3. Frankie
Frankie
Present Day
“You’re number four,” Cami says, by way of good morning. “In the country.”
“Don’t.”
“In. The. Country.” She turns her phone around so the list can hurt me personally.
There it is, in a font I’ve dreamed about since I was nineteen: Mile High, J.M.
Sinclair, a little arrow pointing up like the book knows something I don’t.
“Frankie. There are three books in America selling better than yours, and one of them is a memoir by a golden retriever.”
“The dog earned it. The dog has a platform.”
We’re in our booth at the Pines, the one with the rip in the vinyl shaped like Florida, because success has changed nothing about my life except the tips I can afford to leave.
Laptop open. That’s the Brick, fourteen years old, missing an F key, held together by stickers and denial.
Sharon, my favorite pen, is clipped to my notebook, green and judgmental. The office is fully staffed.
Eighteen months ago I flew home from a convention where I signed four books and one of them was for a woman who thought I was somebody else.
This morning, a stranger on the internet has tattooed a sentence I wrote on her rib cage.
There’s a hashtag. There are duets. There is a woman in Ohio who filmed herself finishing chapter twenty-two in an empty bathtub, fully clothed, sobbing, and eleven million people have watched her do it.
The belle of BookTok, Becca calls me. My agent uses phrases like cultural moment and career quadrant now. She texted at six this morning: call me tomorrow. big things. wear ambition.
I should be insufferable about all of this. I planned to be insufferable about all of this, I had material prepared.
Here’s the problem, and because I’m a professional, I can state it in one line of jacket copy:
The book is about a real man, and the whole internet has started asking where he is.
“Read me today’s theories,” I say, because I am also a professional self-harmer.
Cami scrolls. She’s got her serious-critique-partner glasses on, the ones she wears to tell me a chapter isn’t working or a decision is.
“Okay. Top theory: he’s a retired Navy SEAL, because of the stillness.
Second theory: he’s a French-Canadian actor whose name they keep almost getting.
Third theory, and I want you to stay calm, is that he doesn’t exist, because, quote, no man says things like this, unquote, and J.M.
Sinclair is, quote, a genius and possibly two people. ”
“I like theory three.”
“Of course you do. It’s the only one that lets you sleep.” She keeps scrolling. “Theory four is that the whole thing’s a marketing stunt and he’s AI, which, having watched you eat a grilled cheese, I know isn’t true.”
The waitress refills my coffee and doesn’t know I’m number four in the country, God bless her, because J.M.
Sinclair doesn’t have a face. That was the deal I made with myself eleven books ago: the initials take the reviews, the panels, the one-star ratings from women who object to kissing on principle.
Frankie Delaney gets to sit in a booth at the Pines with pen access and plausible anonymity.
I come by the hiding honestly. My father left when I was nine, and people who get left young learn to keep the best of themselves out of reach.
It has worked for years. It is working still, technically, the way a dam is working right up until it isn’t.
Two booths over, there’s a woman I’ve never met with my book propped against the ketchup caddy.
I noticed her when she came in, because I notice the cover everywhere now, the way you notice your own name in a crowd.
Hardcover, library-plastic jacket, a boarding pass sticking out as a bookmark, which is either coincidence or the universe showing off.
She’s deep in the front third. Plane chapters.
I watch her fork stop halfway to her mouth, and then she laughs, out loud, alone, the specific laugh a person only spends on a book, and I know from the page count exactly which line it was.
The chicken lied to everyone.
That’s his, is the thing. Sixty-some thousand of those words are mine, blood from the forehead, revised nine times.
The line strangers laugh at in diners belongs to a man delivered deadpan at altitude by someone whose father, I’d bet the royalties, said it first. I stole a dead man’s dad joke from his grieving son, and it’s the funniest thing in my number-four book.
The woman two booths over goes back to her eggs, happy.
I go back to my coffee and can barely swallow it.
“Does that ever get less weird?” Cami asks, watching me watch her.
“It’s getting worse, actually.”
“Walk me through it again,” Cami says, gentler. “The part where this is fine.”
“It’s fine.” I count it off on my fingers, which even I know is a tell, because I’m talking with my hands at a volume the next booth can hear.
“No names. No city. No last names, no first ones either, I never used his. The hero is called Beau Girard and he’s a retired athlete from a sport I never once name, because I don’t know it, because the real one never told me.
Everything identifying is invented. He could be anyone. That was the whole point of him.”
“Frankie.”
“He’s a ghost, Cami. I met a ghost on a plane a year and a half ago, and the ghost is not on BookTok, he’s a forty-something man, wherever he is, doing whatever gorgeous retired ghosts do. He will never read it. Statistically, no man reads me. I’ve seen the demographic charts—”
“Frankie.” Cami takes off the glasses, which is worse. “Do you want him to read it?”
The question lands in my chest and just, sits there, taking up a booth of its own.
“That’s not—”
“Because you wrote him an eighty-thousand-word letter and had it published in hardcover, babe. There are faster ways to reach a man. Skywriting. Prayer.”
She’s not wrong, which is the worst quality in a critique partner and the reason I keep her.
