Chapter 3
Eli adjusted his tie in the elevator mirror and said, “Remind me why we’re doing this.”
“Because my publisher asked me to come and I couldn’t say no without explaining why, and explaining why would involve telling them I’m the anonymous author of their biggest book in a decade.”
“Right.” He smoothed the tie. It was navy with a small pattern I couldn’t identify from this angle — birds, maybe, or anchors.
He’d bought it new for tonight, which meant he’d gone shopping alone, which meant he’d stood in a department store and held ties up to his neck in a mirror and asked no one for their opinion.
This was the kind of thing that made me love him.
“And the literary gala is the one with the—”
“Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, a silent auction, and two hundred people who think books are a personality trait. Yes.”
“I think books are a personality trait.”
“You teach them for a living. You get an exemption.”
The elevator doors opened. The penthouse floor of the Roosevelt Hotel was already crowded — publishers, agents, editors, a handful of actors who were there because someone had told them it was the kind of event where serious people went, and a scattering of journalists who circled the room like sharks who’d learned to smile.
The lighting was warm. The drinks were free.
A string quartet played something tasteful in the corner, which meant no one was listening to them.
Joss appeared within thirty seconds, holding two glasses of champagne and wearing a blazer I’d seen at least forty times. “You came.”
“You threatened me.”
“I motivated you.” She handed me a glass and nodded at Eli. “Professor. You look like you’d rather be grading.”
“I would rather be grading,” Eli said. “But the appetizers are better here.”
Joss smiled. She liked Eli — genuinely, not performatively — which was one of the things that made the whole arrangement work.
My best friend and my fiancé in the same room, and nobody needed managing.
Nobody needed me to smooth the edges or read the subtext or fill the silence. They just liked each other.
“Your publisher is by the bar,” Joss said, turning to me. “Diane wants to introduce you to someone. An agent. Very important. Apparently he repped the last three National Book Award winners and has opinions about first-person narration.”
“I have opinions about first-person narration.”
“You are first-person narration. That’s the problem.” She took my arm. “Come on. Fifteen minutes of schmoozing, then we eat crab cakes and leave.”
I let her steer me through the crowd. Eli drifted toward the hors d’oeuvres table with the calm contentment of a man who had accepted his role at these events: eat, observe, and be ready to leave the moment I gave the signal.
He was wearing the gray suit — the one his late wife had picked out seven years ago, the one he’d had re-tailored twice because he refused to buy a new one.
It still fit. He still looked like a man who read poetry before bed and considered this a reasonable way to live.
Diane Chen was holding court near the bar, a glass of red wine in one hand and a conversation about paperback print runs in the other.
She was my publisher — or rather, she was Maren Hale’s publisher, because as far as Diane knew, the anonymous author of The Penalty Box communicated exclusively through Joss and had never attended a single industry event.
The irony of standing five feet from the woman who’d published my book while she complained about not being able to book “the Hale woman” for a single interview was a kind of comedy I couldn’t share with anyone except Joss, who found it endlessly delightful.
“Emory,” Diane said, pulling me in. “This is Martin Voss. He’s been dying to meet anyone from our side of the list.”
I shook Martin’s hand and smiled and said the things you say at these things.
He was one of those agents who talked about literature the way stockbrokers talk about portfolios — assets, returns, market positioning.
He wanted to know about Maren Hale. Everyone wanted to know about Maren Hale.
The anonymous author of a novel about a woman who burns her life down and walks away was, apparently, the most interesting person in publishing precisely because no one could find her.
“The book is extraordinary,” Martin said, swirling his scotch. “I’ve never seen a debut move like that. The film rights alone—”
“Maren is very private,” Joss said smoothly, the way she always did when someone got too close to the truth. She’d been my shield since the day the book took off — fielding calls, declining interviews, constructing an absence so complete it had become its own kind of celebrity.
“Private is an understatement,” Diane said. “I’ve published the biggest novel of the decade and I’ve never met the author. My marketing team is losing their minds.”
