by Erin McRae
Eliza didn’t hear the rest except in snippets. Something about a sense of exile, about the way cultures melded in Vienna like lovers. And something about how the book had picked up all sorts of attention online and in the trades and was starting to make bestseller lists. She wanted to murder Harry. Beside her, Jonathan, bless him, once again took over the conversation as she managed to lower herself into a chair with what she hoped was some grace.
“Oh my God,” Gina said as the man went on. “You’re the girl!”
“DID YOU KNOW?” JONATHAN asked, when both Gina and the acquisitions editor had walked away.
Eliza shook her head even as she reached for her tablet and Googled Harry Sargent and The Girl with the Key. She was going to kill him.
Buying it and getting it on her Kindle was the work of a moment. To B., the frontispiece read. Until that moment, Eliza had clung to the hope that Gina had been mistaken. But no. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“‘B’?” Jonathan asked. His cheeks were white in what Eliza interpreted as sympathetic rage.
“For Betts. It’s what he calls me. Called me. In – Paris,” Eliza said. She wondered about that now. Had Harry thought of her that way for months, or added the dedication sometime between Paris and when he’d dumped her?
Jonathan nodded, looking as horror-struck as Eliza felt.
She spent the rest of the day on the convention floor in a daze. She didn’t trust herself to pick up the book and read it right there, and she couldn’t leave her post and abandon Jonathan. As soon as the floor closed, though, the two of them packed up and left.
Of the many non-glamorous realities of what was supposed to be Eliza’s glamorous life, sitting in a hotel room with her ex-lover’s assistant, eating takeout and reading an erotic love affair travelogue about herself was the one she had least anticipated.
Chapter 15
America’s Newest Heartthrob
Harry
THE DAY AFTER ELIZA and Jonathan were slated to fly back from BEA, Harry got a video call from Anika. About The Girl with the Key. And a publisher who was offering him a traditional contract for it. Harry could hardly believe his ears. The book had barely been out for two weeks and he hadn’t been able to make himself look at sales numbers since the day it had released. He was entirely unprepared for this development.
Harry stumbled through some routine questions about the contract being offered. Anika had answers ready, but Harry couldn’t focus enough to take notes. For one thing, he’d assumed that no one was reading the book. For another, the more attention the book received, the higher the likelihood that Eliza would learn of it before he had the chance to tell her.
“Harry.”
Harry looked up from his computer. As if his thoughts and fears had summoned her, Eliza stood in the doorway, her right hand on her hip and her left holding an e-reader.
She wore a pale green dress cinched at the waist with a thin belt in a darker shade of the same color. The palette set off her dark hair, which hung loose in waves like a stormy sea or, worse, some sort of peculiar fire. She was beautiful, because she was always beautiful, but Harry had a very bad feeling about this.
“Do you have a moment?” Eliza asked.
“I’m afraid I’m in the middle of a call –”
“Do. You. Have. A. Moment,” she repeated.
Harry quailed at her tone. He was in trouble. And it was personal. Please don’t be about the book, his brain supplied. Then, less helpfully, Of course it’s about the book, you absolute tool.
“I’m going to have to call you back,” he said to his screen where Anika was mid-sentence. Without waiting for a response, Harry snapped his laptop closed.
He looked at Eliza. “Yes?”
“Were you planning to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Harry knew playing innocent wasn’t going to make this better, but buying himself time, however foolishly, seemed life or death. Eliza had any number of legitimate reasons to be angry with him and maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as he feared.
“Harry, I have never been so fucking furious in my life, do not make me more angry, I swear to God –”
He held up his hands in protest, even as he wondered if his palms had the word guilty written on them. “I have no idea what you’re talking about –”
“You wrote a book about how much you wanted to fuck me and you didn’t tell me!” Eliza stepped fully into his office but didn’t close the door behind her.
“It’s not about how much I –”
“I read it! The whole thing! Yes, it is!” Eliza brandished the e-reader which Harry could only imagine contained the book he’d written. Most definitely about her.
“I –”
Eliza threw the device. Not at him, but close enough. The thing clattered against the bookshelf behind him and hit the floor.
“What the hell makes you think you can do something like this, Harry?” Eliza demanded. “You fucked me, and then you dumped me, and then you wrote a book about me!”
“Technically.” Harry got out of his chair and circled around her to close the door to his office. “Technically, I wrote a book about you, and then fucked you, and then dumped you.”
Harry knew he deserved every bit of the scorn and disbelief Eliza’s eyes sent at him.
“So, what?” she demanded. “Did it not live up to your expectations or did you just need to get it out of your system?”
“Betts, you know that’s not –”
“Don’t you dare call me that.”
“Eliza.”
“Did you dump me so you wouldn’t have to tell me you wrote this monstrosity?” she demanded.
“No.” That was true. Mostly. He’d dumped her because the whole affair was destined to end in tears. Also he needed to publish a book, and it seemed easier if... I’ve made an entirely terrible calculation.
