25. Frankie
Frankie
The internet, which spent five months planning my wedding, needs eighteen hours to sharpen the same energy into a blade.
By Saturday morning I am no longer the fairy tale.
I’m the twist. PREDATOR WITH A MANUSCRIPT runs across the bottom of a morning-show broadcast, Barlow’s old framing finally cashing its check, and the theories that once auditioned Navy SEALs for my love life now audition motives for my crime.
She targeted him. She engineered the plane.
And over and over, the only one that draws blood: She was writing about him the whole time. It hurts because part of it is true.
The book club cancels. Marisa’s text is three sentences long and kind and final, and the kindness is the part I cry about, standing in my kitchen at nine a.m.: I have to look after the team wives, honey.
I hope someday I get the whole story. Take care of yourself.
Someone posts a video burning a paperback, which trends, which prompts a counter-movement of people buying two, which also trends, and my sales double while my name becomes a genre of joke, and if you want to know how this business actually works, it’s this: everything burns and the register still rings.
Fabio and I watch it all from the floor of my apartment, which I have not left in two days.
There is a photographer outside the Pines and another one who found my building.
Donna had to ask a man with a camera to leave my booth.
My booth. I cannot think about Donna defending the booth without crying, so I am mostly not thinking about it.
Monday, Becca comes to me. House call. She brings bagels and a legal pad and the flat wartime face, and she sits at my kitchen table where his tea mug still is, because I can’t make my hands move it, and she lays out the figures, because I asked.
“Here’s the state of it, and I’m going to say it all at once so we only have to do this one time.
” She doesn’t look at the legal pad. She knows it cold.
“The scandal doubled the offer. Don’t make that face, kid, you know how this works.
Two houses reached out this weekend, quietly, off the record of their own consciences, and the number for the true story, today, with the fire still burning, is eight figures if I let them bid against each other.
That’s the up. Here’s the down. If you refuse, it doesn’t go away, it inverts.
You become the author who sat on the story of the decade, which reads as either saint or accomplice depending on the outlet, and Marion still holds your contract for the Dominic book, which you have not delivered, and if they want to be ugly about the sequel refusal they have grounds to be ugly.
The film option lapses. The foreign markets cool.
And the next book you write, whatever it is, whoever you are by then, gets reviewed through all of it, forever.
” She sets the pen down. “That’s the price of no, laid out flat, like you asked.
Everything you built, kid. Twelve years. That’s what it costs.”
The kitchen is quiet. Fabio, on the third chair like a board member, blinks at Becca, then at me.
“And you should hear this part,” Becca adds, quieter. “I’m the one who sent those pages out. That mistake is mine, and I’ll carry it. So this once I’m not giving you advice. You decide, and whatever you decide, I’ll make it happen.”
I look at the tea mug.
Here’s what I have learned about myself this year, the finding of the whole study: I am a woman who waits.
I waited to feel like a real writer, twelve years.
I waited to tell him, thirteen weeks. I have spent my entire adult life on the reader’s side of my own story, last page first, waiting to see how it ends before risking the middle, narrating in third person from the emergency exit, and every disaster in this wreckage came from waiting, not one of them from acting, and the man I love shut a door in my face because I kept choosing comfortable silence over the truth, one day at a time.
So. No more waiting. The word costs nothing now. That’s the one mercy of losing everything: the price of courage drops to zero.
“Kill it,” I say. “All of it, formally, forever. Book two doesn’t exist, at any number, from any house, under any name, and I’ll sign whatever makes that permanent.
Marion gets the Dominic book by fall, and it’ll be good, tell her I said that, tell her I said it’ll be the best chef anyone’s written, because it will, because I finally understand him.
” My voice doesn’t shake. I notice it not shaking, from a small clinical distance, like watching someone else’s hands hold steady.
“And Becca. The eight figures. I need you to hear this part, because you carry too much already: you didn’t cost me anything.
The pages were mine. The waiting was mine.
You sold what I wrote, that’s the job I hired you for.
