CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If the chalkboard sign in front of The Lost Plot weren’t advertising AN EVENING WITH ANNA MATTHEWS, I’d say the place fell straight out of Anna’s brain.
With its mint-green facade draped in wisteria vines and the rosy glow emanating from latticed windows, it’s exactly the kind of place where an Anna Matthews heroine would work.
Or at least an old Anna Matthews heroine. The winsome, plucky kind who spends her time running a small business and trying not to flirt with the sexy baker next door. Not the kind who falls into murder conspiracies the way the others fall in love.
We wait in tense silence at the end of the check-in line. Grant can’t seem to decide how to stand. Arms crossed. Hands in pockets. Arms crossed again.
It’s a surreal moment, which is ironic given that it’s the first nonfiction thing that has happened to us in over a week.
Somewhere in the cozy shop before us, there’s a woman who can restore our regular lives with just a few clicks of a keyboard, the dragging of a Word document to a virtual trash can.
Can and will are two different things, of course. But if our cease-and-desist plea works, that will be the end. No more Lesley, no more Lissa, no reason for Grant and I to keep in touch. Eventually, we’ll go back to being strangers.
“You think we’ll ever cross paths again?”
I’m startled to hear Grant speak, and even more startled by the sense that he’s been sharing my thoughts. He doesn’t look at me, just stares toward the check-in table as we inch closer.
The yes that I want to say catches in my throat. “I don’t know” comes out instead, thin and flimsy.
I feel an urge to say more—to say I’ll look him up when this is over, to promise I won’t forget. To suggest we could get lunch or meet up for a walk. Stop into a bookstore to look at books, not to pull some kind of existential emergency self-destruct lever.
We could be friends, maybe. For real. People who may not have much in common outside of a shared fever dream, but are glad to know each other anyway.
Before I can speak, I’m interrupted by a sweet-sounding voice.
“Names, please?”
The young woman at the check-in table smiles at us, her round face framed by multicolored braids and her wrists full of friendship bracelets. She’s the one who should be the Anna Matthews leading lady. She even smells vaguely like baked goods.
Grant steps forward. “Hoffman,” he says. “Grant. Two of us.”
She bows her head toward the sheet, running a pink fingernail down the list of names, then comes to a jarring halt before she even gets to the B’s. She looks gravely back up, then slaps on a pale imitation of her previous smile.
“Could you give me just one second?”
She leaves us to our confusion and serpentines through the gathering crowd, toward the makeshift stage at the back of the store. A tall, impeccably sleek-haired, silky-bloused woman is setting out water bottles by each of the empty chairs there, turning them logo-out with machinelike precision.
The check-in woman approaches her and whispers something in her ear. Her head snaps up, her steely gaze cutting straight to us.
I’ve heard people who hate roller coasters say that the click-click-clicking toward the top is the worst part. I’ve never really understood that. Now, hearing this woman’s heels tick closer and closer on the hardwood floor, I think I get it.
“Mr. Hoffman?” Her voice is low and clipped. “I’m Leah Reynolds, Ms. Matthews’s personal assistant. I’m afraid we’re not able to admit you or your guest to this event.”
“What?” His brow is really out-furrowing itself as he digs in his pocket. “But I registered. Over a week ago. I have the confirmation right here.” He taps on his phone to pull up the email, but she puts a firm hand up to stop him.
“I received your registration,” she says sharply. “I also received the eighteen troubling emails you sent to Ms. Matthews claiming that you’re trapped in her story.”
I gape. Eighteen emails? We’ve only been here nine days. I knew he was desperate to get out, but … wow.
Grant is turning vaguely pink. “So she hasn’t seen them?”
“She has not, and she will not.” Leah sets her hands on the table between us with icy professionalism.
“I’m handling her communications while she works on her upcoming project, and I assure you, this won’t be going any further.
You can understand how dozens of unsolicited messages come off as a bit alarming.
So I must ask both of you to leave, and to stop harassing my employer.
No more pleas, no more demands, no more inexplicable poetry. Are we clear?”
Grant opens his mouth to speak, and I can feel him preparing to inform Leah that eighteen is not actually dozens. But he coughs out a humorless laugh instead.
“I—this is such a misunderstanding,” he says, raking a hand through his hair. “A funny story, actually.”
“So funny,” I echo.
“I am not interested,” says Leah. “But if you’d like, you can tell it to security as they remove you from the premises by force.”
