CHAPTER 5
I looked up after reading the letter and—oh my God—I took a step back. What the hell was that? What the hell was happening to her face? Was that a . . . a . . . I gasped in utter shock as a tear seemed to snake out of her eye and trickle down her cheek. It carved a white line in her too-orange foundation. The tear was watery in color and I was surprised to see she didn’t cry drops of blood harvested from her former clients. I heard a sniffle in the doorway and looked. Three of her meerkats were standing there, tears streaming down their faces.
PPPfffffgghhhhhh!One of Daphne’s assistants took out a tissue and blew her nose loudly.
“That is . . . That is—” she stumbled and stuttered over her words—“the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
The others all nodded in agreement.
“Read me a letter that she wrote to him,” my agent said, snapping her fingers at me.
“I . . . I . . . haven’t written any of those yet,” I lied again. As far as I could see, all these letters had been written by the same person—him.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Uh . . . I’m writing his story first, and then I’ll write hers,” I added, suddenly feeling terrible for what I had just done.
“Well, they better be as good as his,” she said.
I nodded. “They will be,” I assured her, with a confidence that I didn’t really have.
“Because if they are . . .” she trailed off and looked down at her desk again, deep in thought. “Yes! Yes!” She raised her head and started nodding. “I can see it. It’s clear. Million-copy seller!New York TimesandUSA Todaylists. Goddammit, a fucking movie deal. Netflix, even. ‘Romeo and Juliet, set in South Africa.’? It will be more heart-wrenching and devastating than your first book. Becca Thorne is the queen of heartbreak. You will make the whole world weep. God, if your first book made you money, this one is going to make us a fuckload!”
I stared at my agent. Her face was red, flushed with a kind of feverish excitement. It was a strange, dangerous kind of excitement. The kind of excitement that told me there was trouble coming.And there was. . .
She snapped her fingers at one of her meerkats. “Get Lighthouse Books on the phone.”
“Wait. Wait!” I held my hands up in panic; the gravity of what I’d just done was starting to sink in. And then the guilt. This wasn’t my letter to read! “What are you doing?”
“I’m telling them what a bestseller you have on your hands. Maybe we can push them for more money. Foreign rights—this needs to be in all the languages; audio—”
“Wait!” I cut her off, a cactus of panic forming in my throat.
She looked at me blankly. “Wait, what?”
“Uh . . . well, don’t you think it’s a bit premature to call them . . . ? I mean, uh, I don’t even have . . . I mean, it’s not like I—”
She held her hand up and I stopped talking. “How many letters have you written?” she asked.
I shook my head frantically. “Not many.”
“Then why is your pocket bulging?” She pointed at my jean pocket, the one the note had come out of. “Or has your one hip gotten fat?”God, she was a bitch!“I want Lighthouse Books on the phone . . .now!” she called out again.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled.
Her head whipped up and she glared at me like she’d never glared before. “What is wrong with you?”
“I can’t do this,” I blurted out. “It’s all wrong. I shouldn’t have done this. It was a terrible mistake and I regret it and . . . I . . .”
Suddenly the phone rang and we both looked down at it. She started reaching for the receiver, her taloned claw moving towards it as if in slow motion. I made my move for the phone too, as quickly as I could, but I was too late. She grabbed the receiver and lifted it to her lips, and then, I was sure, she snarled at me.
“Belinda, dahhling!” she gushed into the phone. Belinda was my editor. “I’ve got great news for you! Really great. Terrific!”
I threw myself into my apartment and straight down on to my couch. My body ached, all the way from my toes to the hair follicles on the top of my head. Since leaving my agent’s office, the enormity of the situation I now found myself in had been hitting me in steady waves. As I’d reached my building, the waves had picked up pace until a massive tidal wave almost knocked me off my feet. And by the time I was sticking my keys into my front door, the earth felt like it was shaking below my feet, as if a meteorite had crashed down. I was teetering on the precipice of total and utter mad catastrophe.
Shit!I was in such trouble.
Not “big trouble,” like when you wake up in your bed in the middle of the night, drenched in a layer of cold sweat and gasping from the stabbing pains in your chest. I’m talking about the kind of trouble where you wake up in a jail cell in the middle of the night, drenched in a layer of cold sweat and gasping from the stabbing pains in your chest. Because I was breaking the law. I was officially a law breaker and I was about to commit the worst crime in the publishing industry:plagiarism.
