Plot Twist

Chapter 1 SIOBHAN

Chapter 1

S IOBHAN

As winter faded into a distant memory, the fresh air represented a sign of freedom to New Yorkers. People forgot about the discomforts of snow and ice; they stowed their coats in their closets and took to the streets again. Spring settles gently upon New York, beckoning like an invitation to live. It was one of those glorious early June evenings. The mercury was showing a balmy 68 degrees. The last rays of sun reflected in the skyscrapers, and the whole city seemed to shimmer like a poem. If she hadn’t already been late to meet Paige and Lena, she would have stopped to take a photo for her Twitter account.

Siobhan Harris @siobhan_harris 1m

I love #NewYork. The people, the traffic, the noise; that constant buzz, like there’s always something going on just around the corner.

She had been on Twitter a lot recently. Bella Watson, her literary agent, had stressed the importance of staying active on social media, especially in the early days. “Baxter Books is making a big investment in you. In return, you’ll have to do your part for this to work. An author’s image is crucial these days,” she had said at the contract signing some months earlier.

A few things had changed as a result of that meeting on the eleventh story of the colossus that housed the publisher’s headquarters in the heart of Manhattan.

First: the title of her novel. Only You was now With Fate on Our Side ; much more appealing, so Bella said.

Second: the format. Since Baxter Books had bought the publication rights, the novel was no longer available on WriteUp.

Third: Siobhan’s debts, or a substantial portion of them. Thanks to the publisher’s generous advance, she could live for a while without fear of eviction. And no more living off pastrami sandwiches! Yes, she still needed her job, but she hoped to soon have the great pleasure of writing a resignation letter, tossing it on her boss’s desk, and walking away with her head held high.

Dear (ironic mode activated) boss:

Fuck you. You and your shitty company. I’m a writer now, so DASVIDANIYA (or however the hell you say it).

And last, although certainly not least as far as she was concerned: her popularity. Siobhan had gone from 174 to 10,439 followers on Twitter since the publisher had revealed her to the world as “the next big thing in romance novels, coming this spring to steal readers’ hearts.”

Well, spring was here.

In every sense of the word.

As usual at that time of day, the Sky Room was packed. As soon as the sun came out, the rooftop terraces of Manhattan’s most imposing buildings turned into trendy happy-hour hot spots. The Weeknd’s latest hit was playing, low enough not to hinder conversation. Siobhan scanned the crowd for her friends and caught sight of them sitting in the lounge area overlooking Times Square.

“Sorry I’m late, girls,” she apologized, as she settled into a modern white armchair. “The Uber guy took ages to show up. Is this for me?” she asked, referring to the only untouched glass on the table, next to a scented candle.

“Yup. We ordered three flutes of champagne while we were waiting,” Paige explained. “And since we have a lot to celebrate tonight, we told the waitress to bring another round in twenty minutes.”

Paige D’Alessandro. Thirty years old. Wasp waist and hair like Jessica Chastain’s. She had an air of sprezzatura and would have looked elegant even with spinach in her teeth. She worked in public relations for a Wall Street bank whose reputation had gone down the tubes thanks to WikiLeaks, and, like many New Yorkers, she planned to become a millionaire by the age of fifty. She didn’t eat carbs—except for her grandmother’s bucatini all’amatriciana and Junior’s cheesecake when she had PMS—and did cardio four days a week to compensate for the calorific temptations that abounded in New York. She followed the latest trends and was up to date on all the celebrity gossip. Her motto was “Men are like shoes: you have to try on a lot of pairs before you find the right ones. And even then, you have to make sure you don’t wear them too long, or else they’ll start to aggravate you.”

“I’d better get a move on, then,” Siobhan said, before downing almost half her glass in one go.

Lena pushed her enormous black-rimmed glasses up her nose with her fingertip and adopted her usual expression: permanently at odds with the world.

“Have you written a negative review on the Consumer Affairs website? About the Uber guy,” she clarified. “Do it. Last week, Noor and I complained about a homophobic driver. If the two neurons in your heteronormative brain short-circuit just because a couple of girls kiss in the back seat of your car, maybe you need help.”