Grant stares at her in the stunned silence of one who has clearly never been threatened with removal by security before. Leah crosses her arms, unflinching, and I give him a light backhanded tap on the shoulder.
“Come on,” I say, backing away. “Let’s go.”
Returning to the street in a daze, neither of us speaks for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” we both say. Grant’s brow immediately creases at me.
He is the only person I’ve ever met who can furrow his eyebrows in at least seven different ways.
An anxious furrow, an angry furrow, a judgmental furrow.
A very specific refusing-to-admit-it-was-cool-when-I-carjacked-his-Uber furrow.
Another one I can’t figure out. The one happening now is somewhere between surprise and confusion.
“I should have tried harder to help you track down Anna,” I say. All this time, I’ve been playing Action Hero and he’s been shooting out flares alone.
“I don’t think it would have made a difference,” he says, gesturing behind him toward the scariest personal assistant in all of London.
“But still. Of course you want out,” I say. “How could I blame you for wanting to leave a world full of murder and burning corpses and blood and guts—” Even saying it, I wince.
“Careful,” he says softly. I look up at him. Furrow of uh-oh, don’t puke concern.
He doesn’t deserve this. He deserves to have his comfortable life back, to go home and see his cat and never have to claw his way out of a headlock again.
He deserves to have someone fight for his peace the way he’s fought through this story.
“We can find a way in,” I say, determination welling up in me. No inbox-guarding assistant is going to gatekeep our lives from us. “Come on. There’s got to be a window or an air vent we can sneak into, right? Or we can disguise ourselves as waitstaff and get in that way.”
“Okay, first of all: that’s a sitcom you’re thinking of,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “That’s, like, a sitcom take on a spy mission. Second, this is an author discussion at an independent bookstore. I don’t think there will be waitstaff. I don’t even think there are refreshments.”
“Well, a back door, then,” I say, marching desperately toward the store.
“Roxie,” he says.
“Down this alley. There has to be a way to—”
“Roxie.” His hand closes on my arm. I turn around to face him, my heart pounding somewhere up near my throat. “Let it go,” he says, his voice as soft as it is resolute.
“But—”
“Let’s go for a walk,” he says, and it’s so unexpected that at first I’m not sure I’m hearing him correctly.
But he lets go of my arm and, with an exhausted kind of decisiveness, says, “That’s all I want to do.
I want to walk around and look at London and have a normal, quiet night. Can we just do that? Please?”
I don’t know what to say. A walk, of all things. I so badly wish I could do more for him, find some way to fix everything. But for now, one ordinary, low-stakes night is the best I can do. So I nod. And together, without another word, we turn away from the shop and head down the street.
· · ·
WE FOLLOW THE road past closed shops and bustling restaurants, through cool air and warm lights and Grant’s unbearable silence.
I’ve never known him to be like this. I keep trying to catch his eye, hoping for a hint to his state of mind—to figure out if quiet Grant is broken Grant or if this is the calm before the storm.
But with his focus on the road ahead, I’m only seeing him in profile—his jaw set, his lips pressed in thought.
After six or seven blocks, he draws a deep, steady breath, the way someone might take in the cleansing sea air. I wouldn’t accuse him of being relaxed—I doubt anyone ever has—but he seems reflective. What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going on behind that lightly scrunched brow.
He doesn’t speak at all until we reach the cobbled brick walkways of Covent Garden, where he turns to me with a serious expression.
“Are you hungry?”
I study his face, looking for signs of an imminent doom spiral, a hint of a breakdown, even a single anxious what-if. Nothing.
“I could eat,” I say.
And so we find ourselves drawn to the amber glow of a Greek restaurant, and our walk turns into a walk and dinner.
Settling in over a tray of pita and tzatziki, I’m about to cut to the chase and ask Grant if he’s really okay when he fixes me with a curious look.
“What would be your death row meal?”
I swallow a sharp bite. “Are you thinking this is your death row meal?”
“No,” he says. “I was just wondering what your favorite food is.”
There really is something a little more settled about him. Maybe he’s forgotten why we’re here or is simply too tired to panic anymore. In any case, I find it mystifying and also kind of nice.
“Churros,” I answer him. “Churros and Coke.”
“The soda or the drug?”
“Yes.”
He chuffs out his nose in a way that could almost be mistaken for a real laugh. “Not very nutritious,” he says.