Girl Next Door

1

W hen MC managed to find a spot on the overcrowded subway platform, she made sure nothing about her was disturbing anyone’s personal space. Not her messenger bag, not her posture, not even her hair, a blond mess she’d partially wrangled into a topknot. Satisfied, she took out her book.

She was rereading a Rebecca Sloane novel, a self-soothing ritual she performed after breakups.

This latest split had been typical—undramatic, blameless, and not MC’s choice—so it called for the typical remedy.

In this case, the passion and suffering of a Byzantine empress and her handmaiden.

Their love was doomed, but it was beautiful and epic and, around the halfway mark, steamy.

Though she was twenty-six and theoretically beyond getting excited by fingers brushing a wrist, MC blushed as a train arrived and she was carried by the human tide into the air-conditioned car.

She gripped the pole that ran above the seats. A napping woman in a shawl opened one eye to stare at her, like she knew.

“The next station is... Prospect Park.”

MC’s phone buzzed.

How are you still basically at home?

The train lurched into the tunnel and she lost service. Joe had summoned her to his office with zero notice, zero context, and a lot of all-caps messages about how he was freaking out. And no, he couldn’t discuss why, just come, please and thank you.

She’d text him back in a minute.

She looked down at her book again. The empress was getting ready for a ceremony with some priests, and her handmaiden was getting handsy.

It was classic Rebecca Sloane: Two women from the distant past were consumed by lust for each other, then cursed by society to either suffer or perish, or suffer and then perish.

This was her most hopeful work, in that the lovers got to eke out a secret affair with the blessing of the gay emperor.

In the epilogue, the handmaiden died of pneumonia on the Black Sea. Still.

MC knew Sloane’s stories were old-fashioned, but they appealed to her on some primal level, for reasons she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to.

Trundling over the Manhattan Bridge, she pulled out her phone.

Train trouble, sorry!

Ughhhh

Just tell me what’s going on?

Joe didn’t reply. She figured he was in the middle of a conflict with a writer or minor television celebrity.

Painful emails with someone’s lawyer needed to be exchanged.

He’d been increasingly stressed about work over the past year, calling her late at night or early in the morning to discuss contract details and pitches he was on the fence about.

MC was a freelance writer herself, though she mostly worked in advertising these days, so she was a safe and knowledgeable sounding board.

Also, highly available. Most importantly, they’d been inseparable since middle school and trusted each other in the way of old married couples—not that either of them knew any of those.

She got off at Canal Street and walked with her hands in her pockets, enjoying the late-afternoon breeze.

It was early September. The warmth of summer lingered even as New York’s businesslike pace left no doubt that fall had arrived.

The scent of cinnamon drifted from a cart selling roasted nuts.

Jackhammers pierced the hum of traffic. MC had grown up in a quiet Long Island suburb but adjusted to the sensory assault of the city in college; now she kind of liked it.

It helped that when she graduated, she didn’t immediately aspire to the office caste.

For the past five years, she’d had the luxury of traveling during off-hours, experiencing the grind when it was a little less grinding.

Freelance work had been her only option at the time, but now she was glad she’d ended up in it.

She made her own schedule, sort of, and she was her own boss, more or less.

She knew she wouldn’t feel quite so serene if she weren’t in good health or had to take care of someone.

But for the moment, she was comfortable: an established professional with almost a dozen brands paying her to throw sentences together.

And though she’d come to the city with the usual dream of being a real writer—a journalist, to be exact—the mildness of her ambition had at least spared her from the insanities of the media class.

Which she had enough secondhand contact with anyway, thanks to Joe.

She arrived at the cast-iron building on Broadway where Jawbreaker kept its offices.

The ground floor was home to a certain fast-fashion European clothing store where she’d bought too many things, including the black slim-fit men’s T-shirt she was currently wearing.

She took a door off to the side and stood in an elevator bank with several sharply dressed people in clear-framed glasses.

An elevator arrived, and they all shuffled in.

MC remembered her first time riding to the fifth floor.

It’d come as no surprise that her best friend was capable of ruling the world, or at least the arts-and-culture beat at the highbrow gossip hub of cubicle drones and young literary types everywhere.

