Epilogue
Epilogue
Jane swipes the tube of red across her mouth and stares in the mirror at her reflection, pulling at the skin on her forehead. She frowns and watches the lines grow deeper.
Dan enters the small hotel bathroom, checks his bald spot in the mirror, and, satisfied it hasn’t grown any bigger since yesterday, puts the hand mirror down and stands behind Jane, smiling at her reflection. “You look beautiful,” he says.
“It’s not too much?”
“What, the red?”
She nods.
He tilts his head. “It’s different,” he says. “Edgy.”
Jane cocks an eyebrow and then wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think it’s me.”
She pulls a wad of toilet paper from the roll and swipes the lipstick off with one swift motion. Then she applies her unflavored lip balm in its place.
“Still beautiful,” Dan says, leaning down to kiss the top of her head.
“Gross,” Sissy says as she pokes her head in the open door to the bathroom. “Get a room.”
“We have a room,” Dan says. “You’re in it.”
Sissy pulls a face. “It’s not my fault nonprofit work doesn’t pay.” Sissy deferred Stanford for a year to intern at an environmental lobbying group in Washington, D.C. She works fourteen-hour days and does a lot of grunt work and can’t wait to start college next fall. This thrills Jane, though of course she doesn’t say so. But who knows? Maybe Sissy will change her mind once again between now and then. Or Stanford could rescind her application. Or the apocalypse could happen, rendering higher education null and void! She takes a deep breath and tries to rein in her rising anxiety. If La Fin du Monde taught her anything, it’s that most things in life are out of her control and often entirely unanticipated. Jane still worries, of course, but she’s gotten better at not spiraling.
“Hey, thanks for coming up for this,” Jane says to her daughter now.
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
Jane grins. “You’re a good kid. You know, when you’re not being a terrorist.”
Sissy groans. “Can you get new material? That joke has really worn out its welcome.”
The television is blaring when Jane steps into the room with two queen beds, and Josh is propped on one of them, zoned out in his phone.
“Are you even watching this?” Jane asks. “If not, can we please turn it off?”
“—another anonymous donation from a benefactor using the moniker ByteMe, funding what appear to be all eco-conscious sustainable innovations like the multimillion-dollar grant last month to EverGreen Tech, the newest start-up to shake up Silicon Valley. One of those lucky recipients is Calvin Brenou, right here in Manhattan. Calvin, you received a hundred thousand dollars to continue your work on the—”
The TV screen goes black.
“Hey! I was watching that.”
“You said to turn it off!” Josh retorts.
Jane sighs.
“Is everyone ready to go?”
“Yes,” Jane says.
“Yep,” Josh says.
Dan looks at her and nods, and then he glances around the room while patting his back pockets. “Have you seen my wallet?”
···
The bright light is blinding. Jane squints, unable to see anything, and sweat pricks her hairline and her underarms. She’s never been so nervous in her life—even when she was interrogated by the police. She hopes she doesn’t trip and fall flat on her face. She hopes the extra-strength deodorant she applied three times is working to prevent pit stains on her mulberry silk blouse—a gift from Vaughn, sent with a note: Congrats on all your success! xx .
She was surprised by the gesture, and it reminded Jane of the other thing she had promised herself she’d work on—her cynical snap judgments. The truth is, most people are doing the best they can, given their situations.
Well, not Otto. He doubled down on his dealings with Big Oil, trying to make up for the money he lost, which the FBI was still having trouble tracking down. Vaughn left him and had been making headlines ever since for donating the majority of her earnings from the divorce to charity.
Still, Jane had no intention of keeping the $740 shirt (she couldn’t help it, curiosity drove her to look up the price on the Neiman Marcus website) until she made the mistake of trying it on and it felt like being cocooned in, well…silk.
She reaches the chair and gratefully sits down, as she isn’t sure her legs will hold her weight anymore.
“Welcome back, everybody,” the familiar nasal voice says. “Tonight we’ve got a very special guest—a real-life heroine. Jane Brooks is here, the author of our Fallon Book Club pick of the summer, The End of the World . Welcome to the show, Jane!”
“Thank you, Jimmy,” Jane says, unable to control her smile, even if she does look like a cartoon horse.
It turns out that Kyle was wrong—Jane’s book didn’t see a bump in sales at all immediately following the night at La Fin du Monde.
She saw a bump two weeks later, after Jar House rereleased it under a new title and food influencer Ayanna Baskhi, with three million followers, posted about the book that was loosely based on her experience at La Fin du Monde, the famous restaurant that she was dining in the night it burned down. The next thing Jane knew, her book was the number one book not just in crime fiction, but on all of Amazon. And Barnes & Noble. And the New York Times .
Though Jane still feels hopeless at technology, Ayanna has kindly given her some of her best social media tips, and Jane uses her new platform to showcase the small steps she and Dan have been taking to combat climate change (taking their stock money out of oil companies, for one) and highlight businesses and people that are doing good things in the world. She knows it’s just a drop in the proverbial ocean, that she’s not making big waves. She’s just trying to do the best she can, given her situation.
Jimmy Fallon holds her book upright, propping it on the desk so the audience can see the cover in all its glory.
“Now, as I understand, you wrote this book six years ago about a terrorist group taking over a teahouse, but you were actually dining at La Fin du Monde—the famous restaurant—just a few months ago when a group of terrorists rushed in, taking everyone hostage.”
“That’s right.”
“You couldn’t make that up if you tried!”
Jane smiles and offers the joke she practiced in the mirror: “It’s true. If I had known my life was going to imitate art, I would have written about being stranded on an island with Idris Elba.”
Jimmy throws his head back and claps. The audience bursts out in raucous laughter, which Jane knows isn’t because her joke was so funny, but because the warm-up comedian reminded them to laugh harder and louder for the benefit of television. Still, it feels good.
“Your book has sold nearly eight hundred thousand copies since it was rereleased. How does it feel? After all those years of failure, to finally be something, to be somebody . Did you ever imagine you would be such a success?”
Jane peers into the audience, and she finally lands on the bright smiles of her husband, Dan, and her children. I already was something , she thinks, her eyes lighting on Sissy. And then her gaze moves to the person next to Sissy—Kyle is sitting beside Ayanna, grinning his forty-watt, wrinkle-free grin. He gives Jane two overly enthusiastic thumbs up. Jane clears her throat and takes a deep breath. “No! I had no idea my book would go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, Jimmy. It’s all been very surreal.”
Then she looks back out into the audience at Dan, and her mind flashes on his plate-throwing heroics and how he didn’t hesitate to help the chef and how he always patiently talks her off the ledge of her anxiety—sometimes literally, like when they went BASE jumping together for the first time two weeks ago. It was terrifying, and in the end she couldn’t actually go through with it, confirming what Jane knew in her gut to be true. Much like her unflavored lip balm, she’s not actually edgy and prefers to live with both feet firmly on the ground, thank you very much. It only took her forty-six years to accept who she actually is, and not some version of herself she thought she should be.
Dan smiles at her, and it reminds Jane to add the other bit she’s practiced over the years: “But I couldn’t have done any of it without my family, especially my husband, Dan.” Because that’s what people say when they’re feeling very magnanimous about the state of things.
And if they’re lucky, sometimes it also happens to be the truth.