Envy (Demon Daddies #3)

Chapter 1

Rachel

She put the stress on hour instead of quiet, and something behind my back teeth went tight.

It was the fourth time in two paragraphs.

The quiet HOUR. As though the noun were the surprise.

As though the adjective hadn’t done all the work.

I had written that sentence in March, on the kitchen linoleum, with my back against the dishwasher and a mug of cold peppermint tea going scummy beside my hip, and the rhythm had landed on the second syllable of quiet the way a hand lands on the small of someone’s back.

The QUI-et hour. Soft on the front, a held breath in the middle, the noun a kind of exhale.

But that is not how she read it. She read it like a weather report. A dull one.

I mouthed the right rhythm against the rim of my glass. Tap water with a wedge of lemon. Warm.

The ballroom on the second floor of the Crosby Street Hotel had been done up.

Low, gold lamps on every fifth surface, white peonies past their best in tall clear vases, a hundred and twenty velvet chairs arranged in a polite arc, and standing room at the back for those of us who were here because we had been told to be.

I had taken up my position behind the last row of chairs, against the wall, just to the left of a column.

At the lectern, in the warm pool of one of those gold lamps, stood the woman whose name was on the book.

The book I had written.

Cream Khaite suit, single-breasted, the trousers cropped a perfect inch above the ankle to show off the slim oxblood Manolo.

Her grandmother’s freshwater pearls, three strands, knotted just below the throat.

Lipstick to match the shoes, a satin finish, applied in the bathroom of her Brooklyn townhouse forty minutes before the car came.

I knew because I had reminded her about the pearls in a text at four-fifteen—the freshwater, not the South Sea, the South Sea reads cold under the lamps—and she had sent back a thumbs-up emoji and the words you are a saint.

She had never, in nine years, used my name in a thank-you.

She turned the page. The audience leaned in by half an inch in unison, the way audiences always did at her readings, the way they had been leaning in since the first prize longlist when she was thirty-five.

“She had spent her thirties,” she read, “understanding that grief was a country with no embassy.”

She skipped the next line.

The next line was the whole point! That line had taken me three drafts. I wrote it weeping, which was embarrassing because writers weren’t meant to cry at their own words, especially ghostwriters!

How could she skip it?

I mouthed it, under my breath. “There was no appeal, no repatriation, only the slow administrative business of becoming someone who could survive there.”

She had skipped it.

She went straight from embassy to the paragraph about the husband’s coat in the hallway, and the audience, of course, didn’t notice, because they had not read the book, they had only read the pieces of the book that her publicist had circled in advance galleys for them to quote at parties.

The omission landed under my sternum. A soft, specific pain.

I bit the inside of my left cheek. I had developed, somewhere in the last decade, the bad habit of biting it on the same molar every time, so that there was a permanent small ridge of scar tissue I could find with my tongue without thinking.

I found it now. I held my tap water steady.

I did not, under any circumstances, allow my face to do anything.

A waiter came past me on my left, threading the gap between the column and the wall with a tray of champagne flutes balanced flat.

He was young, very thin, and he had got his tray half a degree off true, the kind of half-degree that became, in three more steps, an inevitability.

I reached out without looking and put two fingers under the lip of the tray and steadied it.

He stopped. He looked at my fingers, and then at my face, and then—with real surprise— he mouthed thank you.

I gave him a half-inch of smile, the smile I kept in a drawer for emergencies, and lifted my fingers away.

When Margot finished, the applause was polite and restrained.

It almost felt managed. It rose, hit a respectable peak, settled into a hum of compliments and clinking, and then the ballroom broke into archipelagoes.

Little islands of three and four, drinks held at sternum height, heads tilted at the angle that meant go on, I’m fascinated.

I made for the bar.

It was at the far wall, between two columns, and there was, by my reckoning, a column at the far end I could stand behind for the duration of the Q&A.

I had identified it during the third paragraph.

I had scoped the route. I was halfway across the carpet, my tap water emptied into a flower vase as I passed, when a young woman in a green velvet blazer stepped sideways into my path with the air of someone who had been timing me from across the room.