“Then when were you going to tell me?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t feel like it mattered when we were together.” Truth be told, Harry had barely even thought about it while they were in Paris. He’d barely thought about anything in the midst of the storm and all the time they’d spent in bed. The melancholy period of wanting Eliza had been so different from the magical period of having her that the experiences might have belonged to two different men.
Not that Eliza would accept that as an explanation. Nor should she.
“Didn’t matter? Didn’t matter?!” Eliza stared at him.
Harry wanted to retreat behind his desk again, to put some physical buffer between him and the woman he’d wounded so badly. But he couldn’t seem to move. Eliza’s rage pinned him to the spot.
“What is wrong with you?” Eliza demanded when he was silent. “There’s already an article in Publisher’s Weekly about this book speculating who it’s about. It seems everyone has a theory, and most of them are right! I keep getting calls for comment from publications I’d wanted to submit my own work too, except now I’m the girl in the book with the goddamn key!” She pulled viciously at the key, which still hung around her neck. “What possible conditions would make this less egregious? Was there some non-disaster scenario you were able to envision?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever written,” Harry said helplessly.
“Then it should have been a gift.” Eliza’s voice was soft and solemn.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything. I don’t need anything from you. I’ve been yelling at you because you deserve to be yelled at, and I have the right to do it. I’m certainly not here to make you feel better about any of this.” Eliza paused.
They stared at each other, breathing harshly in the terrible silence. In sync, even now, in Harry’s failure and her fury.
“I loved you,” she said, more calmly, but he would have given anything to have her take those words back and return to yelling at him. “I loved you, and you called me a child, and then you published a book about the great love affair it turns out
you didn’t actually want to have with me. Well congratulations,” she said, reaching for the handle of his door. “I guess you got what you wanted.”
“Eliza –” Harry had no idea what he was going to say. He was miserable and sorry and, he suspected, only beginning to realize how truly and spectacularly he had fucked up.
“What!?”
He wondered, for a split second, whether it was even in his power to fix this. He could fantasize about falling on his knees and begging forgiveness. But Eliza wasn’t going to take him back. She had broken off an engagement with a fiancé because he had treated her like a prize, not a living, breathing person who was his peer, his equal, and, very probably, his better. Had Harry done the same? The thought was a paralytic, and he was too horrified, it seemed, to speak.
In any case, Eliza was done. Without saying anything more she left, slamming the door behind her.
Whatever suffering Harry now faced, he most certainly faced it alone.
HARRY’S FIRST CALL that evening when he was back in his apartment was to Meryl. She finally answered after letting her phone ring what Harry thought was an excessive number of times.
“I did something horrendously stupid and need your advice,” Harry said. “Can I come over?”
“Right now?” Harry could hear her eyebrows hitting her hairline.
“Right now would be preferable, yes.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then muffled speech as though Meryl had covered the receiver with her hand while talking to someone else. Finally, she came back.
“Unfortunately, Harry, I have company.” Something about her tone, not to mention the whispering, told Harry she didn’t mean a dinner party. If it had been a dinner party, Harry was sure he would have been invited.
“I thought you didn’t fuck people in your apartment?” he blurted.
“I don’t fuck you in my apartment,” Meryl clarified with exactly as much iciness as he deserved. Harry could only imagine what her company thought of her end of the conversation. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Given that unearned scrap of graciousness, Harry could hardly tell her anything but the truth. “Yes. Just pathetic.”
“All right, well, let’s schedule another time to talk. And then you can be as pathetic as you’d like. Are you free on Thursday?”
A date for drinks and moping scheduled, Harry hung up.
HARRY HAD A PHONE MEETING with Anika the next morning to talk more about the publisher’s offer for The Girl with the Key. He spent the rest of the day wishing he dared turn it down.
He was willing to recognize the irony; he’d been reluctant to self-publish the book, and, now that an actual publisher was interested, he was terrified. The book was already getting more attention than he’d ever expected. Placing it with a publisher might only increase its visibility, not to mention Eliza’s ultimate fury with him for publishing it at all. She had already thrown her e-reader in her rage after saying some very pointed, very true things that Harry could not get out of his head.
The most gentlemanlike thing to do would be to decline the contract – and pull the book out of its current sales channels. Certainly that might go some small way toward making amends to Eliza. But it would also mean letting the best thing he’d ever written about a woman who now, very fairly, hated him, languish as an odd abandoned e-reader file of creative genius. It would be easy to argue that the damage had already been done. Signing a new contract could hardly make things worse.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON he arrived at her office door with a paper cup of tea prepared the way she liked and what he hoped was a penitent expression. The door was slightly ajar, and he took a moment to look at the sliver of Eliza he could see through it. Today she wore a grey pencil skirt and a pale blue cardigan that looked so soft that Harry longed to see how it felt under his hands. It was nearing the end of the day, but her dark hair was still perfectly swept back in an elaborate French braid, every strand in place. She was working on something on her laptop, Harry couldn’t tell what, and her chin was leaning on her hand.
