Happily Ever After: A Novel (8 page)

Chapter 13

W
hen Allison and I finally get home, Greta greets us at the door with her thick arms crossed against her ample bosom. She glares at me like a spinster schoolmarm who’s just discovered a stack of
Playgirl
magazines and an eighth of weed in her best student’s locker. I’m in trouble.

“Hi,” says Allison. She gives Greta a radiant smile and sweeps into the house, leaving me alone with the German tornado.

“Listen,” I say. “Harry’s an . . . old friend.”

“Don’t you mean second cousin once removed?” she says. When she’s angry, her accent is much more intense. I cast my eyes down.

“I’m sorry I didn’t give you any warning. But . . . well . . . I didn’t have time and he’s been ill and I thought I’d offer him our guest room while he recuperates.”

“He looks healthy as a horse to me,” Greta says, through tight lips.

“He’s just a friend,” I say for emphasis.

“He’s very . . .” She pauses, searching for the right word.

“Good looking?” I offer.

“Yes. That’s right. I’m not sure . . .”

“You’ve ever seen anything like him before?”

Greta gives me an annoyed look that says “stop finishing my sentences.” I slip by her into the house.

Inside, Harry and Allison snack on toasts with goat cheese and fig jam, laid out on china plates, neatly folded linen napkins tucked alongside. Left to my own devices I’d feed my daughter Cheerios out of the box at every meal. But Greta has standards, and we are ever so grateful for them. They laugh about something, their heads together over the kitchen table.

Harry still wears his suit pants with the tear in the leg, but they are rolled up now to reveal well-muscled calves. His bare feet twitch and move under the table, dancing around like they’re covered in ants, burning excess energy. I notice he has nice feet.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Allison asks, still gazing at Cousin Harry with a dopey expression. I can read her thoughts: oh my god, oh my god. Oh. My. God.

“Nothing,” I say. But really, who has nice feet? No one, that’s who. Feet are inherently
not
nice. Toenails with yellow fungus, calluses, corns, cracks, blisters, bunions. Our feet bear the brunt of a great deal of abuse, and they look the part. I’ll concede maybe newborn babies have cute feet, but that is only because they have not touched the ground yet. The minute they do, they are on the road to ugliness.

But Harry’s feet are perfect. And Allison is already in love with him. Even Greta moves around the kitchen with her lips less pursed than usual.

“Ahem,” I say.

Allison giggles. Harry pats her on the head like she’s a puppy. She giggles again. I pull Harry out of his seat by the back of his shirt, not very gently.

“Harry and I have some work to do on the computer in my office,” I say, pushing him ahead of me toward the stairs. He bounds up them like a panther, two at a time. I hurry along in his wake, a beat faster than normal. The effort leaves me breathless. Maybe I should throw myself on the sword and do that morning yoga class with nosy Belinda after all.

“Are we going to your bedroom?” Harry asks as we head down the hall.

“No!” I bark. “I said office.”

“Just checking.”

I stop short.

“Look,” I say. “You and I, we’re not going to have sex. Not now. Not later.” You belong in the realm of fantasies. Reality would just ruin it.

“Really?” he asks.

“Really.”

“No one has ever said that to me before.” He’s utterly perplexed.

“The only thing I want,” I say, “is to figure out who you are and deliver you back to your people.”

“Right,” Harry says. “And I’m grateful.” But I can tell the no-sex thing bothers him. It’s clearly not something he’s used to.

Just as I turn toward my office, a sharp, stabbing pain grips my chest. It’s like the panic meter has been cranked up to an eleven. I gasp, leaning into the wall to keep from collapsing. I want to run, fast and away.

“Harry,” I whisper. Cold sweat runs down my back.

Behind me, at the same moment, Harry falls to his knees, fighting for air as if he’s being strangled. I sink down beside him. His pale face looms large, his eyes huge. Somehow the sight of him puts my own agony in perspective. If I drop dead in my own house, everyone will shake their heads and say I should have exercised more and laid off the mac and cheese. They’ll be sad but not shocked. But if a virtual stranger dies in my house, I’m screwed. I have a horrible vision of burying Cousin Harry in the backyard under the rosebushes.

