The Perfect Rom-Com
Chapter 1
It was a dark and stormy night.
I mean, not technically .
Technically it’s actually remarkably warm for a January afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee. Men and women of all ages are practically
skipping down the sidewalk on the street below, twinkles in their eyes, hope in their chests. Just a moment ago I watched
from the three-story glass wall of the conference center as one stuffy-looking businessman actually dropped his phone call
to commence sharing crackers with a squirrel. Crackers . With a squirrel . Having a little lunch together on a green bench while taxis and tour buses flash by, windows down, hair in the breeze.
Everybody in all of the city is basking in the unusual sunshine.
Learning life lessons.
Having existential breakthroughs.
Except for me.
No, I, twenty-nine-year-old Bryony Page, have the distinct pleasure of my mind crackling like a thunderstorm while I pace
outside the conference pitch room on my final day of the American Society of Writers conference, awaiting my final pitch appointment
that will determine whether the past two years of writing my heart and soul out was life-changing or, in actuality, a complete
and utter waste of time.
And then, of course, there’s my sister on the other end of my phone. With her own particular brand of “trying to help.”
“It’s your last day, Bryony,” Gloria says in my ear, a nails-down-the-chalkboard kind of twang in her voice. “You just have
to buck up . Pull yourself up by those bootstraps. Slap that book on the table—”
“Proposal,” I interject, pivoting on the thin hotel carpet.
A manager in the distance is frowning mildly at my legs, looking like he’s calculating exactly how many times I have to pace
this exact path before I’ll wear a hole in his carpet.
“—and get back on that horse because you are going to have a rootin ’ tootin ’ good day, ya hear? This is it .”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the tension. On the bright side, I’m not hyperventilating. Hyperventilating
is what the man to my left is doing as he exits the pitch room and collapses onto the first bench he finds.
Neither am I crying.
Crying is what the woman to my right is doing while another conference attendee is shaking her by the shoulders, telling her
to pull herself together because she has, according to the clock above the door, thirty seconds before she’s up.
No, what I am doing is getting my pre-pitch pep talk. The same pep talk I’ve received from my sister the past three pitches
over the past three days I’ve been at this writers’ conference nine hundred miles from home. Only, as each day has gotten
progressively worse, the rejections have piled up higher and higher, and the stakes have risen to dangerous levels, the pep
talks have grown... weirder. Longer. Just worse.
My sister, Gloria: dignified court reporter in the courtroom, whimsical adult-child every moment out.
I know what she’s doing, though. The harder she sees me struggle, the more absurd she gets.
Some people’s love language is baking casseroles and sending letters. Hers is providing distraction—even at the cost of throwing
on a Big Bird costume and dancing down a congested hospital hallway waving streaming blue ribbons (i.e., during our friend’s
seven-year-old daughter’s recovery from tumor removal). And right now, without question she has at least four tabs open on
her phone on websites about “Southern slang” while she grasps at straws for any sort of distraction from these tortured few
minutes before my last and final pitch.
(Not to mention she found it raucously funny that I called her from a line-dancing saloon my first night during a “meet and mingle.” Needless to say, life at the conference here in Nashville, Tennessee, is a far cry from our little borough outside New York City. And to my misfortune, it turned out, I did not happen to have any life-changing chats with agents while doing the Boot Scootin’ Boogie.)
I let Gloria continue as I turn on my heels and pace beside the doors, taking in words like “highfalutin” and “can’t never
could” and attempting small chuckles every few moments for her sake.
And to my surprise, it’s actually helping in a small way. Just hearing her voice rattling off anything, anything at all, braces
me. It’s not fixing me, mind you. But it’s stabilizing enough that I’m not getting any worse.
At least eight people are pacing in the massive room around me (all of whom are contributing to the manager’s stress). Most
with heads bent, mumbling to themselves as they stare at their papers. Some, like me, on their mobiles, getting their own
personal pep talks—that no doubt don’t include phrases like, “There’s someone for you, B. After all, there’s not a pot too crooked that a lid won’t fit.”
And as the long hand on the clock strikes twelve, I feel an urge to flip open my proposal folder and recheck everything. Just
one more time.
It’s unnecessary. I’ve checked to make sure my papers were all there and in order at least a dozen times.
But I have to see. I have to confirm it did not magically disappear in the past sixty seconds.
My one-sheet. Check.
My business card crafted on some site I’d never visited before, where I ordered two hundred for the sole purpose of this weekend
(and 197 still linger at the bottom of my bag). Check.
