Chapter 12 Maggie #2
I’d been too scared to fight for it. Too new, too young, too convinced that Patricia knew better than I did. That my instincts weren’t worth trusting.
Decades of experience told me differently now.
“You’re right,” I said. “I shouldn’t be scouting projects. I should be doing my job.” I took a breath. “But I’ve read enough to know what works. And this works. It’s not safe, but safe doesn’t win National Book Awards.”
Patricia’s eyebrows rose. In twenty-three-year-old Maggie’s tenure here, I had never talked back. Had never done anything but nod and smile and swallow my opinions like they were medicine I didn’t want to taste.
“Is that so,” she said.
“Yes.” My heart was pounding, but my voice stayed steady. “I know I’m an assistant. I know my opinion doesn’t count for much. But I also know that Harrison & Webb hasn’t broken out a debut author in three years, and that the imprint’s reputation for discovering new voices is—”
“Careful.”
“—is not what it used to be.” I made myself hold her gaze. “This could change that. If you let it.”
The silence stretched. I could hear the typewriters in the bullpen, the phones ringing, someone arguing about royalty percentages three offices away. Patricia’s cigarette smoldered in its ashtray, a thin thread of smoke curling toward the water-stained ceiling.
This is it, I thought. This is the moment where I get fired.
But I didn’t want to take it back. Didn’t want to smooth things over, apologize, retreat to my desk and my slush pile and my small, safe life. I’d spent a lifetime playing it safe. Where had it gotten me? A corner office and a condo and no one to call on Valentine’s Day.
This isn’t about Jack, I realized with sudden clarity.
This is about me. About who I want to be. About whether I’m going to keep running from everything that scares me, or whether I’m finally going to stand still and fight.
Patricia was still watching me. Evaluating. Making calculations I couldn’t see.
“The prose,” she said finally. “It’s literary. Quiet. The market isn’t kind to quiet right now.”
“The market changes. The prose is permanent.”
A pause. Then incredibly, impossibly, the corner of her mouth twitched.
“You know you’re too young to talk to me like this.”
“Probably.”
“And too junior to be recommending acquisitions.”
“Almost certainly.”
She picked up the manuscript again. Flipped to a page near the middle. Read something that made her eyebrows draw together in concentration, not displeasure.
“I’m going to read it,” she said. “The whole thing. And if it’s half as good as you seem to think it is, we’ll talk about next steps.”
My heart was still pounding. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” She set the manuscript in her to-read pile, the real one, not the polite-rejection one. “If this is a waste of my time, you’re going to wish you’d stuck to fetching coffee.”
“Understood.”
I turned to go. My hand was on the doorknob when she spoke again.
“Maggie.”
I looked back.
Patricia was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Something that might have been approval. Or surprise. Or just the interest of a woman who’d spent thirty years in this industry watching young editors burn out at an alarming rate.
“That was either very brave or very stupid,” she said.
“I’m hoping for brave.”
“We’ll see.” She waved me out. “Close the door on your way.”
I closed the door.
Then I stood in the hallway outside her office, shaking with adrenaline and something that felt like triumph, and thought, I did that. I did that for me. Not for Jack, not for some romantic gesture, but because I believed in something and I stood up for it.
Maybe that was what the voice had meant. Maybe the choice wasn’t really about staying or going, about Jack or no Jack, about love or safety.
Maybe the choice was about becoming someone worth staying for.
Lunch was sandwiches with Diane at the little place near her office. Tuna melts and too much coffee and the comfortable rhythm of best friends who’ve known each other long enough to sit in silence without it being awkward.
“You look different,” Diane said, studying me over her sandwich.
“You said that this morning.”
“You look more different now.” She tilted her head. “Did something happen?”
I thought about Patricia’s office. The manuscript. The way I’d stood my ground instead of backing down. It felt like a secret, not because I was hiding it, but because I wasn’t sure yet what it meant.
“I stood up for something today,” I said. “At work. Something I believed in.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe something.” I took a bite of my sandwich. “It felt good, though. Scary, but good.”
“Scary-good is usually a sign you’re doing the right thing.” Diane stole one of my chips. “Speaking of scary-good, how’s Jack?”
“In New York. His interview’s today.”