Lena Midlarsky. Twenty-nine. Five feet two inches of activism and ninety-nine pounds of don’t lay a finger on me if you know what’s good for you . At fourteen, she was expelled from school for a week for accusing the history teacher of antisemitism (most of her classmates didn’t even know what antisemitism meant; some thought it had something to do with porn). At sixteen, she announced that she wanted to be like Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta and shaved her head. At eighteen, she came out of the closet at her sister’s bat mitzvah. At twenty-two, she had a feminist tattoo inked on her arm. At twenty-four, she was arrested for disturbing the peace at an LGBTIQ+ demonstration. And at twenty-six, she announced she was moving in with Noor, a blogger of Palestinian descent who designed hijabs for empowered Muslim women and sold them on Etsy. None of this stopped her parents from believing she was a good Jewish girl and the best public interest lawyer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“Amen, sister,” agreed Paige. “Hey, Shiv, there’s a guy at twelve o’clock who keeps looking at you. Don’t turn round.”

“At me?”

“No, at Hillary Clinton,” replied her friend.

“Well, that would make sense, because Hillary’s more interesting than I am.”

“I disagree,” said Lena. “What’s so interesting about a woman tolerating her husband ejaculating on another woman’s dress?” Paige grimaced in disgust. “And the thing with Monica Lewinsky wasn’t even the first time. What’s the point in committing to another person if that person has no intention of respecting it? Hillary should have filed for divorce as soon as she suspected it. I know I would have.”

“Me too,” agreed Paige. “I would have grabbed Chelsea and all those wonderful Ann Taylor Loft pantsuits from my First Lady closet, and I would have gotten the hell out of the White House before that cynic dared to say, ‘I’m sorry. It was a mistake.’ And then I would have gone on Oprah to tell my story, because revenge is a dish best served on prime time.”

“Better going on Oprah than becoming a puppet of the system. To be honest, I don’t get why she allowed herself to be humiliated like that. The same woman who said on 60 Minutes that she didn’t plan to stay home and bake cookies. For god’s sake, she’s not Betty Draper!”

“And Bill Clinton isn’t exactly Don Draper.”

“Maybe she still loved her husband and that’s why she forgave him. That isn’t so ridiculous,” ventured Siobhan.

“But love is based on trust. How can you trust the person you share your life with after something like that?”

“Come on, girls, don’t get all deep and meaningful on me,” Paige said. “Anyway, in the extremely hypothetical case of Hillary Clinton being in this bar right now and being the epitome of the empowered twenty-first-century woman, that guy would still be looking at you, Shiv. And I’m not surprised because you look ... radiant. Are you having a fling, or have you been watching contouring tutorials on YouTube?”

Siobhan snorted.

“I’m not having a fling, Paige.”

“Hey, the occasional screw is not a bad thing. Did you know you can burn up to six hundred calories in just one session? I read it in Esquire. ”

Lena raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Six hundred calories. Uh-huh. I bet the author of that article is the one who wrote”—she made air quotes with her fingers—“‘Come ten times in a row without getting soft, tough guy. All you need is willpower.’”

“And Viagra,” added Paige. “Returning to Shiv’s sex life, I bet you ten bucks the only man who’s been down there recently is her gynecologist.”

“I’ll raise you twenty.”

Siobhan looked at her friends, feigning outrage, but then she dropped the act.

“I have a female gyno, so you owe me forty dollars. Don’t worry, I take payments on Venmo,” she said. “And you know me. I’m not into one-night stands. Sex is an emotional thing for me. If I slept with someone without being in love, I’d feel guilty.”

“That’s a very patriarchal way of thinking, Shiv.”

“You’re not one to talk, given that you and your girlfriend took forever to get to third base,” said Paige.

“Noor was still exploring her sexuality when we met. I didn’t want to pressure her.”

