4
I walked home. Partly to clear my head, partly to kick off my own personal walk of shame. A funeral march for my writerly ambitions.
Truth be told, there wasn’t much to clear up: it was over.
Kaput. Dead and buried. If a manuscript I’d poured my soul into—along with my heart and at least twenty liters of coffee—didn’t get read past the second line…
maybe writing wasn’t my calling. Maybe I was meant for something else entirely: snake charmer, international drug dealer, or—the most exotic of the three—a mid-level import-export clerk.
I dragged myself through the streets of Manhattan at an excruciatingly slow pace. New Yorkers flew past me with the aggressive grace of marathoners on steroids, throwing shade every time I clogged the pedestrian flow. I didn’t care. I had nothing left to lose.
I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. Halfway across, I stopped and leaned against the railing. The East River flowed beneath me—gray, cold, indifferent. A sanitation barge passed below, slicing through the water with funereal dignity, trailed by a noisy flock of nosy seagulls.
I pulled the manuscript out of my bag, held it up, looked at it one last time—and waited for the barge to be directly underneath me.
Then I let it go.
Only it wasn’t bound. So instead of plummeting like a dignified book seeking redemption, it exploded midair like a pinata that burst too soon.
Pages scattered in every direction, fluttering through the indignant squawks of seagulls that bolted in outrage.
Some sheets splashed into the river, others wedged themselves between the bridge’s steel beams, and a few rode the wind all the way toward Manhattan.
Not even the trash wanted it.
I glanced downtown, toward the skyscraper of Bronson Literary Agency. Pulled a face that tasted of surrender, hitched my purse strap higher on my shoulder, and kept walking toward Brooklyn. Without once looking back.
By the time I got home, the sun had already set. Tess wasn’t back yet. Odd. She’d finished her shift at the public library over an hour ago. Maybe she’d swung by Chad’s place to set his car on fire. Not exactly far-fetched.
When I walked into my room, my Olivetti glared at me from the desk like a merciless judge. The aluminum wastebasket was, as always, overflowing with crumpled pages.
A wave of disgust rolled through me.
For a split second I considered chucking everything out the window—or worse, using that typewriter to type up a résumé. A threat so dark I’d never dare say it out loud.
But then… nothing.
There’s a little voice inside me—probably my left hemisphere, armed with a whip—that takes pleasure in watching me suffer.
My brain is a sadistic professional, the kind that takes notes during torture.
So, without thinking too much, I shrugged off my coat and bag, flung them onto the bed like I never wanted to see them again, and sat back down at the desk.
I slid a sheet of paper into the Olivetti’s roller with all the solemnity of someone about to perform a human sacrifice. Aligned the page, cracked my knuckles—hey, couldn’t hurt—and began to type:
Clare was an independent woman, but when she met Robert, something inside her heart shifted.
I clenched my jaw, ripped the page out with a grimace of pure nausea, crumpled it up like dirty Kleenex, and fed a new sheet into the machine .
Clare had never been in love, but the first time she saw Robert, her heart skipped a beat. At last, she understood the true meaning of “love at first sight.”
“Ugh.” This time I tore the page out with pure savagery, shredded it into confetti just to make sure no human being would ever lay eyes on it.
Sometimes I pictured a sanitation worker digging through my trash, finding an opening like that, reading it aloud to his coworkers—then everyone bursting out laughing: “Oh my God, she actually wrote this! Listen: ‘Clare was an independent woman…’”
I was fairly certain even a garbage man could write a better rom-com opener.
I slid in another sheet. Stared at the keyboard. The letters. One by one. Rested my fingers on the keys with the reverence of a priestess awaiting divine illumination. Closed my eyes.
Waited.
Nothing. No sign from the spirit of Jane Austen. No paranormal vibrations. No benevolent possession.
With a sigh, I stood, spun in the middle of the room—no reason, or maybe because I was slowly losing my mind—and flopped onto the bed, flat on my back.
