Chapter 4
She’d barely unzipped her suitcase when two sharp knocks on the door made her flinch.
Who? Her imagination accelerated into high gear.
Panera Guy ? But the peephole revealed it was Graciela from the registration desk, carrying a cellophane-wrapped and beribboned plate of cheese and crackers and glistening red grapes.
“I am so sorry, Ms. Calloway,” she said, as Tessa opened the door. “I thought this was already in your room, but it was still in the kitchen fridge. I hope I didn’t—”
“How gorgeous!” Tessa took the chilled white platter, heavier than it looked. “From the hotel? Thank you. Again.”
As the door closed, Tessa put the cheese on the desk under the wall-mounted television, untied the periwinkle satin ribbon, then peeled the cellophane from the plate, revealing thin triangles of golden cheddar and white squares dotted with caraway seeds surrounded by an array of multishaped crackers.
Picking up the top piece of cheddar with her fingers, she took a bite, almost swooning with the rich, sharp creaminess.
A white notecard was tucked underneath the black linen napkin.
Call me the minute you get this, the typed note said. No matter how late. XO, Olivette .
Not from the hotel. From her editor. But Ollie wasn’t much of a talk-on-the-phone kind of person. So what was this about?
Bestseller list. Tessa had been trying all day not to think about it. She knew, everyone knew, that the all-important Sunday New York Times bestseller list was released on Wednesdays. This was Wednesday.
And Ollie wanted her to call. Please let me make the list, Tessa prayed to whatever muse might be listening, the gods on writing Olympus.
Making a deal. I’ll never complain again.
She thought of their new and shocking mortgage payments, and of the precious family back home relying on her, only her, to keep the Calloway engines running.
“Guess what?” Olivette answered on the first ring.
“Don’t make me guess, Olivette Iketa. Is everything okay?”
“More than okay. You made the list again, superstar. Holding at number two. Two weeks in a row. Only ‘she who will not be named’ is ahead of you.”
“That’s—”
“Put on FaceTime,” Olivette interrupted. “I want to show you something.”
Tessa smoothed her ponytail, knowing she must look frazzled, but she was too delighted to care. She touched the icon and Olivette appeared, chopped dark hair and enormous, black-framed glasses. She was at her desk at Waverly, Tessa recognized her big black chair.
“Ready for this?” Olivette said.
“For what?”
Olivette turned the phone and panned it across a row of smiling faces, each person lofting a champagne flute. “It’s your team,” she was saying. “Team Tessa. We’re all here, wildly celebrating.”
Tessa heard a chorus of praise and cheering, individual words unintelligible, but the support and joy wrapped around her, and her exhaustion vanished. All this could be hers—no, it already was. Team Tessa.
“We ordered the cheese this morning, by the way.” Olivette’s voice. “That’s how certain we were. We stayed late so we could toast you. And see? Carol’s here.”
Olivette was protecting her, making sure she noticed publisher Carol McClintock, in Chanel as always, and publicist Djamila Parekh, and Tessa’s agent, Sadie Bailey; all names in the acknowledgments of her book, all real people, all drinking champagne and applauding her.
Her. She’d wanted to write a novel since she was…
since the first time she’d read one. She scrawled her hopes in her precious pink diary in her loopy handwriting, and revealed her dreams to her mother, and to her best friend, and some nights, alone, she’d whispered them to the universe. I’ll give anything , she’d promised.
“Thank you,” was all she could think to say. Her face on the minuscule phone screen was distorted by the hotel room lighting, but she recognized her own joy. “This is—because of you.”
“And you, Tessa. And your fabulous Annabelle.” Carol, low-voiced but commanding, raised her glass, then touched it to the rim of Olivette’s.
“And Olivette,” Tessa said. “She plucked All This from the submissions and called Sadie and—”
“The rest is history,” Olivette said. “As long as you keep selling those books, you can have all the cheese you want.”
All the cheese. Tessa let herself fall backward onto the voluptuous row of pillows piled against the bed’s headboard, and stared at the stucco ceiling. Her colleagues were laughing and toasting, miles away, and her book had changed their lives. And hers. It would all be fine. It would.
“You okay, darling? Getting enough sleep?” Sadie asked. “Any issues at your events, anyone being too pushy?”
Tessa sat up at that question, seemingly out of nowhere. Was Sadie warning her of something? She remembered the probing questions at the bookstore.
“Why would you ask that? Is something wrong?”
“Of course not,” her agent said. “But I know you don’t like discussing your personal life. And—”
“In fact, yeah, we’re monitoring your socials,” Ollie interrupted.
