Chapter 2
That evening, I fed Lucy an early dinner and she conked out two minutes into her bedtime story, which freed me up to finish my work projects that were due in the morning, including proofreading the online florists’ weekly email newsletter and a new series of Instagram ads for a local gourmet chocolate maker.
As an account executive at the marketing agency cofounded by my in-laws twenty years earlier, where I’d been working for the past three months since Lucy started preschool, my job mostly consisted of literally making sure the i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed in all the materials the agency produced.
It wasn’t exactly writing, but it was at least writing-adjacent, and it was satisfying to feel effortlessly successful at work when it required so much more diligence to keep the rest of my life on course.
After I finished the projects, I went through my usual evening housekeeping circuit: clean the kitchen, pick up toys, run a load of laundry, and set the coffee maker to brew me awake in the morning.
Though physically exhausted, I was still burning to start brainstorming new book ideas.
The first baby step toward writing again was to open a new document in my long-dormant writing folder.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
All I needed was a concept that would be both interesting to write and safe to publish.
I pushed aside the worry that these two prerequisites might be mutually exclusive.
Threading the needle would be tough, but not impossible.
An hour later, my eyelids were heavy and the page was still blank.
At one time, an empty page at the start of a new writing project would have felt like a challenge to dream and create, but tonight it felt more like a taunt.
Vowing to try again tomorrow, I slipped under the covers.
I only needed one good idea. It would come, in time.
I jolted awake in a cold sweat. Terror clawed at me as the vivid nightmare seeped into my conscious brain.
Instinctively, I clutched my throat and realized I’d been awakened by my own muffled screams. For Lucy.
Because in my dream, I’d landed on the perfect solution to my writing dilemma: writing about something that had already happened so there was no chance of my words causing new harm.
I’d invented a story loosely based on the time Sam had accused an opponent of match-fixing in a qualifying tournament and it spiraled into a sport-wide scandal.
In real life, the hullabaloo eventually died down.
But in the plot of my nightmare, I’d cleverly raised the character’s stakes with death threats made against the player and his young wife—culminating in the player’s death at the hands of a fanatic.
Sam couldn’t very well die a second time, or so said my warped subconscious.
But the day the book was published, I figured out my big mistake.
In my attempts to protect Lucy, I’d focused solely on the couple at the center of the drama.
I had intentionally avoided any mention of a future child for this couple, sure that would keep Lucy safe.
But in neglecting to breathe life into that future character, my tunnel vision had backfired.
Rather than protecting Lucy, I had inadvertently erased her from existence. She was nowhere. Not now. Not ever.
My heart was pounding as I threw off my tangled sheet and tiptoed into Lucy’s room, my pajama top damp with dread.
My rational brain knew it had only been a nightmare.
Still, the moment I saw her curled up in her toddler bed, her silky light-brown hair splayed across the pillow, my body went limp with relief.
I slid under the comforter alongside her warm little heater of a body and tried to slow my breathing to match hers.
Lucy was fine. I hadn’t done anything irreparable. Not yet, anyway.
When we woke up a few hours later, a tangle of sweaty limbs, it was a sunny Friday morning and Lucy was bouncing off the walls for pajama day at preschool.
There was nothing like an ecstatic little girl to shift the energy in a house.
Despite Lucy’s precocious attempt to skip brushing her teeth—“Remember, Mommy? I do that after I get dressed, and today I’m not getting dressed!
”—we made it out the door in record time.
Lucy buckled her own booster seat, I double-checked her work, and then off we went.
After depositing Lucy in her classroom with hugs and kisses, I returned to my car, thankful that I’d make it to the office ahead of schedule.
This meant I would have time to stop for a latte to savor through my first meeting, which was a deep-dive data analysis of the online florists’ recent Thanksgiving promotion.
Though the work was less than scintillating, I had to admit I enjoyed being gainfully employed, especially in an office filled with adult colleagues who didn’t consider Disney princesses to be the pinnacle of intelligent discourse.
Even better was the flexible schedule I enjoyed.
It was far from the life I’d been envisioning before Sam died, but I had a secure job to support Lucy, which was what mattered most now.
With the optimistic start to the day, I was finally shaking off the hangover from that awful nightmare.
So what if I hadn’t come up with a viable book idea in one night?
The important thing was that there would be another book in my future.
There was no great rush. I could take my time developing a concept and then spend even more time obsessively scrutinizing every plot thread for any risk of unintended outcomes.
It would be difficult, methodical work, but I’d never been afraid to dig into details.
I pulled out a chair at the long rectangular glass table and sat down next to Coco, the agency’s social media guru.
A couple of other account team members drifted in, and then Louisa, the account supervisor, started the meeting.
Soon, Louisa, Coco, and Chad, the creative dude, were debating what we should have done differently with the Thanksgiving promotion.
I was still learning the lingo, so I had nothing meaningful to contribute other than as a dutiful notetaker.
In that mind-numbing role, the passage of time felt murky, but at some point my phone started to pulse.
“Sorry,” I said to the team as I flipped over the phone to silence it.
But as I did, I saw the name on the screen and my stomach dropped.
It was Harper Davies. My literary agent.
We hadn’t talked in almost two years, and that had not been a fun chat.
Unless she’d magically intuited my “I shall write again” epiphany outside the bookstore yesterday, there was only one other reason she would be reaching out.
I wasn’t ready, would probably never be ready, to have that particular conversation again.
Louisa cast an annoyed glance in my direction, so I sent the call to voicemail and tucked my phone under my leg.
But Harper was a bulldog of the first order.
This was a brilliant thing for her clients when she was out in the publishing world making deals on their behalf, but on the receiving end, not so much.
I squirmed and fidgeted, knowing that she was probably hitting redial over and over again.
The meeting had to be coming to an end.