“Take a breath,” I plead. “It’s okay. Does your chest hurt? Tell me what’s wrong.”

He’s fetal, his long, lithe body curled into a tight ball. The pain in my side is excruciating, like hundreds of tiny shards of glass are burrowing beneath my skin. I hold on to Harry’s shoulder with one hand and dig the other into my side, praying the pressure will relieve some of the pain.

We are quite a pair.

“Say something,” I demand. Harry’s eyes flick to mine. He’s terrified.

“Something’s coming back,” he says.

“It’s okay,” I say, pulling him into my lap as best I can. I stroke his hair like he’s a baby. I wince.

Greta appears at the bottom of the stairs. She’s too far away for me to read her face.

“Is everything all right?” she asks. “I heard a noise.”

“Yes, yes,” I say. I imagine, from her position, we probably appear as if we’ve moved on to our golf game. “Everything’s fine. Harry just tripped. Right, Harry?”

I give him a nudge.

“Yes,” he says. “I tripped.” His voice catches. He closes his eyes.

“Tell me what you remember,” I whisper. I can’t take much more of this. The pain builds to a crescendo in my gut. I can’t die. I have too much to do.

Silently, I berate myself for being stupid and impulsive and not taking seriously the potential cause of this man’s memory loss. What if it’s the result of some horrific trauma, like witnessing a murder or being forced to watch back-to-back episodes of
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
? What if he freaks out and goes berserk in my lovely house full of girls? I should
know
life is not controllable like a novel. Life is messy, and the plot never goes exactly as you’d like.

“My name is Aidan Hathaway,” he says.

And just like that, the pain vanishes.

Chapter 14

T
here are rules for almost every professional pursuit, and that’s no different for fiction writing. If you write mysteries, you better have your facts straight. If you write humor, you’d better not be annoying your readers by chapter three. After my first K. T. Briggs book came out, I received a letter from a helpful fan named Ellen. The letter started out “Dear Hack” and just got better from there.

Ellen was furious she had given me several hours of her life that she would never get back and I had betrayed her trust. I had broken the rules. There is a covenant between reader and writer, and I’d stomped all over it.

Ellen did not fall in love with my romantic hero. She did not identify with the heroine. She was appalled there was sex before the midpoint in the novel, and she thought my strategically placed coincidences were ridiculous.

“You can’t blame it all on the evil twin,” she wrote. “Who does that?”

By this point in the letter, I was feeling pretty bad about myself, but I plowed on. Ellen’s next complaint was that I used, or overused in her opinion, plot at the expense of conflict.

“There can’t be makeup sex without conflict,” she moaned. “You’re so wrapped up in what they’re doing, you ignore how they’re
feeling
.” I thought this was interesting. To this day, I’m not totally sure I understand what she meant, but I give her credit for trying.

Quickly, she moved on to the issue of secondary characters. I had too many. Naturally.

“They take up so much time!” she hollered from the page. “I hate them!”

Ellen was also kind enough to point out that my “I only have eyes for you” was lacking and that my “happily ever after” was not convincing enough. She had doubts about the future of my hero and heroine. Was a sequel planned? A trilogy? Was that my reason? She found she could not sleep on account of worrying for them. In fact, she was writing this letter at 2:00
A.M
.

But fear not. At the end of the letter, Ellen grudgingly complimented my use of dialogue, which I thought was big of her.

I appreciate all fan mail, despite its actual content. It’s flattering to have a person I do not know take even a minute out of her busy life to make contact with me. I read and respond to each e-mail, every letter, and sometimes I even tweet, although when I tell Allison that she rolls her eyes. I cannot possibly understand social media. I am simply too old.

So there I sat with Ellen’s old-fashioned letter in my hands, wondering how best to respond to her, when I had a thought. Maybe Ellen was onto something. Maybe I was working outside the boundaries when I’d be better off staying within them.

