Chapter Six
Juliette sat in the conference room of Simon Says Publishing simmering with impotent fury.
Two weeks it had been since the night of Warren’s party.
Two weeks since the manuscript that was supposed to be the culmination of all her schemes and dreams had disappeared.
And what did she have to show for it? Nothing.
No word from the police, who swore they were investigating the theft.
No word from the detective who was meant to look into the circumstances surrounding Warren’s death, which she still found highly suspicious.
No word from Warren’s son, Brad, who had apparently taken the helm at the Ellingham Group in the wake of Warren’s untimely demise.
Juliette drummed her fingers on the reclaimed wood of the conference table—one of Simon’s proud reveals when he’d revamped the office a few years ago, before anyone knew the extent of their financial troubles.
If there was one thing Simon Hsu had in spades, it was good taste.
The bookshelves he’d chosen for the office were open and airy, mounted to the wall in such a way that the books often looked like they were floating.
He was a fan of natural light, and so he’d had all of the depressing corkboard-style wall dividers replaced with massive panels of glass.
Which meant that everyone could see everyone else, which was an unfortunate discovery for Greg the copy editor’s plumber’s crack and everyone adjacent to him.
Juliette had advocated for privacy blinds for years, but the funds for such trifling matters had long since dried up.
Getting hired as a marketing associate at Simon Says straight out of college had been one of the proudest, happiest days of her life.
Juliette had turned to books as a source of comfort for at least as long as her parents had been writing theirs, the Parenting a Prodigy series.
Pop psychology books that promised to make a prodigy out of every average child if they simply followed her parents’ research-backed approach to child-rearing.
Putting her life on display for millions of parents desperate to achieve greatness for their precious little angels.
Her parents had earned their entrée to the country club set not by charging their exclusive clientele obscene amounts of money, but by becoming influencers before such a thing existed, and dragging Juliette reluctantly into the limelight along with them.
For all that they had violated her privacy as a child, she could at least be grateful that things like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok didn’t exist when she was a kid.
Still, they’d done a good enough job screwing her up without such a lasting platform.
She’d made a life for herself here at Simon Says, despite everything.
She was proud of what she had accomplished, putting books she truly enjoyed out into the world.
She worked hard and sacrificed any semblance of a personal life to keep the place running, but still the ship was sinking faster than she could bail the water out.
It ground her down in her weaker moments, the early-morning hours and late evenings.
The grueling phone calls with authors disappointed with their sales.
The double duty of covering marketing and publicity when they’d had to lay off all their young, hungry publicists.
People like Simon and Kennedy would be fine; they had their golden parachutes and personal wealth to catch them before they hit the ground.
But for others like Veeta, like Greg the copy editor—like Juliette herself—there was no safety net.
If Simon Says went down, it took all of them down with it.
She checked her phone, ostensibly for the time (Spencer and Kate were dangerously close to being late for their meeting to discuss market positioning for Kate’s new series).
It had only been two minutes since the last time she checked, and yet there were still no calls, no texts, no voicemails, no emails.
No updates. She had been ghosted, which was frankly beyond the pale.
Juliette Winters didn’t get ghosted. She did the ghosting.
Her phone dinged. A notification from Facebook.
The high school reunion group. She shouldn’t check it.
No good would come of it. She knew—she knew—it would be about her.
It was all they seemed to talk about since someone rediscovered her online during the debacle of Kennedy’s wedding last year.
She wasn’t going to check it. She didn’t care what they thought.
She was going to find the missing manuscript, make it a thunderous success while also respecting the legacy of Warren Ellingham, and they could post whatever they liked about her because it wouldn’t matter. She would have won.
Okay, she was going to open it. Just to delete the notification. She wasn’t going to read what they had posted. She didn’t care.
Okay, she was reading it. And it was worse than she’d imagined.
They’d posted the Pub Daily article about Warren’s death and the missing manuscript.
