Chapter 32
Ellie
The auction took eleven days.
Marcus had warned me it could take that long — sometimes longer, he said, sometimes it resolves in an afternoon and sometimes editors need weeks to get acquisitions committees to sign off, and there was no way to predict which kind of auction this would be until it was already happening.
I tried to keep working during those eleven days.
I had the new manuscript — past the hundred-page mark now, the two careful people finding their way through their own version of the dark moment, which I was writing with an honesty that occasionally startled me, the line between the fiction and the actual thing it was processing thinner than it had ever been in anything I'd written before.
But concentration was difficult.
Every time my phone buzzed I looked at it. Every email notification produced a small jolt of anticipation followed by the specific deflation of it being something ordinary — a distributor invoice, a customer newsletter signup, nothing.
Jo noticed, of course.
"You're going to wear a hole in the counter," she said, on day six, watching me check my phone for what was probably the fortieth time that morning. "Marcus will call when he calls. Checking your phone every four minutes isn't going to make the call come faster."
"I know that intellectually."
"But."
"But apparently my hands don't believe what my brain knows."
She laughed, and took the phone from me, and put it behind the counter where I couldn't see it, which helped for approximately twenty minutes before I went and retrieved it under the pretense of checking the time.
Noah called every night, same as always, and on day eight he asked the question I'd been avoiding asking myself.
"What happens," he said, "if it doesn't sell. If the auction falls through, or the offers come in lower than Marcus hoped, or—"
"I've thought about it," I said. "I think I'm okay.
Genuinely. Three months ago that question would have ended everything for me — if it doesn't sell, the whole three years of not-writing would feel confirmed, vindicated even, proof that I'd been right to put it away.
Now—" I paused, finding the actual shape of the feeling.
"Now I think even if this specific manuscript doesn't sell, something has already changed that doesn't depend on the outcome.
I'm writing again. I have a hundred pages of something new.
Marcus believes in the work regardless of what any individual editor decides.
The auction either happening or not happening doesn't undo any of that. "
"That's a healthier place to be than I think I'd be in your position."
"I had good teaching," I said. "Someone explained to me recently the difference between facts and verdicts."
I could hear him smile through the phone.
"That guy sounds insufferable," he said.
"He has his moments."
The call came on day eleven, a Thursday, at eleven in the morning, while I was helping a customer find a gift for her sister's graduation.
I saw Marcus's name on the screen and excused myself — "I'm so sorry, I need to take this" — in a voice that probably gave away more than I intended, because the customer, a stranger I'd never met, said, "Go, go, take it, I'll wait," with the specific generosity people show when they recognize a moment mattering to someone else.
I stepped into the storeroom.
"Tell me," I said, instead of hello.
"Three offers," Marcus said. "I want to walk you through all of them properly, but the headline is — Ellie, the headline is we have a deal. A good one. Better than I projected, honestly, which I don't say too many clients on a first sale."
I sat down on a box of returns.
"Which house," I said. My voice did something strange, climbing slightly, the words coming faster than I meant them to.
He told me.
I knew the imprint. I had shelved their books for nine years, knew their list, their aesthetic, the specific kind of literary attention they brought to the writers they chose to publish.
It was, in every way that mattered to me, exactly the kind of home I would have chosen for the book if I'd been allowed to choose freely from every option in publishing.
"They want a two-book deal," Marcus continued.
"This one and an option on the next, with real numbers attached to both, not a token option clause.
Their editor — I want you to talk to her directly before we finalize anything, but Ellie, she read it twice.
She told me she read it once for the story and then immediately again because she wanted to understand how you'd built the structure.
That's not common. Editors don't usually have time to read submissions twice. "
I was crying.
Not dramatically — quiet tears, the kind that arrive without warning and continue without your permission, sitting on a box of returns in the storeroom of a bookshop I had worked in for nine years, holding a phone with news that undid three years of a story I had told myself about who I was and what I was capable of.
"Ellie?"
"I'm here," I said. "I'm just — give me a second."
"Take your time."
I took several seconds. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. Breathed.
"Okay," I said. "Tell me the rest."
He told me the rest — numbers, timeline, the production schedule that would put the book on shelves in roughly fourteen months, the option clause for the second book, the specific next steps that needed to happen this week.
I listened to all of it.
Then I called Noah.
He was in a meeting, his assistant told me, sorry, could she take a message — but I must have said something in my voice that made the assistant pause, because thirty seconds later Noah was on the line, slightly breathless, having clearly excused himself from whatever room he'd been in.
"What happened," he said immediately. "Is everything okay?"
"It sold," I said.
Silence on the line for a beat. Then: "It sold."
"Two-book deal. The house I would have picked if anyone had asked me to pick. The editor read it twice, Noah. Twice."
"Ellie." His voice had gone thick in a way I'd never heard from him before, even during the hardest conversations of the last two months.
"Ellie, that's — I need you to know I'm standing in a hallway outside a meeting with my publicist right now and I don't care even slightly, this is the only thing that matters right now. "
"You should go back to your meeting."
"The meeting can wait. This can't." A pause. "I am so proud of you I don't have the right words for it, and I write for a living, which tells you something."
I laughed, wet and real, still sitting on the box of returns.
"I want to celebrate with you properly," he said. "Not on the phone. I want to be there, actually there, when this fully sinks in."
"You can't," I said. "You're three thousand miles from being able to do that right now and we both know it."
"I know. I'm saying it anyway because it's true." A pause. "When's my next visit?"
"Eleven days."
"That's too long for this. I want to do something now."
"Noah, you have a meeting—"
"Hold on," he said.
I heard muffled conversation, his hand over the phone, something exchanged with someone in the hallway. Then he was back.
"Look outside your shop," he said.
"What?"
"Just look. Outside the front window."
Confused, I left the storeroom, walked through the shop — the customer from earlier waved, having apparently waited, bless her — and went to the front window.
Carol was standing on the sidewalk with a tray. Not just any tray. A full tray of pie, the good apple, four slices, and behind her, walking up Main Street with what was clearly purpose, was Jo, who had apparently left wherever she'd been to come do exactly this.
"What did you do," I said into the phone, laughing now, fully.
"I called Carol while you were telling me about the deal," he said.
"Told her to put something together. I know I can't be there.
I wanted there to be pie regardless. I wanted Wren Falls to know before the day was over, because that town has been rooting for you since before I even understood what I was watching. "
I stood in the bookshop with tears on my face, watching Carol set up an impromptu celebration on the sidewalk outside the window, Jo arriving and immediately understanding and hugging the confused but delighted customer who had clearly been roped into something she didn't fully understand but was thoroughly enjoying.
"I love you," I said into the phone.
"I love you too," he said. "Go eat pie with our town. I'll see you in eleven days and we'll do this properly."
"Our town," I repeated.
"Our town," he confirmed. "I think it adopted both of us a while ago, if we're honest."
I hung up, wiped my face one final time, and went outside into the May sunshine to eat pie on Main Street with Jo and Carol and a stranger who would, I suspected, be telling this story for years, while somewhere in New York Noah Calloway stood in a hallway having just rejoined a meeting he didn't care about, having done the thing he always did now without my having to ask.
Made sure I knew, immediately, that I wasn't alone in this.
That whatever the distance cost us, it had not cost us that.