Chapter Two
Four Weeks Earlier
“ARTHUR FLETCH IS DEAD.”
Holden’s head snaps up at the words, pen hovering over the notepad.
He is perched on the stool in the corner of Ava’s office, taking notes, when Eleanor Vandenberg drops the news.
Five minutes earlier, Fletch’s longtime agent swept into Merriweather Press and up to Holden’s desk, declaring she needed to talk to senior editor Ava Paulson.
In private. Now. Holden wavered, unsure what to do.
Ava had spent the morning in back-to-back meetings, was behind on at least three different authors’ edits, and had just snatched up the sad desk salad he’d gotten her and escaped into her office with the order that for the next hour, she was not to be disturbed, on pain of death.
But death was probably better than denying Eleanor Vandenberg.
Especially since she never trekked across the city when a phone call or a curt email would do.
(He’s seen most of those emails, and she never once used an exclamation point.
It’s periods, across the board, and he is pretty sure that is the sign of a modern-day sociopath.) The fact that she was there, in the flesh, meant something was either very right, or very wrong.
Holden stood and knocked, bracing for Ava’s withering look, and it was there, but as soon as she saw Fletch’s agent, it slid right off, replaced by something stiff but welcoming.
“Eleanor, what a surprise!” she said, and Holden mouthed sorry as the industry’s most powerful agent walked right in and took a seat.
“Aveline,” she said, and Holden’s mouth twitched, because he knew for a fact that Ava hated when anyone called her that, but Eleanor was one of the few people she wouldn’t correct.
Still, she shifted a little in her seat, her expression tightening like a face mask that has started to dry out, and Holden wrote a tiny 3 in the corner of his legal pad.
Some people had a range of smiles. His boss, Ava Paulson, had a whole spectrum of frowns.
Holden had been classifying them since he started working as her assistant, six months before, cataloging each and ranking them from 1 to 10 on a scale that ran from mild disapproval all the way through mental flaying.
(He spent the first two months trying to win his boss over, to no avail, and the next four months trying to avoid looks on the scale of 7 to 9.)
“Close the door, Holden,” Ava ordered. He hesitated, just for a second, unsure which side of the door he should be on when it closed—normally, private didn’t include him, but he knew for a fact that his boss was vaguely terrified of Vandenberg, so he entered and tugged the door closed in his wake.
Now he’s on the footstool in the corner, which is so short it makes his knees brush his elbows, and his slacks inch up enough to show his socks, which today are covered in ducks.
And for the record, there are two chairs in front of Ava’s desk, but whenever he starts to take one, his boss points to the stool, like a teacher sending a kid to time-out.
Senior editor Ava Paulson seems determined to hate Holden Merriweather, as if it were his fault that he went to Yale, or that when his theater career didn’t pan out, his uncle did what family does and helped him get this job. It’s not like he walked in the door and was given a spot in the C-suite.
It isn’t his fault that his name is on the building. In fact, if anything, he is pretty proud of himself for still taking the job when his uncle made him start as an assistant.
Proud of the fact he’s working his way up, just like Ava did.
He knows it will take time, and he has never complained, even though it’s been six months, and she is still making him do book reports, like he is back in school, insisting it is part of the job, when he is pretty sure she just doesn’t want him to get ahead.
He doesn’t even complain when she gives him one of her withering looks, like last month when she handed him a manuscript and told him to come up with some copy, and he asked how many, thinking she wanted him to use the Xerox machine.
(How was he supposed to know that copy meant the pitch for a book’s plot? Someone should have told him.)
He doesn’t complain, because his uncle has said that if Holden can stick it out a year, he will be promoted.
“Can’t climb too fast,” he said, patting his nephew’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t want it looking like I’m playing favorites.” He winked, like it was a joke, but Holden doesn’t get it.
Why shouldn’t he play favorites? Empires are built by keeping business in the family.
Besides, Holden is good at this! He likes books.
Sometimes he even reads them for fun. It’s just, Ava keeps giving him the most boring work.
He wants to do more; he wants to pick cover art, and present titles at launch, and take authors out for fancy lunches—he’s always been a people person, and he thinks his time would be better spent out there, as the future face of the company, instead of perched on a stool, pretending to take notes.