My sixty-page proposal prepared to tell literary agent Jack Sterling every single bloated thing about my life, career, and
book.
I don’t work as an ESL teacher. I am a philanthropic academian with a bent for loyalty and integrity in my fifteen years of
service.
I don’t have a gerbil named Biscuit my old roommate abandoned when she left me halfway through a yearlong lease. I am in the animal rescue service and provide therapy—via allowing Biscuit to come to my classes so my students can find comfort in stroking his soft black fur during anxiety-ridden testing weeks.
I do not have a newsletter of forty-six people comprised of 25 percent family and 75 percent students. I have a global-spanning
news outlet with a roster reaching people from twenty-seven countries and counting.
I have three sample chapters.
I have a pen I can gift him that has my name and email, just in case he loses my business card.
I have a paper clip with my name and email I can slip on my papers in case he loses my business card, and my pen, and my proposal
and folder, and all electronic receipts regarding my name and information.
I have... everything. Down to the bandages on my blistered heels from walking miles inside these conference halls the past
few days and attending classes about how unprepared I was to do something as idiotic as try to sell my book when “don’t you
guys know that two million new books come out each year?” and “let’s not even begin to think about the destruction wrought by AI.”
I’ve diminished beneath celebrity speakers sharing their glory stories of old, writing books on washers and dryers before
receiving the big phone call with the six-figure advance.
I’ve sat in on marketing classes informing me how I need to run a successful website, newsletter, blog, Goodreads, BookBub,
Instagram, Lemon8, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, X, and Clapper account before even considering reaching out to an
agent, because of course publishers can’t publish books without successful authors. Never mind that it’s impossible to be a successful author with a thriving platform on social media without actually having, you know, a book.
I’ve done one-on-one sessions only for editors to circle every page of my first seven and tell me precisely thirty-two things
I did flagrantly wrong.
I’ve been rejected by three agents during three pitches. The whole reason I came.
If dictionaries were made entirely of pictures, there’d be a large photo of me under the word defeated .
My eyes flicker up to the clock on the wall and I swipe at one particularly annoying lock of brown hair that keeps falling
over one of my eyes. The energy in the room is lifting. Shifting as people gather up their supplies and begin to stand.
“Are you done, Gloria?” I say into the phone.
She stops midsentence. “You feeling energized yet? ’Cause I can do this till the cows come home.”
“I’m up,” I say in a hush. “They’re about to open the doors.”
“All right, all right, I know you’re...”—she pauses, clearly hunting for a clichéd phrase—“busy as a cat on a hot tin roof,
so I’m going to cut to the chase ’cause this is key. Here we go!” she says, and I pull the phone from my ear after a thunderous
clap. “Repeat after me: I, Bryony Sophia Page, am a strong and intelligent woman—”
My mouth remains clamped shut.
“—and I don’t care if I have had three agents tell me my stuff was crap—”
The doors burst open, lanyards swinging from the necks of two conference staff. People begin to stream out.
“—or that that woman said my proposal wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on—”
My heart begins to beat frantically. I clear my throat. My jaw tightens.
“—and I will not waste my time on anyone who’s slicker than pig snot on a radiator—”
You can do this, Bryony. You have gotten this far—you can do this.
Do it for The Bridge.
Do it for your students.
Do it for you.
“—or waste my time on anyone who’s as useless as a screen door on a submarine—”
A young woman’s face is as red as a tomato as she walks unsteadily on skinny stilettos, eyes unfocused ahead as she clings to her dignity and, apparently, aims for a trash can.
Two more walk behind her, already pulling out their phones to break down everything that happened in the past fifteen minutes.
The fifteen minutes that feel like both a lifetime and a blink.
Fifteen minutes.
That’s all the time I have, ever again most likely, to sit before a real professional and give my novel a real shot.
“—because I am Bryony Sophia Page, summa cum laude in literature studies at NYU, beautiful woman with the voice of an angel—”
I flush slightly. I do like my voice.
“—and the best English teacher hundreds of your students have ever sat under. A world changer. And a heck of a writer with
a story to tell. My sister.”
“You changed your POV,” I murmur.
And sure enough she’s done it. She’s managed to put a hint of a smile on my face.
“I’m going back into court, but I’m calling for an update the second I get out.”
I nod and drop my phone tab down to silence it. Pause just before hitting the airplane button. Check one last time for a text
message from Parker. Nothing.
Still nothing.
Of course, he has his own life and his life is on the other side of the world currently, but still, I had hoped he would’ve
remembered to message me sometime today. Anytime, really. Given this moment has been all I’ve been able to think about the
past six months.
