“Who hasn’t?” she said.
“Natalie,” I said. “I mean, not when I spoke to her this afternoon.”
“That was probably before Leila Donnelly, right?”
I cringed. “Yeah.”
“It’s been all over the news,” she said.
“It has?”
“Leila Donnelly’s like Garbo,” Kim said. “She never speaks, so when she does, it makes headlines.”
“Garbo…”
“Before your time?”
“No, no. I know who she was. It’s just an interesting analogy,” I said. I was thinking about Blake. The profile he’d come up with on Book Babe. “Do you like books about old Hollywood? Like…movie star memoirs?”
“Sure,” she said.
“How about self-help books?”
“Some of them.”
“You have any young kids?”
She didn’t answer for a few seconds.
“Like two, three years old?”
“If you don’t mind my saying, Sunny, these are some weird-ass questions.”
I exhaled. “I know.” I was five minutes away from my folks’ house, and this wasn’t going anywhere. I decided to cut to the chase. “Look. I talked to Natalie because I thought she could have posted that one-star review of Melanie Joan on ReadAnon.”
Kim snorted. “Natalie’s a doll,” she said, “but she’s not the book-critique-writing type.”
“Are you?”
“What?”
“Are you Book Babe?” I said. “Natalie seemed to think it was possible.”
Kim inhaled sharply, then blew into the phone. Smoking a cigarette. “That’s what Melanie Joan hired you for?” she said. “She’s paying you to find out who shit on her memoir?”
I cleared my throat. “She wants to personally apologize for her inappropriate response to the review.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Are you Book Babe?”
“No.”
“And I should believe you because…”
“I am a big reader, and I have a ReadAnon account. But I just look at other people’s reviews. I don’t post them.”
“Nobody will know, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” I said. “Melanie Joan feels awful about what she said. She wants to apologize. And that apology can be as private as you want. If you’re Book Babe, you can keep posting and be as anonymous as ever.”
