Epilogue Caroline
Epilogue
Caroline
One year later
Caroline Lash pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine.
Even now she had to take a moment and collect herself after a drive, to let the adrenaline subside, to congratulate herself on having made it to her destination without a major traffic violation or incident.
She pulled her handbag into her lap and reviewed the contents: bottle of water, box of Sharpies for signing her name, index cards with prepared remarks, and a copy of her book, still a surreal object for her to behold, her name in raised script across the front.
Before getting out of the car Caroline flipped down her visor to check her reflection.
Her glasses were clean, her eyebrows were groomed, and her hair was magically doing the right thing despite the humidity—the power of a three-hundred-dollar salon haircut, paid for by Gwendolyn Lash.
She looked good. Authorial. But in the afternoon light Caroline glimpsed a hair sticking out of her chin and she grabbed the tweezers from her glove compartment to banish it.
Just as she had yanked it free, there was a rap on the windshield, sudden and loud, and Caroline startled, dropping the tweezers into the gearshift.
There, on the other side of the glass, was Ned Clark, grinning hugely.
“Jesus. What are you doing here?” Caroline swung her door open.
“I have lots of clients at the Newburyport Book Festival.” Ned reached for Caroline’s bag and helped her out of the car.
“You do?”
“No.” Ned snorted. “I’m here for you. Plus, I was up in Greenhead and this was ten minutes away.”
It was a truly unexpected turn of events.
Over the past year, Ned had become Caroline’s literary agent.
Stranger still, they had become friends.
After Caroline realized that she couldn’t publish the novel about Van’s circle, Ned swooped in and took care of canceling the contract.
She apologized to the Bushwick editor with curtain bangs, she apologized to her old agent, and she gave back the advance, leaving the fellowship cottage behind and returning home to sleep in her childhood bedroom.
She was the lowest of the low. For weeks she mourned her lost novel, her moment in the sun, and, as all writers must, she contemplated law school.
But then one day, staring at her ceiling as her parents whispered worriedly in the next room, she had a revelation.
While she had long been trapped by her need to write about real people, real things, she could stop scribbling notes about everyone around her and turn her pen on herself.
In a white heat fueled by stomach-destroying quantities of coffee, Caroline wrote a new novel, a satirical roman à clef about the publishing industry.
She told the story of a young woman, daughter of a famous writer, the product of deeply entrenched nepotism, born to great privilege and denying it at every turn.
Set amid the trendy coffee shops and alt-lit poetry slams of the Lower East Side, populated by men with ironic mustaches and women drinking espresso martinis, the spoiled narrator must escape to Mexico City, where she finally reckons with the life she has been handed on a silver platter.
Caroline’s novel was an arrow, aimed directly at herself.
Ned Clark sold the finished manuscript to an older editor Caroline had always admired, earning her an advance that was just slightly less than what she’d been paid the first time.
Together Ned and her new publisher planned a media rollout that involved a Substack, a podcast, and a mother-daughter profile in The New York Times, a piece so emotionally taxing to Caroline that she felt she might actually have paid her penance.
Gregory and Gwendolyn Lash were no less pleased this time around than they had been with her first book deal.
Her father went with her to buy a copy at the bookstore the Tuesday it went on sale, her friends all posted selfies with their own hardcovers, and Nina brought a massive bouquet of flowers to her launch event, coming straight from an audition and sporting a full-body leather catsuit.
The Newburyport Book Festival was bustling with people but Ned cleared a path through the crowd, escorting Caroline from her car through the lobby of the theater, where he delivered her to the flustered event coordinator.
At first Caroline assumed there must be a second event going on at the same time, or at least some confusion about which member of the Lash family would be reading.
“No, no,” the coordinator assured her. “Everyone’s here for you! ”
They led her to the main stage, a theater that seated a hundred people, and a tech dressed in black carefully slipped a microphone down Caroline’s top.
The lights shone brightly on the podium, and even though she was sort of blinded, she jumped right into her presentation, a self-deprecating speech about her creative process, a look at the research she had conducted on a two-week trip to Mexico, and then a brief reading from the novel itself.
