Chapter 7
Present Day
It’s never a good idea to start a conversation with my mother when I’m already in a bad mood, but I’m too irritated by my last interaction with West to give it much thought when her name appears on my phone. I stab the answer button.
“Hey, Mom.” I sound every bit as sullen as I feel, sitting on the white steps in front of Old Main. “What’s up?”
On the other end of the line, I hear a door closing, and I picture her stepping outside to pace up and down the driveway while we talk. “Did you make it to Tucson?”
“No, sorry, my plane crashed.”
She doesn’t dignify my snark with a response. “How’s the festival?”
Warm and sunny and horrible. “There’s a problem with my schedule, but—”
I let the end of that sentence fall off a cliff.
“What problem?” she asks sharply. I fear she’s logging in to Facebook as we speak, righteous indignation at the ready.
“It’s nothing,” I insist, well aware that it’s too late.
In my distraction, I dipped a toe into the topic I’m always dodging with her.
Silence stretches from here to San Diego, but I’m too flustered by the last hour of my life to fill it with anything but the truth.
“They have me sharing a stage with someone I’d rather avoid. ”
“Do they know who you are?” she asks without a hint of irony.
“Mom—”
“No, I’m serious. They’re lucky to have you!”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that,” she exclaims as I writhe in silent misery. Defending me is my mom’s favorite (and most problematic) pastime. She thinks everything I write is perfect, and anyone with a different opinion is wrong, as she likes to tell me—loudly—every chance she gets.
I don’t give her many chances. I’d rather listen to earned criticism than her empty praise and relentless positivity.
She wasn’t always supportive. Daphne says she’s overcompensating for her attitude toward my writing when I was younger, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
A few weeks after my third book came out, in the midst of my career implosion, I fled home to wallow in misery and lick my wounds.
Instead of, I don’t know, buying me ice cream or giving me a hug or venting in private, she used her public social media accounts to argue with readers in the comments of my bad reviews.
Like when a guilty party doubles down on her innocence, it made everything worse.
Similar to my recent conversation with Dr. B, I need this one to end. I don’t want anyone to be proud of me before I’ve earned it. “Forget about it. It’s not important.”
“What about the new book? Are you selling it at the event?”
“No. It’s not out yet,” I remind her.
“I can’t believe you haven’t given me an early copy.”
“No one got an early copy,” I point out. I could give one to her, of course, but I can’t handle the inevitable compliments. Not until I know whether or not I can trust them.
“But I’m your mom! And I’ve preordered it from three different stores! Shouldn’t that count for something?” she asks.
In the background, my dad yells, “Send your mom a book!”
“Debbie asked if it was going to be an improvement over your last one, so I told her not to talk to me until she understands art. By the way, you never responded to my text about the Page Turner.”
I sigh and rub the heel of my hand into my eye. “I forgot.” Sensing this conversation is far from over, I stand and walk back toward the lawn.
“I was talking to the event coordinator—Marilyn, have you met her? She blocked off a few dates for you to do a signing with them if you decide to come home this summer.”
“I told you my publicist does my event planning—”
“Tell your publicist to book it. I’ve already told all my friends about it, so you’re guaranteed to have an audience.”
I sigh. A book signing filled with women who have been guilted into attending might be my final straw. “I don’t know when I can next make it home,” I say in lieu of the truth, which is that I don’t know if I could survive the dissonance of being given a grand homecoming.
“Nonsense. You haven’t seen Lucy since she started walking!
Oh! Did I send you the video?” Without waiting for my answer, she launches into a story about my niece, and it takes ten more minutes to get her off the phone, at which point I’ve found Daphne in the outdoor patio section of the authors’ lounge.
I sink into the seat across from her and rest my chin on my threaded fingers while I wait for her to remove her AirPods.
“You’ll never guess who I just ran into.
” Around us, tables are dotted with authors gossiping and eating and resting between panels.
I exchange cursory waves with a handful of people, but events like this tend to be cliquey.
If Daphne weren’t here, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to show my face.
The crochet hook in Daphne’s hand pauses. She studies me for a long moment, and then her eyes widen. “West is here?”
“How’d you know?”
“The look on your face. Fury mixed with…well, something I can’t put my finger on. Revenge, maybe? It’s intense,” she muses as she resumes stitching a fuzzy pink blob that she claims is two-thirds of a halter top. “Plus, he’s local.”
I blink in surprise. “When did he leave New York?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I heard it in passing.”
As I sit back to process this, I’m struck by the distinct and unpleasant feeling of being watched. I look around, and unless I’m imagining it, gazes scatter. “Is everyone looking at us?”
“No!” Daphne says quickly, but then she glances around and hesitates. “No,” she says again, this time with much less certainty. “What happened with West?”
“We argued. I yelled at him. As expected.”
“What’d you argue about?”
I pull my attention from the whispers at the next table. “He was added to my Sunday panel.”
The disbelief on her face fills me with smug vindication. “They want you to share a public stage with him?” she asks.
“Can you believe it?”
“Did he even attempt to apologize?”
“What do you think?”
She leans toward me, eyes fierce. “What are you going to do?”