Being kept by his side on the way up had been a thrill and a relief.

“Mischa Celeste,” Sheena called out from her desk, phone tucked against her shoulder.

She liked to elongate MC’s full name in a singsong voice, accentuating its absurdity, which never failed to delight Jerome, who sat across from her.

He leaned back in his ergonomic chair as far as it would go, then tempted fate with another inch or two.

“New assignment?” he said.

“Does dealing with Joe count as an assignment?”

Jerome steepled his fingers. “He’s been locked in his office all day.”

“Any sense of what’s going on?”

“I assumed a variation on the usual drama.” He glanced over at Joe’s door. “But the paranoid part of me is wondering if there’s something else.”

MC was about to ask for theories when a man in a matte-black tracksuit walked up to her.

“The woman of the hour,” he said, his voice smooth.

It took MC a second to realize she was staring into the icy blue eyes of Seth Flanagan. She’d met Jawbreaker’s founder on several occasions over the last few years, mostly at their infamous holiday parties, but was pretty sure he didn’t know her name.

Yet here he was, smiling at her.

“Um,” she said, convinced he’d confused her with someone else and not sure how to explain it politely.

“Looking forward to Monday,” he said.

And then he continued on to one of the glass conference rooms.

She turned back to Jerome and whispered, “What was that?”

Jerome looked stunned. “No idea.”

Sheena uncrossed her legs—clad in the usual fishnet stockings—and leaned toward them. “He and Joe had a long-ass meeting this morning.” She raised an eyebrow.

“About what?” MC asked.

“You,” Sheena said, “would be the only person who’s allowed to even attempt to figure that out.” She readjusted the phone. “Hi, yes, I’m still here—”

MC took a deep breath, exchanged a final look with Jerome, and walked up to Joe’s door.

It flew open before she even had a chance to knock.

“Finally,” Joe breathed, waving her in with a frantic hand. As soon as she’d passed the threshold, he drew back to pace behind his desk, his normally perfect curls in disarray. “Close the door behind you.”

“Are we in the Matrix right now?” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Are agents coming for us?”

He dropped into his chair and stared at her, the arched lines of his brows high and expectant.

He was framed by a wall of shelves stuffed with edgy collections from writers MC had never heard of, corkboards plastered with dimly lit pictures of him with journalists, poets, and podcasters. “Actually, yeah, kind of.”

She blinked.

“Sit,” he said, his catlike hazel eyes more shadowed than usual. “You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m making you nervous?” She settled into the big leather chair across from his desk. “I hear you had a long meeting with Seth Flanagan.”

Joe winced but said nothing.

“I guess that’s not nearly as weird as him calling me ‘the woman of the hour’ just now.”

His gaze fell to her lap, where she was still loosely holding the book. “Is that Rebecca Sloane?”

“You mean the high-water mark of eighties historical fiction?” She palmed the paperback. “Why yes.”

“Not over Lisa dumping you yet?”

“Getting there.”

“Well, I’ve got something that’ll make you forget about her for the rest of your life.” He picked up a book from his desk. “You haven’t read this. I know, because if you had, you’d be losing your shit.”

The cover was highlighter pink, with a cutesy illustration of two women on either side of a picket fence, oh-so-close to kissing. Girl Next Door , by S. K. Smith. According to the banner at the top, it was a New York Times bestseller.

MC was confused. “Is that a romance novel?”

“Technically, it’s a rom-com.” Joe’s eyes were sparkling now, his exhausted slump replaced by a giddy, spring-loaded perch.

“And the only thing crazier than its fan base is the fact that no one has any idea who the author is. I called every publishing boy I’ve ever slept with to check.

” He grinned. “S. K. Smith is a bona fide mystery—no bio, no interviews, no nothing.”

“Okay...”

“Are you ready for me to blow your mind?”

“Not really?”

He took a breath.

“This,” he said, pointing at the blonde on the cover, “is you.”

And who is that? she almost asked, her eyes moving over to the dark-haired girl on the other side of the fence.

But she already knew.