She was not tall. She had the kind of immaculate brows that took forty minutes a fortnight, and a small gold hoop in the helix of her left ear, and she was holding a glass of something clear with a lime in it.

“Rachel,” she said. “Hi.”

She knew my name? I rarely gave it.

“Priya Shah,” she said. “The Cut. Books.” She gave me a half-second of the brow and a half-second of the smile and then leaned her elbow on the bar in a way that closed the angle between us and made the conversation, in one small movement, private. “You don’t know me. I know you. Sort of.”

“I’m—sorry,” I said. The reflex came up my throat before I could stop it. “I think you might —“

“Two vodka sodas,” she said to the bartender, without taking her eyes off me. “Tito’s, lots of lime. Thanks.” Then, to me, lower: “I’m not going to keep you long. I promise. I just—please don’t move for ninety seconds.”

The bartender slid two highballs across the bar. She pushed one toward my hand. I had not asked for it. I had not said yes. The glass was very cold and the condensation soaked immediately into the pad of my thumb.

“Off the record,” she said. “Completely off. I don’t have a recorder, my phone is in my bag, my bag is at coat check. Off the record, Rachel, you’re her ghostwriter. Aren’t you.”

The ballroom did not stop. The ballroom did its hum. Somewhere behind me a man laughed too loudly at his own anecdote and a woman said oh stop in a voice that meant go on.

Something moved behind my ribs. I felt it the way you feel a pilot light catch—a small, blue, useful flame, tucked away in a part of the apparatus you had forgotten was wired.

Yes, it said, in a voice that was not exactly mine and was unmistakably mine.

Run it. Run it tomorrow. Run it Wednesday morning before the school run, with my full name in the standfirst, with the byline of the actual book underneath it, run it and let the floor go.

I felt my mouth begin to open around the syllable.

Then ten years of muscle memory took the wheel of the car.

I laughed.

It was a warm laugh. I had practiced it.

I had practiced it in the bathroom of my apartment with the door closed, because there were certain laughs a person needed to be able to deploy in a publishing context and the warm-deflecting-laugh was first among them.

It came out of me now without my permission and it sounded, to my own ears, mostly normal.

“Margot doesn’t need a ghostwriter, Priya.

” I tilted my head a quarter inch. I let my eyes go a little tired and a little fond, the way you might look when discussing a friend who had texted you at two in the morning about a recipe.

“She’s a genius. A great writer. No, what she really needs is a little less interest in her private life, and less speculation about her writing. ”

Priya did not move her elbow off the bar.

“Rachel.”

“I’m — sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong —“

“I’ve watched you mouth the next line three times tonight,” she said, very quietly.

“You know what’s coming half a sentence before she does because you wrote it.

I would run that piece tomorrow. I would run it Thursday at the latest. I would put your name on the masthead of the homepage for a week.

” She paused. “I’m not—I’m not trying to ambush you. I’m trying to give you a door.”

The pilot light flared. I felt it in my throat. I felt it behind my eyes. I felt the heat of it in the small palmed weight of the glass she had bought me.

I thought about my rent.

I thought about the non-compete.

I thought about the agent at the most powerful agency in New York who had known the truth for ten years and had been, in every measurable way, on the other side of it.

I thought about the publisher’s CEO. I thought about the woman in cream three columns away, doing her favorite anecdote about agonizing at her desk for the third time this week, and the way she had once, in a bad moment in a hotel room in Toronto, said to me, perfectly calmly, no one would publish you under your own name anyway, sweetie, that’s just how this works.

I slid the vodka soda back across the bar.

“That’s really kind of you,” I said. The warmth in my voice was so practiced it was almost convincing. “Honestly. But it’s just—it’s a good book, Priya. She wrote a good book. I’m her assistant, not her ghostwriter.”

I gave her the half-inch smile. The drawer smile. The same one I had given the waiter.

I walked away before my face could do anything I would have to live with later.

Behind me, I heard her say, very softly, almost to herself: “Okay.”

Not okay like she believed me.

Okay like she was filing it.

The ground-floor ladies’ room of the Crosby Street Hotel was empty but for me.