Chapter 4
On the Saturday she sat down to write at ten o'clock in the morning, which she had never once done in her life.
That was the whole problem, as it turned out.
Now it was ten in the morning in a bright kitchen in Rockland and there was nobody in the building but a five-year-old watching cartoons, and she could not write a sentence.
She got four hundred words out by noon and they were terrible. Not badly made — she could not, at this point, make a badly built sentence; six years had beaten that out of her. They were worse than badly made. They were careful.
She read them back and understood, with real dislike, what she was looking at. She had written the whole passage as though someone might come in.
At half past twelve she deleted all of it.
Then she got up and did something she had thought about for a long time without admitting she was thinking about it.
She went into the settings and took the file out of taxes 2019.
She dragged it onto the desktop, where it sat by itself in the top left corner in white letters against a photograph of the harbor, with its actual name showing.
She looked at it for a while.
"Mom."
Wyatt was in the doorway with his blanket over one shoulder like a legionnaire.
"Hey, bud."
"What are you doing?"
For five years the answer to that question had been nothing or email or just some things for the house, delivered without looking up, in a voice engineered to end the conversation. She had used that voice on a two-year-old. She had never once thought about it until this second.
"I'm working," she said.
He came over. She did not tap the trackpad.
He climbed up onto the chair beside her, which took a while, and put his chin on the table and looked at the screen with the particular contempt of a person who cannot read.
"It's just words."
"It's just words."
"Is it a story?"
"Yes."
"Is it about a dinosaur?"
"No."
"Then it's not a good one," Wyatt said, and got down, and went back to the cartoons.
Erin sat there for a second.
Then she laughed — out loud, alone in a kitchen, harder than the joke deserved — and pulled the chair in, and wrote for four hours without once looking at the door.
The four hours were not good either. But they were not careful, and by six o'clock there were nine pages of something with a pulse in it, and she saved it, on the desktop, under its own name.
She emailed Bev the first three pages at 6:15 with no message attached.
Bev wrote back at 6:19: Come down Thursday. Wear something you can sit in.
Bev's office had a window that didn't open and a radiator that didn't stop, and in October it was eighty-one degrees in there and Bev wore a cardigan anyway.
"Sit. Don't take your coat off, you'll die. Shannon's got the boy?"
"Shannon's got the boy."
"Then we have until the four-forty." Bev put a legal pad in front of herself and did not write on it.
"Here's where we are. It went out Monday to nine houses.
By Tuesday afternoon there were six reads.
This morning there are four bidders and one of them called me at home, which is not done, and which he did on purpose so I'd tell you he did it. "
Erin sat very still with her coat on in an eighty-one-degree room.
"Four."
"Four." Bev finally looked up. "Erin, I've been doing this since before you could drive. This is the top of my career. I want you to hear me say that out loud in a room, because I know you, and I know that in about four minutes you're going to start finding a way to make this small."
"I'm not—"
"You said, and I have it in an email, put my name on the deal memo, not on the book, just so somebody's written it down once." Bev took her glasses off. "Sweetheart. Somebody's about to write it down for a great deal more than once."
It took most of the day.
Erin had thought — she'd had a picture of it, from a hundred versions of this scene she'd never written down — that an auction would be loud. Phones. People shouting numbers.
It was a woman in a cardigan making calls at forty-minute intervals from a desk chair and saying mm a lot.
Between the calls they talked about nothing. Bev's daughter. A restaurant that had closed. Whether the radiator could be turned off, which it could not. At half past one Bev sent a boy out for sandwiches and Erin ate half of hers and put the other half down and forgot about it.
At two o'clock Bev said, without looking up from the pad, "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you sit like you're at somebody else's table."
Erin looked down and found she had her ankles crossed and her hands folded and her back off the chair.
It was the posture. Five years of it — the one she used at the long dinners on the Point, at the foundation lunches, in every room where she had been the only person who had arrived by marriage.
Chin level, hands still, take up as little room as the room will allow.
