you’re right.”
He seemed doubtful. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Yeah,” I croaked.
“Good. Please tell Mrs. Nichols that I send my regards, and I’m very happy to be working with her. And I’m sorry—is that a cactus? I just noticed.”
I looked down at the succulent, all but forgotten in my lap as my panic banged on the box in my head, lock rattling, to get free. I—I thought I hated this man, and if I stayed in this office any longer, I was going to either throw this cactus at him or cry.
Maybe both.
I jerked to my feet and put the succulent on the edge of the desk. “It’s a gift.”
Then I gathered my satchel and turned on my heels and left Falcon House Publishers without another word. I held myself together until I stumbled out of the revolving door of the building and into the brisk April day, and let myself crumble.
I took a deep breath—and screamed an obscenity into the perfectly blue afternoon sky, startling a flock of pigeons from the side of the building.
I needed a drink.
No, I needed a book. A murder-thriller. Hannibal. Lizzie Borden—anything would do.
Maybe I needed both.
No, definitely both.
2
The Breakup
IT WASN’T THAT I couldn’t finish the book.
I just didn’t know how.
It’d been a year since The Breakup—everyone has at least one in their lives. You know the one, right? The kind of breakup from a love you thought would last your entire lifetime, only to find your heart ripped out with a spork by your former lover and placed on a silver platter with FUCK YOU written in ketchup. It’d been a year since I’d hauled my luggage out into the rain on that shitty April evening and never looked back. That’s not the part I regretted. I will never regret ending things with him.
I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.
The time had crawled by after that. At first, I had tried to get up every day and sit down on the couch with my laptop and write, but I couldn’t. I mean, I could—but every word felt like pulling teeth, and every one of those words I deleted a day later.
It was like one day I knew how to write; I knew the scenes, I knew the meet-cutes and the swoony moments, exactly how the hero tasted when my heroine kissed him . . . and then the next day, it was all gone. Iced over in a blizzard, and I didn’t know how to thaw out the words.
I couldn’t remember when I stopped opening up the Word document, when I stopped trying to look for a romance between the lines. But I did, and now I was here between a rock called despair and a hard place named Benji Andor.