Chapter 14
The book broke open on the ninth of September at about four in the afternoon, and it took twelve days to finish.
She would not be able to explain it afterward and did not try.
She had spent six weeks producing four hundred words a morning, and then on a Tuesday she sat down at one o'clock, after the school run, and did not get up until Shannon banged on the door at seven because Wyatt had been at hers since three-fifteen and Erin had not answered her phone.
Nine thousand words. In an afternoon.
They were not good. About a third of them survived. But the road was there — she could see the whole of the last third at once, the way you sometimes can, and after that it was only a question of typing fast enough to get to it before it went.
She delivered on the twentieth. A hundred and nine thousand words.
Bev read it in a day and a half and called at six in the morning, which she had never done in six years, and did not say hello.
"Where did you get that ending."
"Is it right?"
"Where did you get it."
"Bev."
"It's right," Bev said. "It's right in a way I'm going to have to sit down about.
Erin — " and her voice did something on the line.
"The whole first two-thirds is a woman building a case.
That's what it is, it's a case, it's magnificent, and I've read it four times thinking that's the book.
And then the last third comes along and it isn't about him at all. "
"No."
"It's about what she does with the case when it stops being any use to her."
"Yes."
"Yeah." Bev exhaled. "Well. That's the one. That's the one you've been circling for four books, and I want you to know that I know it, and now I'm going to be your agent again for a minute." Paper. "Because we have a problem, and it is the size of a house, and I think you already know what it is."
"I know what it is."
"Say it, then, and let's both hear it out loud."
Erin stood at her kitchen window with the harbor going gray-blue at the far end of the street.
"It isn't a novel anymore," she said. "Not to anybody who knows us.
There's a house on a peninsula. There's a sister who's a lawyer.
There's a woman on a guest list for six years.
There's a wife who writes at night with a small lamp.
" She heard herself say it. "Anybody in that world who reads it will know inside forty pages, and everybody in that world reads everything. "
"Yes."
"And it's got the folder in it."
"It has got," said Bev Kaplan, "the folder in it."
Here is the thing she had understood on the ninth of September at about four in the afternoon, and had written twelve days flat out to get to.
The book was never going to work with her name off it.
Not for the market. Bev could have sold it as Elle Winters in an afternoon and it would have done extremely well, and nobody at that end had ever asked for anything different.
It was that the ending did not work.
Because the ending was a woman who stops keeping the file. Who has been building a perfect, dated, unanswerable case for five years, and who arrives at the point where she could put it in front of everybody — could publish it, could file it, could win — and does something else with it instead.
And you cannot end a book that way from behind a fake name. It's a cheat, and she'd have known it, and every reader who ever mattered would have felt it without being able to say why. A woman who has stopped hiding cannot write the last chapter from inside the drawer.
So it was her name or it was a different ending, and there was no third door.
She told him on the last Sunday in September, at the diner, in the booth facing the entrance.
Six meetings by then. The terms had never changed — she still set them, still named the interval, and he had never once asked for the next one — but the intervals had gotten shorter without either of them saying anything about it, and this one was eight days after the last.
He came in with nothing in his hands and sat down.
"I've got something to tell you," Erin said, "and it isn't a question, and you don't get a vote. I want to be straight about the shape of it before I start."
"All right."
"I've finished a book. It's a hundred and nine thousand words, it's delivered, it comes out in the spring.
" She had her hands flat on the table. "It's about a marriage.
It's about a woman who marries a rich man because she's pregnant, after she hears him say he doesn't love her, and then spends five years being perfect at it and writing everything down. "
Graham did not move at all.
"There's a house on a point," she said. "There's a sister who's a lawyer and who brings a folder to a study three days before a wedding.
There's a woman who stays on the guest lists for six years.
There's a message that arrives in a hospital room.
It's not us — it's not, actually, it's a novel and about half of it is invented and the husband is worse than you in some places and better in others.
" She kept going, because if she stopped she'd never get it out clean.