I hadn’t even landed properly when Tess burst into my room like a medieval barbarian storming the gates of a cathedral.
“You’ll never guess what I discovered today!”
My face was buried in my hands, my soul in shambles, my dignity somewhere below basement level. “Tess, please. Not tonight. Unless you’ve secretly landed me a publishing contract, just… spare me.”
She didn’t even flinch. She strode to the center of the room, planted her feet apart like a samurai before battle, and hoisted up—two-handed—a book thick enough to double as a brick.
The thing looked like a cursed grimoire forgotten in some attic, its hardback cover yellowed, the page edges curled from dampness—or maybe from sheer shame.
Stamped across the front in blinding hot-pink embossing, in utter defiance of good taste, stood the author and title:
How to Seduce a Doomed Artist by élo?se de Saint-Rouge
I looked at it with all the enthusiasm of someone staring at mold on a slice of bread. “What the hell is that?”
“Today at work I was a nightmare,” Tess declared.
“Cranky and unbearable, like a cat with a stomach ache. Anyone who asked me for a book recommendation, I sent straight to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther —just to ruin their day.
Some pushy mom wanted something ‘relaxing,’ so I pointed her to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Because if you’re going to suffer, you might as well do it in style. ”
I stared at her in horror. “Tess, are you insane? Proust—for a mom?”
“That woman asked me for ‘something relaxing’ while her kid was busy demolishing an entire Roald Dahl display. She had it coming.”
She paused theatrically, then continued in a grand, epic tone.
“Anyway. Toward the end of my shift, while I was stacking chairs, my eyes fell on this little brass plaque that read: Self-Help. Obviously, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it.
But it was the first time I… really saw it.
You know what I mean? Like when you suddenly notice the guy you pass every morning at the coffee shop—and realize, months later, that he actually has an interesting face? ”
“Yeah. And then you find out he’s married, lives in Chicago, and runs a motivational YouTube channel.”
“Exactly. But that sign just said Self-Help. And in that moment, it felt like a divine signal. Self-help. The words held dignity, determination, and just the right splash of desperation. Like: get up, stop wallowing, and for God’s sake, do something.
So, driven by a mysterious force—or maybe just the urge to strangle Chad with a rubber band—I followed the call and walked in.
The shelves were divided into neat little sections: Self-Esteem.
Finances. Wellness or, The Art of Melting the Hearts of the Unattainable. Bea, this thing was originally written in French in 1894! And this”—she shook the heavy volume for emphasis—“is a 1941 American edition. Hardback. Gold-embossed. Smells like scandal. When I grabbed it, I swear I felt a shock. Like electricity up my arm. As if the Contessa herself had clutched my wrist and whispered in a husky voice: Je vais t’aider, ma chérie. ”
“Sounds less like an author and more like a slightly deranged French aunt who’s read too many novels.”
“Bea, that book had been waiting for me for over eighty years. Eighty. And get this—inside the back cover there was still an old checkout card. Handwritten names, dates borrowed, dates returned.”
“The old borrower’s log. Ah, nostalgia.”
“And do you know how many people had ever checked it out?”
“Let me guess: zero.”
“Exactly. Zero. I even double-checked the digital catalog. Not a single trace. Nothing. Nada. I was the first! The first in eighty years to touch it! That book had been lying in hibernation, like a vampire in its crypt, waiting for me to awaken it!”
“Remind me of the title again?” I asked, already regretting it.
“ How to Seduce a Doomed Artist. ”
I snorted. “Tess, come on… Chad? An artist? Damnation, maybe. But art? Please. Unless you count ‘leaving dirty socks everywhere’ as some kind of conceptual performance piece.”
“Ugh, no. This isn’t about getting Chad back.”
“Oh, really?” I arched a brow. “Then who exactly is this masterpiece for?”
She lit up like she was announcing a lottery win. “For Zane Ryder, obviously!”