Comment after comment making twenty different versions of the same lame joke about Juliette being voted “Most Likely to Botch the Deal of the Century.” She knew she shouldn’t have made that Instagram post, but she couldn’t have imagined how the evening would have gone at that point.
But the worst of it was, someone, somehow—and she fucking knew it had to be Juniper, even if she couldn’t prove it—someone had found a photo of her talking to the police on the docks the night of Warren’s death.
Barefoot, her hair blown all over the place, looking strung out from her scopolamine/Dramamine/whiskey comedown; she looked terrible.
She didn’t look like a scion of business or an industry leader.
She looked like she’d just been busted for possession at a Girls Gone Wild boat party.
Unbelievable. Fifteen years she had tried to escape their judgments and opinions.
Changed her name, stayed off social media, worked behind the scenes without claiming any of the credit she deserved.
And then they’d found her. For months now she had tried to rebuild her reputation, creating that stupid Instagram profile to show how far she had come, and all it took was one photo—one blurry, out-of-context, poorly shot photo—to bring her back down.
To make her feel sixteen again. Betrayed. Humiliated. Abandoned. Alone.
“Juliette!”
“What?!” she snapped, slamming her phone down guiltily and nearly cracking the screen.
Kate Valentine stood in the doorway looking surprised, her dark brown hair falling halfway out of a clip and her vintage 1987 Florida largemouth bass fishing competition sweater frayed along the sleeves.
She always managed to look like she was on the last twenty-four hours of a deadline, even in formal wear.
“I was just going to say, I was on time for once to our meeting. But it seems like you’ve got other things going on? ”
“Sorry,” Juliette sighed, checking her phone compulsively for the hundredth time that day.
Still no calls or emails, but at least there wasn’t another update from Facebook.
She ought to delete it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She didn’t know why their opinions still mattered.
She didn’t know why she was trying so hard.
But somehow she had to prove she wasn’t what they were calling her. She wasn’t a failure.
“Are you okay?” Kate asked, taking her seat at the conference table across from Juliette. “We can reschedule—”
“I’m fine,” Juliette said, gathering her mental armor.
“I mean, you did just watch a man die like two weeks ago,” Kate continued. “I can tell you from personal experience, it’s a traumatic blow.”
“We’ve all seen dead people before,” Juliette said dismissively. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Let’s talk strategy for the new series.”
Kate was one of their bestselling authors, her mystery series focused around Florida bartender Loretta Starling having become a runaway bestseller and a blockbuster movie.
The series had kept the lights on at Simon Says for several years now, and Kate’s surprise decision to end it last year after Kennedy’s wedding had been the final nail in the coffin for Simon Says and their struggling list. Kate couldn’t possibly know how her decision had affected the business, but in her less charitable moments Juliette harbored a quiet resentment toward her for it.
It was part of the reason that Juliette was in this predicament in the first place.
That and the media attention that Kate had brought on all of them at Kennedy’s wedding after discovering not one but two murders during the ceremony.
Again, things Kate couldn’t know—disaster just seemed to follow the woman around.
But Juliette still wished she had kept it out of the press.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Kennedy and Spencer?” Kate asked, eyeing the conference room door. “Spencer doesn’t like when we start without him. He’ll make one of his comments.”
“Since when do you care about Spencer’s comments? You’re not engaged anymore, and he’s married to someone else.”
Kate had been engaged to Spencer, the senior editor at Simon Says, before Spencer called it off and started dating Kennedy Hempstead.
There had been an office betting pool about whether or not Kate would make a mess of things at their wedding, which she had—but definitely not in the way anyone had thought.
Kate tilted her head to the side in consideration. “You make a compelling point. Maybe I should start being early to all our meetings and pretend like we’re halfway through when he shows up just to piss him off.”
“That’s the spirit,” Juliette said, her phone dinging. She nearly lunged for it, but the notification that popped up was just a spam email from a clothing store.