15. Frankie
Frankie
Becca orders the good champagne at lunch, which is how I know something terrible is about to happen to me.
“Before you say anything,” she says, which is what she says before she says things I won’t like, “I want you to hear the number the way I heard it. Sitting down. Chewing something. Open heart.”
“Becca.”
“Seven figures, Frankie.” She lets it detonate over the bread basket.
“For book two, if we take it to auction — I put the proposal in front of six publishers at once and they bid against each other until the number stops climbing. Seven figures is just where the bidding starts. Marion called me twice yesterday, twice, and Marion does not call, Marion has people whose whole job is to do her calling, and she said, quote, the market has never wanted anything the way it wants the rest of this story.”
The rest of this story. I put my water glass down carefully, because my hands have started talking before me, and a mile that way a man with a fused neck is running drills, and four nights ago I fell asleep on his chest in the house with his father’s room in it.
“There is no rest of the story,” I say. “Mile High is a standalone. It says standalone in the deal memo. I wrote the wedding, Becca, I closed the door, I did everything but bolt it.”
“And then the door walked into a bookstore and confirmed the whole thing was real, sweetheart, and now the door does a wrist thing on national television and the wrist thing trends.” Becca leans in, and here is the problem with my agent: she is not wrong, she is never wrong, she is only ever early.
“Nobody wants Beau and June’s honeymoon.
They want the true story. The reunion. The comeback.
The woman behind the initials and how it really went.
Autofiction, memoir-adjacent, novel-shaped, I don’t care what we call it, and neither does Marion.
They want the ending you didn’t print the first time. ”
“The first book’s ending is the ending.”
“The first book’s ending,” says Becca, buttering a piece of bread without looking at it, “is a beautiful lie, and everyone can smell it now, and honey, that’s the pitch. That’s why it’s seven figures. Readers don’t pay a premium for happily ever after. They pay a premium for actually.”
Here’s what I do not say at lunch, over champagne I don’t drink: the ending they can smell isn’t a wedding.
I know exactly what the honest second book looks like, because I’m the only living person with all the pages.
It looks like a man playing one last season on a body he described to me in the dark like a house he was handing over the keys to.
It looks like sixty days in a desert that the whole sport still thinks was a hip issue.
The true story runs directly through the one room I swore I’d never open again, and this time there would be no Beau to hide him in, because the whole point of book two, the seven-figure point, is that everyone already knows who he is.
“I’ll think about it,” I tell Becca, which is a lie, and my thumbnail is in my teeth before the sentence ends, and she watches me do it with a look that says she knows exactly what my nail-biting means after twelve years together.
“Think fast,” she says. “Offers like this don’t sit still.”
I go to the diner, and I open the Brick, and for four days, between his road games and my deadline for the book I’m supposed to be writing, I try to solve it on the page, because that’s the only place I’ve ever solved anything.
Draft one: the protective version. Beau and June, book two, pure invention, a fluffy sequel with a puppy and a bakery subplot and no truth in it anywhere.
It’s dead on arrival. I can feel it dying under my hands, page by page, the way you can feel a party failing through a wall.
There is no pulse in it because I built it specifically to have no pulse, a decoy book, and readers can smell a decoy the way Becca can smell money.
Draft two: the deflection version. The lost year becomes something else, a gambling thing, an invented scandal, fiction upholstered over the fiction.
Worse. Now it’s a lie with the shape of his truth, close enough that the internet would strip it for parts in a weekend, and I’m six pages in when I realize I’m literally drafting a decoy secret for a real man’s real recovery and I close the laptop and put my head down on the Formica until the waitress refills my coffee out of what I can only assume is spiritual concern.
Draft three I write at two in the morning, at home, Fabio on the printer, and I write it the way I wrote the first book, no outline, hands ahead of conscience, just to see.
The true version. The man who came back, the season on a rebuilt body, the room in the desert, the promise, the headstone with no Cup on it, a love story where the woman is the leak in the levee, and it sings.
Of course it sings. It sings for eleven pages, the best eleven pages of my career, prose I would frame if it were about anyone else, and then I sit back and read what I made and understand, with a clarity that arrives like ice water finding a filling, that I have just typed up the working schematic of how to destroy Nico Lachance, and that it is good, and that it is worth seven figures precisely because it is true, and that this is what I am.
This is the job. Cami said it years ago, laughing, at this same hour: you’d sell us all for a good paragraph. Everyone laughed. Me too.
I select all eleven pages and delete them, and the deleting fixes nothing, because the schematic isn’t on the laptop. It’s in me. I’m the manuscript.
Then, because I am apparently determined to lose all my own respect in one night, I do the ritual. I open STOLEN.
The note scrolls up warm and horrible, eleven years of other people’s best sentences, and there at the top, added without ceremony over the last month, are the new entries.
His. Recent. I love you, get out, Micah’s, translated from goalie, secondhand through Nick’s retelling.
The house is where a house would live, mine actually, said on his steps, kept because he laughed.
And then the ones I typed half asleep in his bed, stealing from the man beside me even as I fell in love with him: tonight nothing hurts.
Museum rules. You finish what you start.
That last one. His father’s. A dead man’s kitchen-table vow, logged in my phone between an eulogy and a splash-pad kid, marked for future use by the part of me that never stops writing, not even there, not even then, not even with his hand in my hair and his whole guard down.
I took the plane confession and made a bestseller.
Now I’m taking the pillow talk. The sequel isn’t a temptation that arrived at lunch with champagne.
The sequel is already being written, nightly, automatically, by the part of me I have never once managed to turn off, and the only question Becca actually asked me today is whether I’d like to get paid for it.
I sit on my kitchen floor for a while, phone dark, and let that be true.
***
He calls at eleven, from a hotel in Winnipeg, voice full of excitement after a win, and this is the part I will remember exactly, because when this all catches fire the timeline will matter: I could have told him tonight.
There was a place for it. He asked how writing went, a plain question, no suspicion in it anywhere, a man extending his trust like a hand held palm-up, and I stood at my counter with the whole thing loaded, Becca has an offer, the publisher wants the true story, there’s an auction coming and I need you to know, and what I said was, “Slow. The book’s fighting me. ”
“Good,” he said, easy, half asleep. “Means it’s honest. You told me that.”
I told him that. I stand there after we hang up with the phone against my chest, in the ruins of the evening, and Fabio watches me from the counter with his flat yellow patience, and I understand the shape of what I just did the way I understand story structure, because that’s the only way I’ve ever understood anything: a lie of omission in chapter fifteen is never a lie of omission by chapter twenty.
It compounds. It’s the check you write against the third act.
Every version of me that survives this book knows better, and I did it anyway, because his voice was warm and the truth was cold, and I wanted one more chapter of the warm.
The woman says nothing. The woman has until the auction.
Becca texts at midnight, cheerful as a fire alarm: Marion again. They want to move. Champagne’s on ice, kid — bring me an answer by the new year.
I don’t answer. On the counter, Sharon lies where I left her, capped, out of ink since Tuesday, and I haven’t replaced her yet, and I don’t want to think about why.