Chapter 18
The phone rang while Fiona was still in her robe, sipping coffee. Across the room, the cursor blinked on a page she hadn't touched.
Rachel. The name sat on the screen, patient and impossible to ignore.
She picked up.
"Well, look at that," Rachel said. "She answers. This is getting to be a habit with you. Actually taking my calls."
"Don't get used to it."
"Oh, I'm framing this day. Marking the calendar." Papers shuffled somewhere in a city far to the north. "How's the hideout?"
"It's not a hideout. It's a writing retreat."
"Honey, you've been on a writing retreat since February. At some point it's just where you live."
Fiona looked out at the dune grass, at the Gulf going about its business beyond it. She didn't have an answer for that.
"Anyway," Rachel said, and her voice shifted. "That's not really why I called. Well, it's sort of why I called. I wanted to make sure you knew. Because knowing you, you're out there with your head literally in the sand and no clue what's happening in the real world."
"Knew what?"
"The news broke. About the deal."
Fiona set down her mug. "What do you mean, broke?"
"I mean it's out. It got picked up at the start of the week. When you didn't text me, I figured you either hadn't seen it or you'd gone full hermit." A breath. "It's everywhere, Fee. I mean it. The whole industry's buzzing."
The whole industry. Her stomach dropped.
"How is it everywhere? I just signed the other day."
"These things leak. Somebody talks to somebody, an assistant talks to a reporter, and then it's a headline and everyone pretends they had it first." Rachel said it the way a person describes weather.
"It's a good story. Reclusive bestseller, never shown a face, fifteen books, and now this monster of a new deal.
People love that. The advance numbers got out, which I'm not thrilled about, but I won't lie. It didn't hurt the noise."
"The numbers got out."
"Ballpark. Close enough to the real ballpark that it made people sit up."
"People I've never met are reading a number with my name on it."
"People you've never met have been reading your books for twenty years," Rachel said. "This is the same thing with a dollar sign. Try to remember, it's good news."
Fiona stood and walked to the writing nook where her laptop waited. She pulled the screen toward her and typed her own name into the search bar. Her hand wasn't quite steady.
"Fiona? You there?"
"I'm here. Hang on."
The results loaded. And there it was. Her name.
Her other name, the made-up one, the one she'd built to hide behind, sitting in headline after headline.
Major Deal. Mystery's Most Private Author.
Record Advance Rumored. A trade site. A bigger trade site.
One of those publishing blogs that lived for exactly this.
"Oh," she said softly.
"Yeah. Oh."
"This is a lot of articles."
"It's a big deal. That's what a big deal looks like." Rachel's voice softened. "I know this isn't how you like things. But it's good. It's the good kind of loud. Nobody's saying anything ugly. They're saying you're worth a fortune, which, for the record, you are."
Worth a fortune. Right. She thought about poor Hank.
"When did it break, exactly?"
"Monday. Why?"
"No reason." She kept scrolling. "I just hadn't seen any of it."
"Because you live in a little cottage by the sea now." Rachel's smile came through in her voice. "I don't need anything from you today. I only didn't want you hearing it from a stranger. Read the nice articles. Let yourself enjoy it for a whole five minutes."
"I'll try."
"You won't, but I appreciate the lie." A pause, a careful one again. "You sound okay, though. Better than the last few times. You sound like you, a little."
Fiona almost laughed. If only she knew who she really was these days.
"Okay, I'll check in again soon. And maybe you'll even pick up."
The line went quiet.
Fiona set the phone down and stared at the laptop screen full of her own success. She should have felt something. Pride. Relief. Those would be proper emotions.
One thought kept rolling around in her mind though.
Monday. "It broke Monday," she said aloud, to nobody, turning the word over like a stone she'd picked up off the beach.
She told herself it didn't matter what day a press release went out. She told herself to read the nice articles and let it be good. She got a paragraph in.
Then the phone buzzed against the desk.
A text. A number she hadn't seen in ages, attached to a name she'd half forgotten she still had saved.
Jennifer Bowers. Jennifer—never Jenny or Jenn—who'd hosted the most elaborate dinner parties.
Jennifer, whose husband golfed with Drake.
Jennifer, who'd gone quiet the way all of them had gone quiet when the marriage came apart.
Who'd picked a side without ever admitting she was picking one.
A couples-friend. One of the ones who'd stayed with him.
Fiona!! Just saw the news. Congratulations doesn't even cover it. So so happy.
A second bubble landed a moment later, the way the real message always did.
Also, had NO idea about the whole F. L. Maxwell thing?? How did that stay a secret all these years?? Always figured it was articles. Corporate stuff. Maybe a little romance or whatever. I am floored.
Fiona read it twice. "Articles," she said to the empty room. "They thought I wrote articles. Or a little romance."
That was what they'd been, all those years. All those dinners, all those rooms where she'd smiled and topped up wineglasses while Drake held the table. They'd thought she did something small and beige in an office. The wife who wrote a little something that didn't matter.
And now here was Jennifer, who hadn't sent a single word in half a year, surfacing inside a day of the headlines to say congratulations didn't even cover it.
Fiona went very still.
A knock came at the door.
She crossed and opened it, half braced for the pressed blue shirt. But it was Winnie on the step, silver-white hair catching the morning light, a small basket in her hands.
"I made too much," Winnie said, which was what she always said. "Banana bread. You'd be doing me a favor."
