Chapter 4
“I’ve written a book,” Kate said, flopping onto the other end of the sofa to her sister, careful not to lose any Pinot from her glass. She’d been back from London for a couple of hours, and all she’d done from the moment she’d sat on the train was read the mystery manuscript.
Liv looked at her sharply. “Have you? When? On the train home?”
Kate shrugged. She’d made the decision within the first few pages that she was going to say oh-my-God-this-is-heartachingly-beautiful yes, so technically, perhaps, she had become an author on the train. “Kind of.”
“Is it a gory thriller about an adulterous twat called Richard who catches his tie in the shredder while doing his secretary and gets yanked face-first into the blades? Or maybe he gets dragged into a dark alley by his ex-wife’s violent kick-ass sister? I’d pay good money to read that.”
Liv had taken Richard’s adultery almost as hard as Kate herself—she was the elder sister by two years, and she took her position seriously.
They’d lost their mother as small children and been raised by the kind of father whose “eccentric scientist” approach bordered on unintentional neglect.
He’d rarely remembered to turn up at parents’ evenings when she’d been small, and he’d chosen to appear at an overseas convention rather than attend her wedding to Richard.
It hadn’t hurt her as much as people might have imagined; he’d never exceeded her expectations as a father.
It had been Liv’s brain wave to move Kate into the flat above her fancy-dress shop in the aftermath of the separation, making decisions because her sister couldn’t face it.
It was a far cry from the five-bedroom detached Kate and Richard had shared—or rather she’d thought they’d shared it, until she’d walked in on him in bed with his secretary and realized he’d stitched her into a pre-nup so watertight that she’d been lucky to leave with her own clothes.
Damn those love goggles. She’d driven away from that house with a few cardboard boxes and a suitcase, her dignity in shreds as curtains around the gated community twitched with barely concealed excitement.
She’d headed blindly to Liv and Nish’s overcrowded three-story terrace, where the welcome was all-encompassing and she’d had to talk her mild-mannered brother-in-law out of paying Richard a visit to relieve him of his teeth.
Turkish veneers, not that it was relevant.
“I’ve been working out,” Nish had said gamely. “And I cycle to the office three times a week now, better for the planet.”
Kate tucked her legs beneath her, already in pj’s even though it was barely six o’clock.
“It’s a love story,” she said. “An incredibly beautiful one.”
Liv put her head on one side, studying her sister. “You’ve lost me.”
Kate reached behind the sofa cushion for the plain-covered book she’d stashed there when she’d answered the door to Liv ten minutes ago.
“This one,” she said. “It’s an orphan at the moment, and I’ve been asked to be its mother.”
“You didn’t actually write it, though?” Liv said, trying to understand. “You haven’t blown the dust off those old romances you used to write and gotten secretly famous have you?”
Kate swirled the wine in her glass, watching the concentric circles.
It had been a long time since she’d written anything, fragile dreams squashed by the reality of life as Richard’s wife, life organizer, and hostess.
She’d quietly channeled her soul-deep need for creative expression into writing rather than performing for a while, but even that had fallen by the wayside after Alice was born.
“God, I wish I’d written it because it’s stunning, but no, these aren’t my words.”
Kate had already made two decisions about the book.
One, she was going to take the job. She could have called Charlie to let him know, but he’d wound her up by badgering her for an answer before she’d even caught the train home.
And two, her immediate family needed to be on board, because she wasn’t prepared to lie to them.
Liv refilled their glasses as she listened to the details of Charlie’s unusual job offer, flicking through the pages of the manuscript balanced on her knees.
“So you basically moonlight as the author online and on the cover, kind of like the book’s official representative?”
“That’s about right,” Kate said. “But we’d need to keep the fact I haven’t actually written it between ourselves. Nish can know, obviously, but I was wondering about Stevie and Arun…would it be easier to just not tell them I haven’t actually written it, so they don’t need to keep any secrets?”
“My kids will have very limited interest in the whole thing anyway, unless you go viral on social media or something,” Liv said. “If it doesn’t happen on their phones, it doesn’t happen.”
“I’m not planning on becoming a meme any time soon,” Kate said. “I better tell Alice, though, it feels too much to keep from her.”
“She called me last night to see how you are,” Liv said, finger-combing her blonde hair back into a knot at the base of her neck.