I sipped my champagne and said nothing, which is the correct response when a room full of people is searching for a woman who is standing right in front of them.
I was halfway through a sentence about contemporary fiction’s relationship with anonymity — leaning into the irony with the particular pleasure of a woman who knows the punchline and no one else does — when I felt it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A shift in the room’s gravity. The way the air changes when someone walks in who is used to being the center of whatever space they occupy.
I turned.
Cade Calloway stood near the entrance, a glass of something clear in his hand, scanning the room the way he used to scan the ice — systematically, reading positions, looking for the open lane.
My hand tightened on the champagne glass. The bubbles pressed against my palm through the thin crystal.
Three years.
He looked different. That was the first thing.
Thinner, the broad shoulders still there but the bulk of a playing career stripped down to something leaner, harder.
His face had changed — the easy confidence replaced by something I couldn’t name.
Not uncertainty. Not sadness. Something between the two, like a room where the furniture has been rearranged and the owner keeps reaching for things in the wrong place.
He was thirty-two and he looked it. When I’d known him, he’d carried himself like a man who believed aging was something that happened to other people. Now he carried himself like a man who’d learned otherwise.
I turned back to Martin Voss and said something about the role of anonymity in contemporary publishing that I didn’t hear myself say.
“Are you all right?” Joss murmured at my elbow.
“Fine.”
“Because your ex-husband just walked in.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to leave?”
I took a sip of champagne. It was good champagne. Expensive. “No.”
“Emory—”
“I’m not leaving a room because Cade Calloway is in it. I spent three years leaving rooms because of Cade Calloway. I’m done.”
Joss looked at me the way she looked at first drafts she wasn’t sure about — with love and skepticism in equal measure. “Okay. But I’m standing right here.”
“I know you are.”
He found me twenty minutes later. I’d moved to the far side of the room, near the windows that overlooked Midtown, and I was talking to Eli about a student’s short story when I felt him approaching the way you feel weather changing — a pressure drop, a gathering tension in the air before the rain.
“Emory.”
His voice. I’d heard it in interviews and press conferences and the occasional clip that surfaced on my phone when the algorithm decided I needed reminding, but hearing it in the same room, aimed at me, shaped around my name — that was different.
That was the difference between reading about fire and putting your hand in it.
I turned. “Cade.”
He stood three feet away. The glass in his hand was water, I realized — not vodka, not the beer he used to drink during every postgame interview. Water. He held it like a prop he didn’t know what to do with.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” he said.
“I didn’t know you would either.”
A silence. The string quartet played something that might have been Debussy. The room moved around us like a river parting around two stones.
“You look—” He stopped. Swallowed whatever adjective he’d been reaching for. “It’s good to see you.”
“Is it?”
He deserved that. He took it without flinching, which was either growth or practice, and I couldn’t tell the difference.
His jaw worked. The twice-broken nose caught the light differently at this angle — sharper, more crooked than I remembered.
Or maybe I was remembering the version of him I’d married, the one with the easy confidence and the grin that could end arguments.
This version didn’t grin. This version held his water glass with both hands and looked at me with something I refused to name, because naming it would mean acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would mean carrying it home, and I was done carrying things for Cade Calloway.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m well.”
“Are you still—” He paused. “Are you writing?”
The question landed harder than I expected. Because he was the one who’d said Then finish. In a bar in Nashville, six years ago, when I was twenty-four and holding a beer I didn’t want and wearing a sweater with ink stains on the cuffs. Then finish. And I hadn’t. Not while I was his.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m writing.”
“Good.” He said it like he meant it. That was the worst part. “That’s good, Emory.”
The way he said my name. Like he was testing whether the word still fit in his mouth. Like he’d been practicing saying it to no one and was hearing it aloud for the first time in three years.
Eli appeared at my side with a plate of crab cakes and the unhurried manner of a man who had seen me talking to my ex-husband and decided the correct response was hors d’oeuvres. “These are excellent,” he said to no one in particular.
“Cade, this is Eli Strand,” I said. “Eli, this is Cade.”