"But nobody is going to believe that. Everyone you know is going to read it and think they're reading your marriage, and they will be about sixty percent right, and there is no version of this where your family is protected from it. "
She took a breath.
"And it's going out under my name. Erin Brooks. On the cover, on the jacket, in the interviews, all of it. Elle Winters is finished."
The diner did what diners do. Somebody's plates went down two booths over.
"Now the terms," Erin said. "This is the part I need you to hear exactly.
"You don't read it first. Not a page, not the jacket copy, not a proof. You'll read it in April when everyone else does, out of a shop, and I don't want to know when you're doing it.
"You don't ask me to change one line. Not one, not a name, not a detail, not the thing about the small lamp. If something in it is wrong, you're welcome to say so in May, and I'll write you a very polite letter.
"Your lawyers don't approach my publisher.
Not to review it, not to be reassured, not for a courtesy read, not in a friendly way through somebody who knows somebody.
If one phone call is made from your side to that house I will find out inside a day, because Bev tells me everything, and if it happens we are finished — not the meetings. Finished."
She looked at him.
"And your family doesn't get warned. Not your mother, not Vanessa, not one of them. They find out in the spring, in a shop, like everybody else."
Graham Lockwood sat across a diner table from his wife.
He did not touch the inside of his left wrist. She noticed that, and would remember noticing it.
"Yes," he said.
"I'm not finished."
"All right."
"That's the small half." Erin's voice went down half a step and she let it. "Here's the big one.
"You've spent a year doing everything I asked, and I've noticed, and it hasn't moved me as much as you'd like it to, and I'll tell you exactly why.
Because everything I've asked you for has been easy for you.
Stay away — that's easy for a man with a house and a plane and forty other things to do.
Sign this — you like signing things. Come at two and leave at three, don't bring anything, don't call.
All of that costs you nothing but comfort, and comfort is the one thing you've always been able to afford. "
"Erin—"
"This one you cannot afford." She leaned forward.
"This is a book with your family's name written all over it in a way anybody can read, going into every house in Camden and Boston in April, and you have no say and no notice and no ability to soften a single sentence of it.
Ever. Not this book and not the next one, because there's a second in the contract and I haven't written it yet and I'm not promising you anything about what's in it.
"That is what the rest of your life looks like if you're anywhere near me," Erin said.
"You don't get to manage what people say about you anymore.
You don't get to make it quiet. You've spent six years buying quiet — quiet with your sister, quiet with Blair, quiet with me at two in the morning in a kitchen — and I am the loudest thing that will ever happen to you, and I'm not going to get quieter, I'm going to get bigger, and there is nothing in this world you can do about any of it. "
She sat back.
"So. That's the test. Not can you be sorry. You're extremely good at sorry. Can you live in a marriage — or near one, or in the same county as one — where I hold the terms and you have absolutely no lever, forever."
Graham was quiet for about four seconds.
Then he said, "Yes."
"You didn't think about it."
"I've thought about it since April," he said. "I didn't know it would be a book. I knew it would be something." He put his hands flat on the table, exactly as she had hers. "Erin, I want to say one thing and it is not an argument, and if it sounds like one you can stop me."
"Say it."
"The worst thing I ever did to you was the joke in the kitchen," he said.
"Not the study. Not Blair. Those are worse on paper and I know what they cost you — I've got a fairly accurate idea now, I've had a year.
But the joke is the one I can't put down, because I made you small on purpose.
Not consciously. But there's no accident in it.
I said the airport thing because you'd just told me you were doing something and some part of me knew that if it turned out you were any good, I'd be married to somebody I hadn't accounted for. "
Erin's hands went cold on the table.
"And you weren't going to be able to be that," he said, "in my house, so you went upstairs and did it at two in the morning for five years."
"Stop."
"That's the whole of it. I'm finished."
"No — " She had to get her voice back. "No, I mean it. Stop, because I need to say something to you and I can't say it after that."
He waited.