Ava eyes the manuscripts on her desk and the untouched salad. Then she sighs and scoots them both out of the way, lacing her hands in their wake to keep from fidgeting.
“What can I do for you?” she says.
Eleanor doesn’t beat around the bush; she simply comes right out and says the words.
“Arthur Fletch is dead.”
Holden’s head jerks up at the news, and Ava’s hand goes to her mouth, not fast, like Oh god! but slow, like . . . Oh god, the expression on her face halfway between a Why me? and an I don’t have time for this. He scratches a tiny 5 in the page corner, and then the penny drops.
According to Uncle Ellis, Arthur Fletch is Merriweather Press, at least as far as finances are concerned. His books had saved the house from going under once, back in the day, and ever since, they’d single-handedly kept Merriweather in the black.
If there’s no Fletch, there’s no publisher, and if there’s no publisher, what will happen to Holden? He’s not about to start over again. The thought alone is exhausting. He does have another uncle, in finance, but the prospect of that . . .
Ava’s voice cuts into his thoughts. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“As was I,” says Eleanor blandly, in a way that makes Holden wonder if she’s ever cried. About anything. Ever.
“When?” asks his boss.
“Yesterday.”
Ava shakes her head. “I’m amazed it hasn’t hit the press.”
Eleanor snorts. “It’s hardly luck. The groundskeeper rang me before the authorities, thank god, since I’m listed as Arthur’s next of kin.”
That strikes Holden as unbearably sad. A man of Arthur Fletch’s station, and his age, with no family of his own.
Holden has family, of course—siblings, and parents, uncles and aunts and cousins—but he’ll be thirty in two months.
By the time his father was thirty, he had a wife and two sons.
Holden doesn’t even have a cat. How long has it been since he logged on to a dating app?
He should really make an effort.
“Of course,” Eleanor is saying, “I could barely understand a word the man said, but I got the gist of what happened.”
“What are you going to do?” asks Holden.
He isn’t supposed to talk in meetings, but he can’t help it; the question just comes spilling out. Arthur Fletch is the biggest name they have—arguably the biggest in the world. Uncle Ellis has the covers blown up and hung as posters on his office wall.
Eleanor and Ava swivel toward Holden. He can’t read Eleanor’s expression, but Ava’s says I should have kicked you out before this started. He smiles back in a way he hopes says Too late now! We’re in this together, boss.
She gives him a follow-up look that says You are now sworn to secrecy; do not write anything down.
He hasn’t actually been taking notes, just doodling his Ava Paulson Annoyance Scale numbers in the margin.
But he now makes a display of laying his pencil down as his boss turns her attention back to Fletch’s agent.
“Tell me he finished the book,” she says slowly, a pleading note in her voice.
The book is The Book, apparently the last one Arthur Fletch will ever write.
The one that everyone is waiting for. The one that is, at last count, eighteen months late.
And the one that will keep Merriweather afloat for the foreseeable future, or at least until Ava finds the next Fletch, which she has been trying to do for as long as Holden has worked here.
As if her whole job depends on it. Which, now that he thinks about it, maybe it does? Publishing is weird.
Eleanor shakes her head, and Ava groans, tucking her glasses up into her hair so she can dig her thumbs into her eyes.
“What are we going to do?” she mutters, repeating his question word for word, but for some reason no one glares at her.
“Well, the way I see it, we have two choices.” Eleanor spreads her hands, palms up, as if weighing the options.
“We can let the press know that Arthur died without finishing his greatest work, the book that he and Merriweather have been hyping up for the last three and a half years, a book he was more than two years late on because even he was over his skis and couldn’t figure out how to stick the landing, and the publisher can eat tens of millions in sales, causing a cascade failure that will cost you your job before it goes on to bury the entire company. ”
Ava groans audibly.
“Or,” says Eleanor, “we find someone else to finish the book.”
Holden isn’t sure how that would work, but it certainly seems like the better option. And yet Ava is shaking her head.
“The public would revolt if they knew that we gave the series to someone else.”