The only person who ever mishandled his secret is sitting at this table, and she’s not the one with the bagels. ”
Becca looks at me for a long moment, twelve years of us sitting in her face, and then she nods once, writes three lines on the legal pad, caps her pen.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, packing up, at the door, not a woman built for this and doing it anyway, “I’ve repped a lot of books, kid. This is the first time I’ve been proud of one that doesn’t exist.”
Cami comes at six with wine, pie from the Pines smuggled past the photographers in a to-go box marked ONION RINGS so nobody would guess where she’d been, and no glasses-off speech anywhere in her.
She just moves through my apartment turning on lamps, feeding Fabio, stacking the mail I haven’t opened, restoring the small physics of a livable world, and then she sits on the floor with me against the couch, shoulder to shoulder, the way we sat in her dorm room twelve years ago when my father sent the last email he ever sent me, and we eat pie out of the box.
“I keep waiting to hit the part where I feel like I made the wrong call,” I tell her, somewhere in the second glass.
“The money’s gone, the name’s gone, the man’s gone, the booth has paparazzi, and I keep checking for regret like a missing tooth and it’s just, not there.
There’s grief everywhere. There’s no regret anywhere. Is that shock?”
“That’s alignment,” Cami says, through pie.
“Grief means you lost something. Regret means you betrayed something. You can tell them apart now because for the first time in your life you’ve only got the one.
” She points her fork at me. “Write that down. Actually, don’t.
It’s mine. First sentence of my eulogy for your career. ”
And I laugh, a genuine one, the first in five days, sitting on my floor in the ruins, and that laugh is the hinge of the whole terrible year, because on the other side of it, quietly, without drama, the way the best structural moves always arrive, I know what I’m going to do.
“I’m done being anonymous,” I say. “That’s the load-bearing lie, Cami.
It always was. The initials, the no-photo, the booth in the back.
I built a hiding spot and called it a career, and then I hid a man inside it, and hiding is what broke everything, his and mine.
He hid twenty years and it nearly killed him twice.
I hid twelve and it cost me everything that isn’t at this table or on that windowsill.
” The wine is gone. I don’t need it for this part.
“So I’m going to do the one thing nobody in this story has done yet, including me, especially me.
I’m going to tell the truth. Not his truth.
That one was never mine, and it’s not mine now.
Mine. The plane, the book, the theft of it, the vow, the waiting, what the waiting cost. Out loud. In public. Under my own name.”
Cami is quiet for a second. Then she picks up the empty wine bottle, examines the label, and says, “He might not come back for it, Frankie. You know that, right? You could do the bravest thing of your life into a void.”
“I know.” And I do, all the way down, and I say the rest anyway, because it’s the truest sentence I’ve said all year and she deserves to hear all of it.
“It’s not a grand gesture, Cami. Grand gestures are third-act currency, they’re for someone.
This one has no reader. If he never speaks to me again, it’ll still be true, and it’ll still be mine, and I’ll still have finally said one thing in this world without checking the ending first.”
She stays until eleven. She washes the wine glasses. At the door, she hugs me hard enough to bruise and says, into my hair, “One more thing. I always hated J.M. Sinclair. Pretentious. No warmth. Frankie Delaney, though.” She pulls back, glasses on, eyes wet, grinning. “Frankie Delaney can write.”
Then I’m alone, and the apartment is lamp-lit and pie-crumbed and quiet, and I sit down at the Brick with my coffee going cold. Fabio takes his position on the printer like a foreman, and I open a new document.
No outline. No beat sheet. No pen name between me and the page, no initials, no ghost, nobody’s soul but my own on the table.
My hands hover, and I notice the absence like a phantom limb: Sharon, my old green pen, out of ink and never replaced.
Eleven books together, and nothing left in her for this one.
Fine. Some things you have to write alone.
I type the byline first, because the byline is the whole revolution, four syllables I have hidden behind eleven books, twelve years, and one catastrophic love story:
by Frankie Delaney
The cursor blinks under my own name like a pulse coming back. And then, because every draft of my life until this one began with somebody else’s stolen line, I write the first sentence of the true story, mine, cold, out loud, in first person, no armor anywhere:
I met him on a plane, and I want to tell you what I did.