“I spoke to her myself,” Kate said.
“Yeah, she told me. She was just double-checking you weren’t faking it for her benefit.”
Kate sighed. “I hate that she feels as if she needs to worry about me.”
“She doesn’t need to. She chooses to, because you’re her mother and she adores you.”
“Did she tell you she thinks I should go solo traveling in Thailand to find myself? She bombarded me with links this morning.”
“Yes. Asked me to badger you into going.”
Kate sighed. “Oh to be nineteen and think the answer to all life’s problems can be found on a tropical beach.”
“Can’t they? I can think of worse places to look.”
“I’m forty next birthday, bit late for my gap year,” Kate said. “I don’t want to run away, Liv, but Alice does have a point. I need to do something to spark my life up, and I think it might have just landed in my lap.”
Liv topped up their wineglasses. “So what did you think of Charlie Francisco?”
Kate huffed. “Nothing like his father, that’s for sure.”
“He was a one-off, to be fair,” Liv said.
Jojo had been in Kate’s life for barely two years, but in that time he’d been a wise teacher, an unpredictably brilliant agent, and sometimes a fatherly shoulder.
He’d certainly guided her well, straight into the casting department of one of the country’s longest-running soaps.
She remembered his joy in personally delivering the news that she’d landed the part she desperately wanted, his pride when she won Most Promising Newcomer at the Soap Awards the following year.
He’d helped Liv out back then too, putting her in touch with TV and film costume departments she’d never have gotten a foot in the door with otherwise.
He was that sort of man, expansive and generous with his knowledge and his little black book of contacts; he’d taken both sisters under his wing, and Kate’s resignation like an arrow to the heart.
“Charlie’s overconfident,” Kate said. “Suntan. Bit flash.”
Liv sniffed. “I did some digging. Word is he cheated on his wife, Tara, more than once.”
Liv had a direct hotline to Hollywood gossip through her indiscreet circle of costume department friends; she’d known about several movie-star scandals before even the pushiest of journalists. Not that she ever told anyone but Kate, which didn’t count as they were two sides of the same coin.
Kate sighed. “I’m not shocked. He didn’t exactly remind me of Richard, but there’s something about him I didn’t one hundred percent trust.”
“He’s hot, though, right?”
“Oh God, yeah. Seriously hot.”
“There’s that,” Liv said.
“I thought he was the secret author at first. It’s no big leap from writing rom-com movies to novels, is it?”
“Who knows.” Liv shrugged. “I bet Tara wrote the movies anyway and let him take the credit.”
It was a disappointing but not altogether surprising idea. Richard’s infidelity had layered cynicism into Kate’s everyday thought patterns, her rose-tinted love goggles flung into the nearest dustbin.
“Watch yourself around him,” Liv said. “All that”—she pointed toward her own face and made circles in the air—“can be distracting.”
Kate knocked back the last of her wine. “He should watch himself around me,” she said, then laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve got his number. He might be wolfish, but I’m no Red Riding Hood.”
Liv gathered her stuff together to head home. “You do look good in red, though,” she said. “That dress I made for your engagement was killer.”
Kate handed Liv her keys. “Shame it didn’t actually kill Richard, it would have saved me a whole heap of trouble.”
She didn’t mean it. Not entirely. Without Richard there would be no Alice, and in truth the early years of their marriage hadn’t been without their good times; but the shock of adultery and divorce had rattled every bone in her body.
Alone again, she flopped back on the sofa and picked up the plain white book, writing her name on the cover with her fingertip.
There were few silver linings to her reduced circumstances, but at least there were no inquisitive neighbors or close friends to explain her sudden new author life to.
As ghost authors go, Charlie Francisco couldn’t have picked a better person for the job.
Hi Charlie,
Thanks for seeing me last week, and even more so for offering me such an incredible opportunity.
I’ve read the book (twice—I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about Leanora’s story, she’s jumped off the page straight into my heart) and you were right, it’s…
I don’t even have the words for how much I’m in love with it.
It would be an absolute honor to be its official representative, if the offer is still open. Please let me know what I should do next.
All my best,
Kate
Hi Kate,
That’s great news, I was very much hoping to hear from you today.
Give me a couple of days to discuss things in-house and I’ll get back to you.
Let me know if any days and times are better at your end.
Best wishes,
Charlie