But then, without warning, Louisa stood up and slapped a piece of paper on the table.
Everyone leaned forward to get a better look. It was a copy of the client’s newsletter with an angry red circle around part of the first paragraph of body copy.
“Thea,” Louisa said, dramatically crossing her arms, “the client is enraged that last week’s newsletter contained a typo.”
Every fiber of my being shifted into high alert. “A typo? But the client signed off on it,” I said meekly.
“The client gives conceptual approval. Proofreading is not their job,” Louisa said.
“But I followed our double-proofreading procedure,” I said, my writerly pride taking a beating. “Can I see the typo?”
Louisa pushed the printout across the table. I scanned it twice. “Sorry, but where’s the typo?”
“You used a semicolon in a newsletter about flowers.” There were gasps. Lots of them.
“But grammatically it works. How is it a typo?” I sat up straight to project confidence.
“Thea, the newsletter isn’t an SAT reading-comp passage or a literary work,” Louisa said.
“Normal people, the audience for this newsletter, see a semicolon and they freak out. They wonder what it means. And when they don’t know—because I mean, really, who knows the proper use of a semicolon—they feel inferior and insecure.
This semicolon alienates them from the brand, and then they don’t order flowers. ”
I slumped in my chair, feeling a bit like Andy in The Devil Wears Prada after Miranda Priestly’s brilliant cerulean-sweater monologue.
Louisa continued, “You need to write the client a note of apology and then please be more mindful in the future.”
“Will do.” I nodded and silently commanded my eyes to stop prickling. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
At long last, the meeting adjourned. There were four missed calls from Harper, and now a fifth flashing on my screen.
With no upside to putting this off further, I stepped into the bathroom and answered.
We exchanged a few minutes of small talk, until I could tell Harper was about to go there.
I took a stab at heading it off. “Hey, so I’ve been batting around a few new ideas. ”
“That’s great,” Harper said. “Like what?”
“They’re not quite ready,” I demurred.
“When might they be ready?” she pressed.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Soon-ish?”
“Thea, what are you, thirty?” Harper asked.
“No, actually, I’m not even twenty-nine and a half yet.” I winced, instantly regretting how childish I sounded. Next I’d be blurting out the date of my half birthday and pleading for a bouncy castle.
Harper paused, as if to demonstrate that sometimes no words were better than dumb ones.
“For the sake of discussion, let’s agree you’re coming up on thirty.
You published one terrific book about four years ago.
Given your relative youth, you probably feel like you have nothing but time.
But it’s my job to tell you that in order to stay relevant in this industry, you need to publish a book more than once a decade. ”
Oof. “I know, Harper. I get that. I do. I’m trying. But the grief is all still pretty raw, you know?” Which was true, but it was also a naked play for sympathy. And more time.
“That’s the beauty of your situation,” Harper said. “You don’t have to write another manuscript right now. Or even this year. You can continue healing. You know why?”
I braced for the answer to her obviously rhetorical question.
“Because the publisher is still interested in Call of the Void.”
“I’m sorry, but no,” I said emphatically. “I need you to understand that they could literally offer me the sun and the moon for that story and the answer would still be no—a thousand times no—every single time.”
“Please tell me after all these years you’re not still stuck on that irrational fear.”
“What irrational fear?” I hedged, hoping she’d let it drop.
“The one where you believe your books have the power to create their own reality?” Harper sounded uncharacteristically annoyed.
“Harper, I get that you’re frustrated that I won’t sell Call of the Void and that my reasoning doesn’t seem rational to you.
But I need you to remember that Call of the Void is about a child who gets kidnapped and disappears forever.
Even if there’s just an infinitesimal chance that my last book played a role in Sam’s death, I couldn’t possibly risk putting out a story into the universe that might invite tragedy back into our lives.
Lucy’s all I have. I wouldn’t survive it if something happened to her,” I squeaked out.
“It would forever feel like it was my fault. Like, I don’t know, what if you were a PhD and you spent five years in a lab researching a rare pediatric brain cancer, and then your child was diagnosed with the same cancer?
Wouldn’t you have questions? Or blame yourself, even if ninety-nine percent of the time you knew it wasn’t your fault? ”
Harper sighed in answer. “I don’t know, maybe, unless the research I was doing helped find a cure.”
“Good point,” I acknowledged.
“But the problem is, I’m not a brain cancer researcher, I’m a literary agent. It’s my job to get compelling books published for people to read.” She hesitated for a moment. “So let’s suppose we set that manuscript aside for good. What then?”
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “Believe me. I want to write again more than anything, and I’m actively trying, but I need more time to settle on a concept that feels controllable.”
“Oh, Thea,” she lamented. “You used to be so energetic and bold. You were determined to write an entire shelf’s worth of books.
You had a big career planned, and I was so there for it.
I want you to understand that I haven’t taken my commitment to be your career partner lightly.
I adore working with you. But unless you produce another manuscript that you will let me sell, then I’m having trouble seeing how it’s in either of our interests to prolong this relationship.
I need to focus on my authors who are burning to publish, not tripping over reasons to avoid it.
So how about if we set a deadline by which you either give me permission to sell Call of the Void or you submit a new book proposal? ”
“A deadline? A proposal?” I repeated numbly as the words echoed through me. “Wait, are you saying you’ll dump me as a client?”
“That’s up to you,” Harper said.
“Lucy starts kindergarten in less than two years. Maybe that can be the deadline?” I could work with that.
Harper cleared her throat. “I was thinking more like next Friday.”
“Next Friday?” My insides twisted. “But that’s, like, really, really soon.”
“You’ve had years. Time’s up,” Harper said. “Listen, I have to run, but I’ll call you again next Friday. And for the record, I still believe in you. This shouldn’t be how your story ends.”
So much for nothing but time.