“People can be jerks, frankly. Even… unpleasant. They’re jealous, or bitter.
Or feel you unfairly got some success that they didn’t.
Or maybe they love you—but maybe too devotedly.
We’ll keep that from you, though. Delete it.
Best we can. That’s our job. But be aware. ”
Aware? Tessa thought. Jerks? “Seriously. Did something happen?”
“Early flight tomorrow, Tessa, remember, doing my publicist duty here.” Djamila, who seemed to be changing the subject, flapped a white paper at her.
Tessa recognized her itinerary. Tessa was married to that schedule, with its dates and times and cities and flights.
Her own printed version was in a green file folder, with an electronic backup copy in a Google doc, and if all else failed, her public signing schedule was on her website.
Her agent, Sadie, had access to the doc, and Henry’s copy was printed out; she’d magneted it to the fridge.
Theirs had hotel phone numbers and specific airplane flights.
“Yeah, how well I know. Six a.m. departure.” She looked at the glowing green digits of the clock on her nightstand, her sleep time relentlessly disappearing. “Yikes, DJ. I might as well just stay up until then.”
Team Tessa—she thought of them like that now, hoped she always would—chorused “no” in unison.
She laughed, relishing how it felt to be the center of attention—impossible, once you had kids.
And it had been so long since she was anything but Mom, or honey, or Mrs. Calloway.
Not that there was anything wrong with that; she’d adored it.
There were trade-offs for everything, no one knew that better than she did.
“Seriously, no,” DJ said. “Do not stay up. Get some food, have a glass of wine, go to sleep. The car will come for you at four in the morning. It’s brutal, but you can sleep all the way to Phoenix.”
“I’ll be fine. See?” Tessa stood, turning her phone camera lens to show her room. “I’m looking for the carryout menu now.” She opened the drawers of the dresser. All of them empty, pungent with cedar and disuse. “I love the cheese. And I love you. Thank you for everything.”
She clicked off to another chorus of cheering and raised glasses, reluctant to let them go.
She’d visited a different city every day, inhabited different but similar hotel rooms, raced through different but similar airports.
She wore an Apple watch on one wrist, showing book-tour time, and a regular watch on the other wrist, set to the time at home.
After the initial tour euphoria, Tessa sometimes felt as if she were never really anywhere, spending less than twenty-four hours in any one place.
And her connection to her family, only virtual, felt infinitely fragile. Her reality filtered through screens.
But it was the internet, she couldn’t forget, that had changed her life.
Her live social media broadcast of her “my one life” departure from her job had engendered a groundswell of support, and she’d continued to post weekly about her journey—its joys and its treacheries, its perseverance and sacrifices, through Linny’s first chapter book and Zackie’s last day of kindergarten, eventually revealing her tentative early writing, and her rejections and disappointments and finally, triumphs.
She wore sunglasses, sometimes, and floppy hats, on the days she felt nervous about who might be watching.
Her followers had shared their hopes, too, and Tessa’s socials grew a supportive following, and #MomsWithDreams became the virtual hub for her journey.
Someone crafted a My One Life T-shirt with colored markers.
Another a stretchy friendship bracelet with #MomsWithDreams in blue beads.
A woman in Tucson sent Tessa those periwinkle “sky’s the limit” earrings.
Tessa still wondered how the woman had gotten her home address, but now she wore blue earrings every day.
And her followers copied her; found their own blue jewelry, and traded bracelets with the book’s title, like their badges of solidarity.
Tessa had shared the book auction, the sale, the glowing reviews and the buzzy publicity, with her social media followers cheering every victory. “We made the cover blue, periwinkle blue, just for you, #MomsWithDreams,” Tessa had told them.
Then the social media fairy dust landed on her.
A soon-viral photo showed Hollywood’s it girl cradling an advance copy of Tessa’s book.
MAKE IT YOURS ! she’d urged her millions of followers, captioning the photo in huge font embellished with a spiral of animated hearts.
WE ARE ALL ANNABELLE . Overnight, every reader and bookstore and library demanded copies of All This Could Be Yours .
And clamored to see Tessa Calloway in person. Her wildest dreams had come true.
To keep them, she simply had to be Zoom Mom and Zoom Wife for a while longer.
And she had to stay lucky.
True, Annabelle said. And stay careful.
But where was Henry? He’d call back in ten minutes, he’d said. It had been longer than that.
Henry had heard “a sound.” And then hung up. She felt the thousand miles gaping between them, as excruciatingly unconquerably distant as if her family lived in another galaxy. Anything— anything —could be happening at home. And not a thing she could do about it.