“Melanie Joan just wants to talk to you,” I said. “Make peace. She’s not interested in the fact that you may have broken your NDA.”
“What? I didn’t break my NDA.”
“Look at this logically,” Tony said. “If Melanie Joan gets fully canceled, she won’t sell any more books. If she doesn’t sell any more books, there will be no quarterly earnings. Your business will suffer.”
“Think of your son,” I said. “His future.”
She stared at me. “How do you know I have a son?”
I started to reply, but Tony kept talking. “My guess is, if you were to take down the review, Melanie Joan would give youanything you want,” he said. “She’d pull the entire prologue, I bet.”
Natalie frowned at him, then turned her gaze on me, then back to Tony again. She shifted her weight and crossed her arms over her chest and looked him up and down, as though she was trying to figure out if he was wearing a wire. “Get out of here, Tony,” she said.
“Natalie, we need to talk about this. It can be a real opportunity for you, if—”
“Get out of here,” she said again. “Go play in traffic.”
“But—”
“I’ll talk to the private detective,” she said. “Cute dog, by the way.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Tony cleared his throat. His cheeks flushed slightly. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you back at the car, Sunny.”
Natalie stood next to me, watching Tony leave. Neither one of us said a word. Once we were alone, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath through her nose, then let it out slowly. Yogic breathing. I’d learned it from a meditation app. It was said to be calming, and sometimes I found it to be.In with the positive energy, out with the negative.Natalie yogic-breathed again, two more times. It seemed to have worked. When she opened her eyes and trained them on me, they were tranquil blue pools.
“What prologue?” she said.
Seventeen
Natalie Blythe and I sat on two of the plush chairs surrounding the Zen garden table. Rosie curled up in my lap. Infinity Wellness Center was about to close for the day, and Larch had the good sense not to return from her Reiki table inspection, so we were alone in the waiting room. I explained the basics of what had happened between Melanie Joan, her publisher, and Book Babe. Natalie seemed genuinely surprised.
“Melanie Joan wrote a memoir?” she said.
“Yes.”
“And the prologue is about firing me?”
“Yes,” I said.
She shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”
“She didn’t name you,” I said. “She used a pseudonym. Nobody would know, and even if they did—”
“It isn’t that,” Natalie said. “I don’t care about that. What shocks me is, considering the type of life that Melanie Joan Hall has lived—the abuse, the stalking…hell, all her exes getting killed off—that she’d remember me rewriting a few lines of dialogue and treat it like the worst thing that ever happened to her.”
I looked at her. “Well, she said you did more than that.”
“If she did,” she said, “she’s lying.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew Melanie Joan Hall. She wasn’t a liar. Not intentionally. But she was a natural-born storyteller. It was possible that she’d exaggerated events in her mind, and on the page.
Regardless, Natalie was right about one thing: Melanie Joan had been through hell. She was a control freak who had been unable to control anything in her life other than the characters she’d created. And that was why rewriting those characters was the worst sin anyone could commit against her. In Melanie Joan’s mind, Natalie had robbed her of what little power she had.
I didn’t bother explaining that to her, though. I wasn’t here to psychoanalyze her former employer. And anyway, I doubted she’d understand.
Natalie asked me exactly what Book Babe had written aboutStronger Alone, and I told her, as best as I could remember. “She singled you out—well, your pseudonym. She said you had grounds to sue,” I said.