She had walked into an office on Twenty-Sixth Street where she was the entire reason four companies were on the phone, and she had sat down like a guest.
"Put your feet on something," Bev said. "That's an order. I've got a bad ottoman under there specifically for this."
Erin found the ottoman with her heel and put her feet on it.
"Better."
"It feels rude."
"Yes." Bev turned a page she wasn't reading. "It'll pass. Took my mother about sixty years."
At quarter past three the number stopped being a number Erin could hold in her head as a fact about her life and started being a number she could only hold as a fact about the industry.
At twenty to four Bev said "mm" one more time, and then said, "All right. Let me speak to my author and I'll call you back inside the hour."
She hung up and put both hands flat on the desk.
"Two books," she said. "That's the winning shape. They want the one in the proposal and they want the one after it, unwritten, undescribed, on a page and a half. That's the part I want you to notice — they are buying a book that does not exist yet on the strength of a page and a half."
She said the number.
Erin heard it. Then she heard the radiator, and a truck backing up somewhere on Twenty-Sixth Street, and a phone ringing in the next office that nobody picked up.
"Say something," Bev said.
"That's more than the Point house."
"What?"
"Nothing." Erin pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for exactly two seconds and took them away. "Yes. Do it."
"There's a condition."
"There's always a condition."
"Not from them. From me." Bev put her glasses back on. "They want the real name."
The radiator ticked.
"They don't know the real name," Erin said.
"They don't. They know Elle Winters has four books and a very particular kind of reader, and they know that whoever she is, she has never done an event, never done a photo, never done a panel, and never once been in a room.
They think that's a strategy." Bev's mouth moved. "They admire it enormously."
"Bev."
"I told them it's not a strategy, it's a circumstance, and the circumstance may be changing.
That's all I told them, and I told them that because you emailed me at twenty to seven in the morning like a woman standing on a ledge, and I have never once had you do that in six years.
" She leaned back. "So. I'm going to ask you the question I've asked you every year since the second book, and this time I'm going to shut up afterward. "
"Ask it."
"Whose name is on it?"
Erin looked out the window that didn't open at a brick wall eight feet away.
Here was the truth, and she had never said it to anyone, not to Shannon, not into a ledger, not once out loud in five years:
She had not kept the pen name because of Graham.
She had kept it because if it was Elle Winters, it could fail.
Elle Winters could write a bad one and disappear and nobody would say a word to Erin Brooks about it at a dinner in Camden.
Elle Winters was a room with a door on it.
Graham's joke in the kitchen in January had not built that room.
It had only shown her that the door worked.
That was hers. She'd been carrying it around for five years calling it his fault.
"Not yet," she said.
Bev nodded once, unsurprised.
"Then here's what I'm doing," she said, "and you can be furious with me.
I'm papering the deal to you. Legal name, Erin Brooks, on every signature line, with Elle Winters as a pseudonym on the publishing side.
That's normal, that's how it's done, and it means that from Thursday there is a contract in the world with your name on it. "
"That's what I asked for."
"I know it is." Bev picked up the phone. "I just want it noted that I heard what you asked for and I heard what it cost you to ask, and those were two very different sizes."
She got the four-forty.
Somewhere around New Haven the adrenaline went out of her all at once, the way it does, and she sat in a train seat with her forehead on the cold window and cried for about ninety seconds — properly, ugly, no sound — and then stopped and blew her nose and was fine.
It was not about the money. She wanted to be clear with herself about that and she made herself do it right there, in the seat, with the water going by.
It was that at quarter past three a woman in New York had said a number out loud into a phone about a book Erin had written at two in the morning in a house where no one knew she was writing it.
Four separate companies had wanted it. Not one of them knew whose wife she was.
Not one of them had ever heard the name Lockwood in connection with anything.
Five years of being the flawless one, and it turned out the flawless one wasn't the part of her anybody was bidding on.
She got out her phone at some point past Providence and did the thing she had done automatically for five years, which was open a message to Graham.
The box was there. The cursor was there.
She had typed four bidders before she understood what she was doing.