The breeze swirls her hair around her shoulders like the palm fronds above us. I tip my head back and close my eyes with a sigh. I swear I haven’t felt the sun in four months.
“I thought I could get him kicked off my panel, but my first attempt didn’t go well.”
“What happened?”
“I asked to speak to the director, and he called me a Karen.”
“The director did?”
“No.” I sigh regretfully. “I didn’t get past the undergrad volunteer. It was West who said it.”
“He shouldn’t have said that. You have a right to stand up for yourself.”
“He shouldn’t have said a lot of things, but here we are. I haven’t even told you the worst part yet,” I add.
“How is sharing the stage with your professional nemesis not the worst part?”
“Because the worst part,” I say with my eyes still closed, “is that West thinks he beat me.”
I can see his smirk in my mind, can hear his smug voice. Likewise, Darling. Darling! He’s never called me that in his life. It was always Mars. Occasionally Jupiter.
West thinks he won this round, and I hate that.
I hate that he knows he got under my skin and that there’s not a single inch of this campus that’s not colored with memories of him.
I hate that without even looking, I know that across the crowded lawn, the library peeks over the tops of food trucks and white vendor tents.
I’m surrounded by land mines; anywhere I go, I’m at risk of having my hard-fought peace blown up by something as innocuous as the biography section on the third floor of Main Library.
“Well, what’s your plan to show him that he didn’t?” Daphne asks.
I sigh again. “I don’t know.”
“I know an Etsy witch who charges six dollars to put a curse on your enemies.”
I snort. “Of course you do. Enough about my drama. How’s writing?”
She makes a dramatic dying-animal sound as she slumps onto the table.
“I thought you were doing final edits?”
“Oh, that!” She brightens. “Yeah, I turned those in last week. Now I’m working on something new, and it’s going even worse than this.
” She holds up her lopsided top. “But my editor saved my life by pointing out that my main character needed a stronger motivation for tracking down the killer. I’ve decided to go with a revenge arc.
Should I send her a sourdough starter as a thank-you? ”
“Absolutely,” I say with a bit too much enthusiasm.
She unpicks a stitch. “How’s yours doing?”
“My what?”
“Your sourdough. Did you follow the instructions that came with it?”
I crumble under the slightest interrogation. “It was so many pages, Daph. Why do I need to read so many pages to eat bread?”
Her mouth turns down in the corners. “Is that a no?”
“Regrettably, it’s a yes, and this thing has taken over my kitchen and my life and my mental health.”
“Well, have you made any bread yet?”
“No! But I don’t want it to go to waste, so I keep feeding it, and it keeps growing, and I’m not convinced it won’t swallow my building whole while I’m gone this weekend.
Say goodbye to Park Slope, because it won’t exist by this time next month.
” I just barely refrain from pointing out that if she hadn’t moved to California last year, we would still be roommates in Brooklyn, and none of this would be an issue.
Daphne’s spit take soaks our table. We’re mopping it up with flimsy napkins when a small voice pulls our attention. “Um…excuse me?” Two teen girls in Torcher for Life T-shirts hover just outside the patio. One of them nudges her friend forward. “Your turn,” she whispers.
“Are you Margot Darling?” the second girl asks, and it’s habit more than anything that makes me wince.
“She is!” Daphne beams. “Nice shirts, by the way. I have the same one.”
“Are you signing books?” the girl asks me, and the hopeful note in her voice makes my shoulders relax. Only fans call themselves Torchers—I should have known they came in peace. “I’ll be in one of the tents on Sunday morning.”
“We’re going home today, and we drove two hours just to meet you,” she says, still hopeful.
My eyes widen. “Really? Even though I—” Fucked up beyond measure, I don’t say, because Daphne’s foot comes down hard on my toes.
“She’d love to sign them,” Daphne says.
Muscle memory takes control, and I usher the girls forward so I can sign and personalize all six books.
Then we hug and take pictures, and I feel like I’m floating as they walk away.
Meeting someone who loves the thing I made never gets old.
There was a time—right up until about ninety seconds ago—when I worried those days were over.
Daphne shakes her head. “They woke up today and decided to spend four hours driving to meet you.”
“Weird, right? They could have watched, like, a hundred YouTube videos in that time.”
“Mars. They drove all this way just to meet you!”
“My ego is big enough, don’t make it worse.”
Daphne spins her finger in a circle. “The festival is expecting a hundred and twenty-five thousand attendees this weekend, hundreds of whom are here to see you. You’re not a Karen; you’re Margot fucking Darling!
Your book has sold in twenty countries. The movies have made hundreds of millions of dollars.
You are the star here. If you don’t want him on your panel, do something about it. Start your revenge arc!”
“No character jokes,” I groan.
“Mars!”
“Fine. You’re right. You’re right!” I stand up, jostling the table and knocking Daphne’s yarn to the ground. I bend to help her clean up, but she shoos me away with the flick of her wrist.
“Go!” she orders.
I nod once, my determination growing and solidifying in real time. “Yes. Good. I’ll make West sorry he bothered to show up.”
“Good.” She nods in approval. “And after you do—stop thinking about him.”
“What?”
She gives me a small smile that could be either pity or pride. “You’ve worked hard to be here, Mars. Don’t let him get in your head.”