Here’s how the book happened, since apparently we’re doing this over hash browns.
I came home from the airport that morning and I didn’t cry.
I fed Fabio, who greeted me by knocking a glass off the counter to reestablish the power structure, and I sat down at the Brick, and I typed Chapter One, and when I looked up, it was six weeks later.
No outline. No beat sheet. Me. I beat-sheet grocery runs.
I plot my dentist appointments. And I wrote this one the way you run out of a burning building, straight through, nothing planned, because the alternative to writing him was thinking about him, and thinking about him had a last page I refused to read.
So I did the thing I know how to do. I gave him a different name and a different ending.
In my version, the woman gets a phone number.
In my version there’s a third-act airport chase, because I am a sucker for airport chases, and a wedding in the snow, and nobody walks out of a hotel room and doesn’t look back.
I kept him and I buried him at once, is what I did. And then I sold the plot.
“It’s a good book,” Cami says, watching me have this entire funeral in the face. “Best thing you’ve written. You know that, right? Whatever else it is.”
“It’s a good book,” I agree, and drink my coffee, and don’t say the rest, which is that I know exactly why it’s good, and the reason has gray temples, and I’ll never see him again.
Behind the counter the TV is on mute, tuned to the sports channel, which in this town in September is a legal requirement.
Something’s happening. The text crawling across the bottom of the screen is all capital letters, the two guys at the counter have stopped eating, and the waitress turns the volume up to a roar that’s all draft picks and destiny.
A comeback, apparently. The comeback, the whole diner suddenly religious about it.
“Denver has two moods,” I tell Cami, packing the Brick away, “and the other one’s weed.” I do not look at the screen.
Remember that. I want it noted somewhere official that I did not look at the screen.
The theories keep me company all day, the way a smoke alarm keeps you company.
There’s one specific thing I haven’t told Cami, and it’s the thing I take home with me that evening, past the mailbox with the new deadbolt energy of a woman whose pen name trended, up the stairs, into the apartment where Fabio is asleep on the printout of the book I’m supposed to be writing next, all three legs deployed for maximum coverage.
The thing I haven’t told her is chapter nineteen.
But first, because I am a completist about my own suffering, I do the other ritual. I sit on the floor with my back against the couch, and I open the note.
STOLEN is eleven years deep now. Overheard breakups, a eulogy line from my grandmother’s funeral, something perfect a kid yelled at a splash pad once.
I scroll up, past a year and a half of other people’s sentences, all the way to a timestamp from a red-eye over Nebraska, and there it is, the entry that turned into a hardcover.
Five words about a chicken, logged one-handed under a tray table while a man pretended not to watch me do it.
Did you just write that down?
He knew. That’s what I keep circling back to, at night, on the floor, wine going warm.
He watched me pocket the first thing he ever gave me, and he let me keep it.
There was a whole night after that where he kept handing me things, heavier and heavier, and never once asked me to keep any of it secret, because we were the secret, both of us, the only two people who knew.
My thumb hovers over the entry like it’s warm. The armrest, his hand, the scar named Steve. My body keeps all of this somewhere south of good sense and it renders on demand, every time, high definition, eighteen months later.
I pour wine I won’t finish and pull my author copy off the shelf, and it falls open where the spine is already broken, because of course I’ve done this before. Beau Girard, my beautiful invented ghost, at thirty thousand feet, telling the heroine the truth about his lost year.
Everyone watched a man retire, I wrote. Nobody watched him get clean.
There is a facility in the desert that specializes in exactly this, in famous bodies and quiet exits, and he checked in under a name that meant nothing and came out sixty days later under a reputation that meant everything.
The sport got a press release about his injuries.
He got a sobriety chip, the little coin they hand you in recovery meetings to mark your clean time, his kept in a drawer instead of on a shelf, and a promise he only says out loud at altitude.
The passage everyone tattoos is in chapter twenty-two.
The passage that keeps me up is this one.
Because the wedding is invented and the airport chase is invented and Beau Girard is invented, but that, God help me, is close.
Not verbatim, never verbatim, I’m careless, not cruel.
But close. A man told me the bravest thing anyone’s ever told me, in the dark, at altitude, with no last name attached, because no last name was ever going to be attached.
And I took it home and I filed the serial numbers off and I made it beautiful, and eleven million people watched a woman cry about it in a bathtub.
He said: don’t put me in a book.
I smiled instead of answering. I remember deciding the smile could mean anything. Writers are liars all the way down; we just do it in a font.
Fabio jumps up and stands on the open book, which is the only literary criticism I respect anymore, and I scratch his ears and let the panic do one clean lap.
“It’s fine,” I tell him, out loud, in the empty apartment of a number-four bestselling author. “No one connects a ghost. He never told me his last name. I never told him mine. We were careful by accident, and that’s still careful.”
Fabio stares at me, flat-eyed and yellow, a creature who has survived worse than this.
The woman closes the book, I narrate, in my third person quiet, an old habit for scary altitudes. The woman turns off the light. And because she isn’t in a romance novel, whatever her receipts say, nothing whatsoever is about to go wrong.