“And you’re not climbing the walls with anxiety?”
“I’m absolutely climbing the walls with anxiety.” I smiled. “But I’m trying to let him have his thing without making it about me.”
“Look at you, growing as a person.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
She laughed, and something about the sound of it—warm, easy, completely unselfconscious—hit me with a grief I hadn’t been expecting.
In my first life, I’d had this. This friendship, this effortless intimacy, this woman who could read my face like a book and loved me anyway. And I’d let it slip away.
Not dramatically, not with any single betrayal or falling-out, but gradually, the way all neglected things die—unanswered phone calls becoming unreturned messages becoming holiday cards becoming nothing at all.
By the time I was forty, Diane had been reduced to a name I’d mention at cocktail parties.
Oh yes, my old roommate. We’ve lost touch.
Said with a shrug, as if losing your best friend were the same as misplacing your keys.
I’d been so careful about protecting myself from the people who might leave that I’d driven away the person who never would have.
“Hey.” I set down my sandwich. “Can I say something weird?”
“Always.”
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. And I don’t tell you that enough. Or ever, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever said it.”
Diane blinked. For a moment, her composure slipped, the mask of breezy confidence she wore like armor, and I saw the real her underneath.
The woman who showed up every time without being asked, who canceled her own plans to take me to movies when I was sad, who never once made me feel guilty for needing her.
“Where is this coming from?” she asked.
“I just… realized something. About the door-closing thing.” I took a breath.
“I’ve spent so much time worrying about the big choices—Jack, my career, all the dramatic crossroads stuff—that I forgot about the quiet ones. The choice to call your best friend back. The choice to show up for brunch. The choice to say you matter to me before it’s too late.”
I looked at her across our tuna melts. “I don’t want to be someone who figures that out when it’s too late.”
Diane’s eyes were suspiciously bright. She blinked hard, twice, and then reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“You’re really freaking me out. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“Like, should I be concerned? Is this a cry for help? Are you dying?”
“I’m not dying. I’m just trying to be less terrible at the things that matter.”
“Well.” She squeezed my hand again, harder. “For what it’s worth, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had too. Even when you’re being a pain in the ass. Which is most of the time.”
“Most of the time.”
“Solid ninety percent.”
“That feels high.”
“It’s accurate.” But she was smiling, the real smile, the one that said I love you and I’m not going anywhere.
“Now eat your sandwich before it gets cold. I have a meeting at two and I refuse to be emotional in front of my coworkers.”
We finished our sandwiches and walked back to our respective offices through the cold, arm in arm, and I thought about how different this was from my first time through 1987.
The first time, I’d kept Diane at arm’s length, close enough to call a friend, distant enough that she never really knew me.
I’d done that with everyone, back then. Built walls and called them boundaries.
Pushed people away before they could leave first.
This time, I was letting her in. Letting Jack in. Letting myself be known, even when it terrified me.
That’s the real change, I realized. Not the timeline. Not the magic. Me.
The afternoon was a blur of paperwork and phone calls and the particular tedium of an editorial assistant’s life.
I tried to focus on the slush pile, but my mind kept wandering—to Jack, to Patricia, to the dreams that had been haunting my sleep.
And to that manuscript. Chester and his cat and his list. I kept thinking about the dual voices—Louie watching from outside with that animal patience, Chester narrating from within, trying to organize his grief the way he’d once organized library shelves.
Eleanor’s reading chair still holding the shape of her.
The routines that were all he had left, the scaffolding that kept everything from collapsing.
And that cat, sitting on the list, washing his paw, refusing to leave.
At 4 PM, I pulled out my notebook and wrote down everything I could still remember, desperate to preserve what was left:
Emma Owens. Sarah’s daughter. Harvard. Pre-med. Pediatric oncology. Red Sox cap in the hospital. Charlotte’s Web. She called me Aunt Mags. She asked me to keep showing up. I promised.
A whole person reduced to bullet points. But it was something—evidence that she’d existed, that I’d loved her, that the promise I’d made in that hospital room had once been the most important thing in my life.
The phone rang. I grabbed it on the second ring.
“Harrison & Webb, this is Maggie.”
“Maggie.” Jack’s voice, breathless and bright. “They want me.”
“What?”