I shake my head, forcing myself to remember. It’s hard being in a long-distance relationship. And it’s particularly hard when it’s the middle of the night his time.
Every victory I’m awake for, eager to share about, he’s sleeping through. And vice versa. It’s hard to be present for somebody else when you can’t even see the sun and moon at the same time.
I push aside my pride, ignore the little internal wound of neglect, remind myself about that one conversation when he said,
“Bryony, it’s impossible to bother me when I’m asleep. I’m just over here dreaming of you. How much better is a conversation
with the real thing?” and quickly type the words : I’m about to go in. Final pitch appointment! Wish me luck.
It sounds a bit forced. And I’m rethinking the command to wish me luck, wondering if I should add something else, something
lighthearted and totally off topic, when the typing bubble on his end forms.
I stare as people start walking past me for the doors, my feet planted to the ground.
And then the text comes, and I exhale.
Good luck, B. They’d be crazy not to pick you.
A smile is plastered on my face as I turn off my phone. My lucky charm text came through.
I slip my phone into my bag.
Inhale deeply.
You know what? The failed pitch appointments simply don’t exist. They didn’t happen. They are all behind me and might as well
have been bad dreams. This is the only moment that counts.
I check the arrangement of the folder tucked under my arm one last time. Raise my chin. Focus on a confident stride. And walk
through the doors.
The pitch room is bright and emotionless and expansive. Twenty-five or so tables litter the room with two folding chairs on either side. Agents sit on the side facing the doors, nameplates on the tables, faces alert to the new charges coming through the doors. Scanning us with a flick of the eye first to our name badge and any accompanying glossy ribbons on our lanyard (i.e., multipublished author, TIFA award winner, contest finalist) and then continuing the scan for any other clues that they can scrape from our bodies. We’re the new recruits to the publishing army. One of us just may be, despite our pale faces and shaky gaits, the needle in the haystack they are hoping to find.
I already know what they see in me:
Bryony Page. Five foot five.
No lanyard of rainbow-colored ribbons falling down to my knees showing I’m important in any way.
Brown, uninteresting shoulder-length hair that matches the brown, uninteresting eyes and ensemble.
Department store clothing that shows, if you look closely, the hole where I pulled off the tag with my teeth. (So. At least
I’m classy.)
In other words, utterly unremarkable in any way.
Agent Kerry Cross’s eyes zing with mine as soon as I enter. She’s perched at her table directly ahead, fingers looped through
one another.
Immediately I avert my gaze.
She’s the one who told me not three hours ago that my writing was “like eating a burrito. Burritos are nice, but they aren’t
filet mignon. And the publishing industry is much too congested for a burrito .”
My eyes then land on Agent Tim Graves and ricochet away immediately like a bouncy ball let loose in the room. He was the one
I actually had a tremendously pleasant conversation with—fourteen of the fifteen minutes, that is. He nodded with what appeared
to be genuine interest as I rattled off details about my grandmother’s history and the inspiration for the novel. He read
my sample chapter thoughtfully. Laughed at my jokes. I remember I had glanced over while he read and actually felt sorry for the girl at the table to my right, sweating bullets as she tried to convince the disinterested agent on the other end
that her story was not a total rip-off of Orwell’s Animal Farm , that it was “just about a farm full of animals who overthrow the leadership and create a peaceful economy of their own...
but... in space .”
And then the one-minute bell rang, and I slipped out my business card, feeling incredibly sure of myself. I slid it over to him. Gave it a little tap with my index finger. Said in a quietly thrilled way, “Here’s my information. This was an absolute pleasure.”
And then, to my utter shock, he slid it back. “It was a true pleasure, Bryony. You’ve got real potential here. I look forward
to seeing it one day out in the world.”
And then he slid back everything toward me. All of it. As though he’d rented my materials from the library and had enjoyed them, but now it was time they return.
I slid my business card back. “That is so kind of you,” I said a little unsteadily. “I so respect your opinion in this business.
It would be an honor to work with you. Here is my email.”
At which point he slid it back, with a few more confusing and uplifting niceties. We slid it back and forth several more times, and long story
short, it was the timekeeper who eventually stepped in with a waiting conference attendee behind her, picked up the business card, and pushed it into my
hands. “He’s saying no . He’s saying he doesn’t want you .”
Apparently, as I found out later, Tim Graves has a reputation for being nice to the point that he is incapable of turning someone down to her face. He just spouts out compliments and avoids taking on folders until the attendees eventually
get it and walk away. Which worked for everyone, apparently, except the most desperate ones. Like me.