“Anyway,” Paige continued, turning back to Siobhan, “if you want to meet someone special, get married, and have children, a golden retriever, and a little house with a backyard in Rhode Island, you’d better get ready to be alone. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is New York; people don’t fall in love here. Much less after thirty. Everyone’s too busy for that.”

Thirty. What was the deal with that number? It seemed like the clocks started ticking faster after that.

The mere idea of taking Paige seriously made Siobhan want to fill her pockets with stones and walk into the river like Virginia Woolf. It wasn’t true that people didn’t fall in love anymore. It couldn’t be. Love deserved a victory once in a while, a happy ending.

A real one.

Not just in fiction.

Like Lena and Noor.

Or her parents.

“Anyhow, you’re on the market. You’ve only laid eyes on one penis in the last few years; seeing another should be your absolute priority from now on.”

“Why do I need a penis? I have a vibrator.”

“In the shape of a dolphin. It’s not the same.”

She was about to contradict Paige when Lena interrupted her.

“Okay, I’m tired of this phallocentric conversation. I don’t want to hear another word about penises. Do you realize we’ve all been here for ten minutes and we haven’t even brought up the really important thing yet?”

And with that, her friends pulled from their respective purses copies of With Fate on Our Side .

“Happy publication day, Siobhan Harris!” they shouted in unison.

Siobhan pressed her hands to her chest and thanked them.

“Oh my god! You didn’t have to buy it. I was going to give you each a copy.”

“And forgo the opportunity to tell the cashier in Barnes & Noble that our names appear on the acknowledgments page of the book of the year? No chance!”

“About that, thanks for the photos from the bookstore, girls. I forwarded them to my family. My mom told me Robin has told the whole of Mount Vernon that if they don’t buy my book, he’ll make their lives impossible.”

“Your jerk of a boss should be sued for not giving you the day off,” said Lena. “So, tell us, how does it feel?”

“I ... I don’t know, it’s a strange feeling,” she said, running her fingertips over her name printed on the cover. “It’s like this isn’t me at all, like I’m living someone else’s life. It’s been a crazy day: I had to put my cell phone on silent.”

“Have you heard from Buckley? I mean, did he call?”

Lena cleared her throat and shook her head several times.

“Paige ...,” she muttered. “Don’t mention the unmentionable, remember?”

“It’s okay, Lena,” Siobhan said. “Buckley is water under the bridge. And no, I haven’t heard from him, so I have no idea whether he’s aware of ... my new situation.”

“Does that mean you’ve finally stopped checking to see if he’s unblocked you on Facebook?”

Paige pressed her palms together imploringly.

“Come on, who’s still using Facebook?”

Siobhan took a sip of her drink before replying to Lena’s question.

“Technically.”

Her friendship with these two girls, whom she had met back in her college days, was priceless to her, but to admit to them that a small part of her still thought about her ex-boyfriend was a weakness she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, allow herself.

Lena was kind enough to redirect the conversation.

“Well, I hope you brought a pen.”

Ten minutes later, Siobhan had signed her first two books, taken a selfie with her friends to immortalize the moment, gone to the bathroom, bumped into a very tall man who smelled very nice, and returned. By then, the second round of drinks was on the table.

“If you had told me six months ago that a publisher like Baxter Books would take an interest in me, I wouldn’t have believed you. I got so lucky.”

“Lucky? Bullshit,” protested Lena. “Baxter Books is a company, and companies don’t like to lose money. They would never have taken a risk publishing an unknown author if they hadn’t been certain of your potential.”

“Lena’s right, Shiv. I have a vision of your future in the literary world and guess what: you’re a highly successful writer. In fact,” she added, in a confessional tone, “I tried to get someone in Barnes & Noble to tell me how many copies they had sold so far, and, although he said he couldn’t give me the exact number, he admitted it was selling well,” she said and then winked exaggeratedly.

“We’re really proud of you. Let’s toast to the start of a dazzling career. May you keep writing until you’re ninety and the arthritis in your fingers won’t let you type.”

“That’s the spirit!”

They raised their glasses and clinked them noisily. In that moment, Siobhan felt so grateful for her friends and the possibilities of this new life that she forgot about everything else.