"You don't have to keep feeding me."
"I know I don't." Winnie held the basket out until Fiona took it. She didn't ask to come in. She only looked at Fiona's face. "You've had a morning."
"I've had a morning."
"That fellow in the pressed shirt. Still in town?"
So she wasn't going to pretend she hadn't seen him. Fiona should have known. Winnie didn't pretend.
"He's at The Tides Inn. For a few days, he says."
"Mm." Winnie nodded, slow. "He called himself your husband, out on my path. Walked up like he had a right to the address." She paused, then added, "I didn't much care for the way he did it, though."
"He was my husband. He isn't anymore. The divorce went through months ago. I never told a soul."
She braced for the questions. The careful, kind, digging questions everyone always had.
Winnie didn't ask one. "That's a lot to carry alone," was all she said. "And now he's come back?"
"Why do you think he came back?" Maybe Winnie could answer this, give her a valid reason.
"That's not a question for me. You'll have to answer that yourself." Winnie looked at her for a moment, then nodded slightly. "I expect you already know. You've got the look of a woman doing her thinking, sorting it out."
"I'm not sure I want the answer I'm getting."
"The truth is like that, more often than not." Winnie patted Fiona's arm once, her hand cool and light. "Eat the bread. Then go do whatever it is you've worked out you're going to do. You've got more spine than you let on, and I'd guess you've known it longer than you let on too."
She turned and went, down the steps and along the path, not looking back.
Fiona stood in the doorway with the basket in her hands. She turned and walked inside. She set the plate on the table and glanced at the laptop screen. She made herself look at the dates stamped under the headlines. Monday. Monday. Tuesday. The big roundup post, Monday afternoon.
And Drake had stood right here in her front room saying, "I want you, Fee," on Wednesday evening. She counted it instead of feeling it. Two days. Two days after her name was broadcast across the whole world.
But…
She tried the kind version first. Coincidence. He'd been working up to it for weeks, the way he said. He'd looked at his life, found her missing from it, and the timing was only timing.
She almost made it stick. She'd gotten good these last months at making things stick that she needed to.
But she wrote people for a living. Fifteen books built on one ruthless skill, looking at what a person did and working backward to what he wanted.
Hank Carson didn't believe in coincidence and neither did she, not when the pieces lined up this neatly.
A man tells his wife she isn't enough. He files the papers.
He finds someone present. He lets her drive off the edge of the map, then goes half a year without a single call.
And then her name turns up in every trade headline in the business, with a fortune attached.
And then, two days after that, there he is on her porch in a pressed blue shirt, saying he made a terrible mistake.
"Oh," Fiona said. The empty cottage did not answer. "Oh," she repeated, sure now.
He hadn't come back because he'd decided he was wrong about her.
He'd come back because she was worth something again.
She crossed to the sofa and sank down onto it.
Fury washed over her, fast and hot, hotter than anything she'd let herself feel in months.
He'd stood right there on the rug she'd been embarrassed by, looked around her new, small good life, and said, "It suits you.
" She'd let that scrap of approval warm her like a starving woman.
She had been starving. He'd counted on it.
He knew which buttons to push because he'd spent twenty years learning them.
"Of course," she said to no one. "Of course that's what this is."
And then, under the fury, relief came rising up slow through all the heat.
Because if Drake had come all this way for the money, if the whole tender, practiced speech was only a man chasing a headline to a bank, then the math she'd been doing in her own head for half a year was wrong from the very start.
She'd taken his leaving as a verdict. She wasn't enough. She had packed that ruling into a suitcase, carried it across three states, clung to it at every warm gathering where she'd hung around at the edges.
And the man, it turned out, couldn't tell her worth from her bank balance.
"Huh," she said softly, almost a laugh. There it was. The thing she'd carried all this time was really nothing—and certainly not the truth—when she looked at it honestly in the light.
His leaving had never once been about her.
It was about what she could do for him in a given season.
As a wife who wrote "articles, corporate stuff, or whatever," she wasn't enough to stay for.
Even though he'd known she was F. L. Maxwell, it hadn't meant anything to him, he wasn't a reader.
He thought of her Maxwell books as "little books.
" But now, as a name worth a fortune, she was worth crossing the country to reclaim.
Same woman. The only thing that moved was the number on the page.
So the verdict was void. Thrown out. Not because she'd finally argued her way to enough, but because the judge had never once been fit to rule.
"You don't get to decide that." She shook her head. "You never did."
She breathed out a long breath. Maybe one she'd been holding since February.
It didn't fix everything, and she wanted to be honest with herself about that.
The reaching was still real. The part of her that had leaned toward him on the porch, hungry to be told she was good, hadn't vanished just because she'd caught on to his tricks.
She'd still have to watch for it, the way she'd watch for a stair she knew was loose.
She could work with that. She'd written enough villains to tell a verdict from a motive. Drake had a motive. He'd had one the whole time. She simply hadn't been able to see it from the inside.
Fiona stood. She noticed her hands weren't shaking. Last night on the porch they wouldn't quit. This morning they were steady. Not the brittle steady she'd faked for half a year, the fine, fine, fine she'd handed everyone. Real steady. Calm steady. Okay, there was still a bit of fury underneath.
She took out her phone and found Drake's number, slightly surprised it was still on her phone. Mad it was still on her phone. She began to type: Meet at Harbor Brew. Twenty minutes.
"All right, then," she said as she headed out the door.