Before Harry got carried too far away in mingled fantasy and self-recrimination, he knocked softly at the door frame. Eliza sat up straight and looked at him. Her eyes narrowed.
“Can I help you?” she asked coolly.
“May I come in?” Harry asked. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
Whatever Eliza’s emotions were or what subject she thought he was going to bring up, her face was a mask, terrifyingly placid. “Yes. Of course.”
“I brought you tea.” Harry held out the cup to her.
Eliza looked at him, the faintest note of despair moving across her features before she schooled them again. “I wish you hadn’t.”
She took the cup, but it didn’t feel like the acceptance of an olive branch that Harry had hoped it might be. She also didn’t drink from it.
“May I sit down?” he asked.
“You know,” Eliza said. “We could have avoided a lot of grief if you’d decided to be this polite earlier.” She didn’t tell him he could sit, and so he didn’t.
“Yes, I could have,” Harry admitted. “That’s why I’m coming to you now.”
“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow.
“There’s a publisher that wants to offer me a contract to publish The Girl with the Key with them.”
“I’m well aware.”
“You are?”
“Yes. In case you didn’t know, they approached me at BEA in hopes of finding you. Five minutes later the entire North American publishing industry knew I was the ‘the girl.’”
Harry actually hadn’t known that was the chain of events that had led to her discovering the book. His shame, if possible, deepened. “Oh.”
“Yes,” Eliza all but snapped.
Harry steeled himself to plow ahead. “Before I sign anything I wanted to talk to you.”
“You want my permission to sign a deal for a book you wrote about me – and already published – without telling me.”
“I know. I’m trying to make amends.”
“By asking me to be okay with a bad situation getting worse. You don’t want my permission, you’re trying to assuage your guilt. This – this book, this choice. It’s your life. It’s your words. Don’t put this on me.”
“I’m not –” Harry started to say, but Eliza interrupted him.
“I have a collection of essays. I was putting together the submission materials when we got back from Paris, before I went to Chicago. And now I have no idea how to submit that work or anything else I do anywhere. Not to agents or publishers or literary magazines. Your book is the only thing anyone in publishing is talking about, it’s going to get bigger, and everyone knows it’s about me.”
Harry said nothing. There was nothing he could say, really. Eliza looked down at her desk, straightened a fountain pen on top of a notepad, and went on. “I was raised to spend my life in the shadow of important men, until that became the one thing I never wanted. Whether I do or not, apparently isn’t within my control. But how I respond is. I’m not going to give you permission, and I’m not going to tell you no. Do what you need to do. But please understand, I will also do what I need to do. Whether that’s saying what I need to say or pretending you never existed, I haven’t decided yet.”
BACK IN HIS OFFICE, Harry signed the contract. On his way home that night he opted to walk rather than take the train. The last few days had been stressful in a way he never could, and had never wanted, to imagine.
He’d had the career breakthrough of his – and many other writers’ – dreams. A big five press had picked up his self-published book. Anika, exasperated at his refusal to look at his Amazon sales dashboard, had sent him screenshots of the book’s rankings. He’d never had a new release that even came remotely close. He didn’t even have to worry about the book being unavailable for a time while the publisher took over – they were apparently dealing with all that.
But at what c
ost? Eliza was furious with him. She had every right to be. He’d behaved horribly. And while he’d never intended to continue a relationship with her, he’d never wanted to be cruel.
As he was lost in these dark musings, his cell phone rang. It took Harry a moment to fish it out of his pocket, and once he did it was from a number he didn’t recognize. Given that he’d just signed a contract with a major publishing house, the best thing seemed to be to answer it.
“Harry Sargent?” a crisp female voice asked.
“This is he.” Harry wondered what could possibly have gone wrong so quickly.
“I’m the producer on The Really Late Show. I’ve been told you’re friends with Dennis.”
“Yes?” Harry said. He vaguely wondered if Dennis had, had a heart attack on set and somehow he was the man’s emergency contact. It was the sort of thing Dennis would do to him out of spite.
“I’m afraid we’re short a guest for the show tonight. Would you be available to come in for the taping? I see you have a book that’s just come out.”
“I – what?” Harry struggled to shift gears out of potential emergency-response mindset.
“A guest cancelled last minute and our backup guest has come down with food poisoning. In his dressing room. Taping needs to start in an hour and Dennis said I should call you.”
Harry sighed. “When do you need me there?”
“Within the hour. Do you need directions?”
“No, I know where to go.” Harry stood and reached for his jacket. “Tell him I’m on my way, and that he owes me.”
THE STUDIO WAS FREEZING, Dennis was too busy to talk to him, the sound of the live audience was mildly terrifying, and Harry couldn’t decide if he was absolutely, positively supposed to call Eliza about this or keep making his own choices. Clearly, she was sick of hearing about the whole thing, perhaps, most especially from him. And she was right – it wasn’t her job to absolve him or give him permission.