Okay. New plan.
I just can’t look at anyone in this room. Every time my eyes lock with someone else’s here, it’s a punch to my confidence.
I’ll just have to... keep my gaze to the floor, then find where I’m supposed to go by clues.
My eyes skirt around tables, focusing on shoes and laptop bags lying on the floor, and I glance up only for the briefest squint
at nameplates before ducking back down.
It’s not until I’m at the very end of the room, isolated from all the other tables deep in conversation, and wondering if
maybe I need to turn around, that I finally spot the name.
JACK STERLING.
His nameplate is askew.
He’s wearing a T-shirt. A charcoal-gray T-shirt—the kind of T-shirt that exudes quiet luxury in its simplicity. The mere fact
that you can’t tell if it’s part of a six-pack from aisle six of the grocery store or handspun in the Himalayas somehow makes
it all the more boastful. A blazer is tossed on the chair beside him.
His shoes are athletic. The brand name something foreign. His feet are crossed one over the other on the table as he leans back in his chair and thumbs through his phone, not a care in the world.
Not one single care.
He may as well be at home right now, watching soccer on the television.
One glance up to his face and there’s no question that this is the man I’m supposed to meet.
They are the same striking gulf water–green eyes as those on a dozen tabs on my laptop—every ounce of research I could find
about the senior agent of the titanic agency, The Foundry Literary. His squeaky-clean, freshly shaven face and perfectly trimmed
and oh-so-slightly swooped brown hair is plastered on everything from decade-old interviews about the state of the publishing
industry to the recent breakup announced on his former girlfriend’s Instagram page. (Yes, I, and every other crazy conference
attendee here, am a stalker.) Every single thing about his life and interests I could possibly find to help me create the
mask I would need to wear to impress him.
The same coffee order in his hand I’d learned through a podcast Q it’s actually been a bit of a drama).
Jack enjoyed skiing in places where the mountains in the backdrop were just, you know, the Alps. And the goggles over his
face were shiny in an intimidating, look-how-expensive-these-are kind of way.
All of these little facts lead to the glaring, waving red flag that is Jack Sterling. And all of this is what I want to cry
out to the people eyeing me and say, “I was number seventeen! He really was the only one left!”
The doors give a painfully loud creak and every face in the world seems to turn, looking for the person who is actually leaving —what time is it now? I cast my eyes to the clock above the door and feel a thud—with nine minutes and five seconds left.
Unbelievable. Someone has jumped up to ask conference staff if she can take my spot in the remaining minutes.
The conference vultures really need their own reality TV show.
The staff member gives an exasperated sigh, as though tired of dealing with a bunch of lunatics, which is entirely what this
place makes you become. “No. That’s her time. If she wants to leave during it, that’s her decision.”
I nibble on the bottom of my lip.
A thought bubble forms.
It is, though. Isn’t it?
It’s my decision to leave.
Agent Sterling didn’t officially throw me out. He didn’t say, “Nice to meet you, now leave.” In fact ... My wheels are turning, my breath coming more quickly as I begin to pump myself up. There is a real chance that the pitch
regulations require that agents and editors allow the full fifteen minutes. Maybe he isn’t allowed to force me out. I’ve paid all this money. Maybe he has to let me give my full pitch.
My insides are gnawing at me.
It’s a painful, hopeful plan I’m drawing up.
Putting my foot down isn’t my strong point.
Being an inconvenience to someone, or even thinking about the possibility of being an inconvenience to someone, is right up there with dropping into a tank of jellyfish. Unacceptable.
Standing here even considering being a five-minute inconvenience to Jack Sterling is enough to make me queasy.
I feel a buzz in my dress pocket and pull out my phone.
Gloria’s text comes in. GO brYONY. THIS IS IT! I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gloria tends to demonstrate how much energy she is giving toward something in the number of exclamation points. It’s actually
a bit of a problem in her line of work. The lawyers don’t exactly love it in their transcripts.
But sure enough, her text is just enough of a kick to get me to put my hand on the door handle. And once that is done, enough people’s eyes are on me that I feel myself propelled to open the door.
Step through.
Force my shoulders back a little more.
And march straight back to Jack Sterling’s table, steadily ignoring everyone’s gaze along the way.
I may not like him.
I may not actually want to work with him.
But with dozens of auto-response rejections in my inbox, three agent rejections down, and a thick manuscript I’ve spent years
writing in the dead of night on my desk, Jack Sterling is quite literally my last shot for getting my little (fine, massive)
book out in the world.
So, Jack Sterling, move over. Because here I (politely) come.