At the end of her remarks the coordinator opened it up for questions and two young volunteers ran microphones around the theater, the speakers glitching and squealing every time they handed them to someone new.
“What drew you to these characters?” asked a woman in Gloria Steinem glasses.
The woman looked vaguely familiar, and Caroline briefly wondered if she knew her from Greenhead but, she was realizing, everyone at book readings looked vaguely familiar.
It was a funny thing—publishing a book was sort of like getting to experience your own funeral.
People you hadn’t thought of in ages came out of the woodwork, old teachers, camp friends, a second cousin’s ex-girlfriend you’d met once at a wedding.
“I guess I wanted to make fun of myself,” Caroline answered.
“It’s so easy to be the sly observer, to eavesdrop on conversations, to point out the ridiculous in others.
It’s much harder to do it to yourself. I have a lot in common with my main character…
Though,” Caroline paused thoughtfully, “if you really hated her, we could pretend she’s totally made up.
” Caroline smiled at the crowd’s soft laughter and squinted out at the audience to try to see who else might have a question.
There were rows of women in chunky knit sweaters and denim jackets, their hair swept back in clips or parted down the middle, their faces obscured by glasses, or their lips painted red.
These were Caroline’s people. She smiled cheerfully, inviting more questions, and as her eyes roamed the crowd, she suddenly saw a familiar face in the back row.
It was Van Whittaker, wearing his olive-green shirt, his shiny hair tucked behind his ears.
But then, as she peered out into the lights, suddenly it wasn’t.
It was another man, much older, with the wrong nose, the wrong teeth.
This kept happening to Caroline. She kept seeing Van when he wasn’t there, running up to a stranger in line at the deli and nearly tapping him on the shoulder.
“Can you talk a little bit about ambition in your book? Do you think the character’s ambition is a flaw?”
“Oh, sure.” Caroline felt half her brain responding while her eyes continued to scan the faces in the crowd.
She hadn’t realized how much she had been hoping Van might come to see her, hoping he thought about her as much as she thought about him.
Even if he was with Bailey, she just wanted to see his face one more time, to say sorry in person.
When she left Greenhead Caroline had mailed handwritten apology letters to Fran and RJ, Augusta and Colin, Eben and Max, and Bailey and Van.
She hadn’t heard back—the letters had not necessitated responses—but over the holidays she had received a Christmas card from Augusta that both she and Colin had signed, and it had made Caroline cry with relief.
Augusta and Colin were still together, and in some way, she was forgiven.
Caroline answered the question about ambition, and then a follow-up question about mother-daughter relationships, and after it was over the coordinator pulled Caroline to a side table to sign books.
It was so weird being the one to sit at the signing table, doing the very thing she had watched Gwendolyn Lash do for years.
Caroline kept fighting off impostor syndrome, feeling like she should get up and let someone else sit down, then silently scolding herself and trying to enjoy the moment.
Ned announced his departure—his assistant was “still rolling calls from LA”—and Caroline hugged him goodbye.
His collared shirt felt expensive to the touch, and she fleetingly wondered where he had learned to be like this, to exude a sense of casual luxury like a cologne.
She appreciated it, but she no longer felt it was sexy.
She had come to like a man with weeds in his belt pack, scraps of trash in his pockets.
Caroline finished signing, posed for a few photos, and then tossed her water bottle, her book, and her note cards back into her bag before heading out to her car.
On the theater stairs she rummaged for her keys, strangely adrift.
The event had been wonderful, a huge turnout. Why did she feel so let down?
She made her way along the grassy path, noticing the smell of the ocean in the air.
It reminded her of the cottage. She closed her eyes for a moment and pretended she was there, by the little shingled house, surrounded by beach roses.
When she opened her eyes, the parking lot was nearly empty, everyone else having dashed off home, or to a restaurant, or a lively bar along the boardwalk.
Caroline’s car was parked under the trees, and as she walked up, keys in hand, she saw something strange on the roof.
Had someone forgotten their lunch? It was a white paper bag.
She half ran and plucked the bag from the roof, her heart in her throat as she peered inside.
There, nestled in wax paper, was a jelly donut, sprinkled with sugar.