Page 39 of Beachfront Pages

"Good. Because I was about thirty seconds from calling the police and having them go knock on your door." A pause. "Not that I know where you are. Where are you?" Papers shuffled on Rachel's end. "Anyway, okay. I need you to actually listen to me. Not the thing where you say 'mm-hmm' and float off somewhere."

Fiona walked to the window of Sea Glass Cottage and looked out at the courtyard. The light was going gold over the gravel paths. "I'm listening."

"They came back with the offer. The real one, the one I've been trying to put in front of you for three weeks." Rachel paused, letting it sit. "Four books. Fiona. Four. And the advance."

She said a number.

Fiona didn't make a sound.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"That's the part where you make a noise. Any noise. A gasp. You're supposed to make a noise."

"It's a wonderful number," Fiona said, and meant it, and felt nothing.

"It's a career number. It's a buy-a-second-house, never-check-the-bill-at-dinner number." Rachel's voice gentled, the way it did when she stopped being an agent for a second and was just the woman who'd had Fiona's back for twenty years. "This is everything we used to talk about back when nobody returned our calls. You remember. That awful conference in Cleveland, the two of us eating vending-machine pretzels for dinner, saying someday."

"I remember the pretzels."

"Then help me out, because I am sitting here with the best news of your whole career and you're so quiet I'm getting actually worried."

Fiona pressed her thumbnail into the soft wood of the windowsill. Down in the courtyard Clint crossed toward the lighthouse with a toolbox, and Winnie's porch light was already on though the sun hadn't dropped. Somebody was always leaving a light on for somebody here. She'd noticed it her first week.

"I need more time," she said.

"More time to say yes? Or more time before you say yes?"

"More time."

The line went quiet. Fiona could picture Rachel's face exactly, the way she'd take her glasses off and pinch the bridge of her nose. "Honey, the publisher needs an answer. Not next quarter. Soon. They've cleared a slot, they've got meetings on the calendar, and there's a woman in marketing who emails me every other day about a launch plan." A beat. "They want to make a real moment out of this. Out of you. Out of all of it."

Something cold turned over in Fiona's stomach. "What kind of moment?"

"The kind people would line up around the block for. The kind we earned. But…" Rachel paused. "There's a catch. I mean, a difference from your last contract." Rachel said it lightly, but Fiona could hear the undercurrent.

"What kind of difference?"

"They want you to write under your real name. They want a woman writing this series. And author signings and connecting with fans."

Her name. Her real one, printed on a contract and pasted into a press release. "And what about F. L. Maxwell?"

"Maxwell can still be Maxwell."

"And not attached to me?"

"Um, I'm not sure how they'll want to handle that. I mean, will it matter, if you're outing yourself as an author anyway? You'll be great at author readings and signings, you know."

No, she didn't know that. She'd enjoyed being the anonymous Maxwell. Her name hadn't been attached to the last fifteen books the whole reading world believed a man had written.

"When would they want to do that? Tie my name to Maxwell?" Fiona asked.

"Around the launch. We'd build to it. Tease the new deal, then the big reveal." Rachel sounded delighted, picturing it. "They think it's a story. The bestselling author nobody's ever seen, finally stepping out. They're not wrong, you know. It is a story."

It was a story. Fiona had spent twenty years making sure it was a story nobody got to tell.

"I'll think about it," Fiona said.