I pulled out a piece of paper and grabbed a thick, black Sharpie. I would cull Ellen’s letter down into a list. Across the top I scrawled “The Rules.” When I was done, I pinned the list to the big, messy bulletin board above my desk, where I would have no choice but to see it every time I sat down.

It has been there ever since. And nowhere on that list is it mentioned that romantic heroes can reality-bend and turn up in the author’s house. It just doesn’t happen. If you don’t believe me, ask Ellen.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I say to Cousin Harry after a moment of stunned silence. I shove him off my lap and slide away until I bump into a pretty little table holding a pretty little lamp. I catch the lamp midair. Mere hours ago, I was here in this hallway with Jason, my head pounding against the wall. Perhaps all that pounding gave me a concussion and I’m hallucinating, because I think Cousin Harry just identified himself as the hero from
Stolen Secrets
.

Which no one has read yet.

“My name is Aidan Hathaway,” he says again in a rush. “I live at Fifty Central Park South. I have a collection of antique roadsters I keep in a warehouse in Brooklyn. There’s a small Van Gogh in my bathroom. My bedroom is white except for one wall which is a window looking out on the park. I’m the Chairman and CEO of Hathaway Enterprises. I’m twenty-nine years old.”

My ears ring.

“Please be quiet,” I say.

“Oh my God,” he says, grinding the heels of his palms into his temples. “It’s like a flood. I have a driver named Thomas, and my father is dead.”

He continues to rattle off bits and pieces about his rarefied existence. There is no way this man could have seen my outline and character summaries for
Stolen Secrets,
and yet most everything he says of Aidan Hathaway is true. I know this because I wrote it.

“You’re out of your mind,” I say. “How did you read the book? Tell me.”

At my last Romance Writers of America conference, an author friend of mine, now solidly A list, told me she knew she’d arrived on the shores of success when she had her first stalker. It turned out to be a young woman with bad acne and a lot of time on her hands, but still, it was significant. Is Harry my stalker? If so, it’s a hell of an elaborate plot he’s concocted to get inside my house. I’d be flattered if the idea were not so inherently terrifying.

“What book?” Harry asks. He looks genuinely confused, but I’m not buying it.

“My book!” I shriek. He leans away from me.

“I thought you wanted to know who I was,” he says. “This should make you happy.”

I cannot scream at him in the hallway. I have Allison and Greta to consider, so I stand up, grab him by the back of his T-shirt, and haul him to his feet. He protests, but I don’t care. I shove him inside my office and slam the door before either of us can escape. I still hold him by the shirt when, for perhaps the first time all day, I
really
look at him. And just like that, my world blurs at the edges, as if the walls are closing in. I take an involuntary step back.

His eyes are green and wide set. They are the same eyes as those of a boy I loved in college. That boy died in a car accident on a country road in Connecticut, but I put a piece of him in every one of my heroes, a tribute of sorts to what might have been. Big hands grip the arms of my desk chair, where I have planted him. They’re the hands of a German butcher Greta favors. From time to time, I pick things up at his shop, and he always wipes those meaty hands on his white apron before handing me the packages, bound up in brown paper. I love those hands.

His flawless pale skin, now slightly red from stress and exertion, comes directly from a young man I saw several times, randomly, over the course of a single snowy week in December. He popped up at the grocery store, at the bookstore, and once on the southbound train platform. After that I never saw him again, but his marble skin made an impression on me.

The dark hair, a little long and curling ever so slightly at the ends, belongs to the guy who bags my groceries at Whole Foods. He’s so hip it almost hurts, but his hair is close to perfect. Every time I see him, I want to run my hands through it.

Trembling, I reach out and push that same fabulous hair from my stranger’s forehead. Starting at the outermost edge of his right eyebrow and running up about two inches, is a thin, faint scar.

“How did you get this?” I whisper.

“I crashed the vintage 1971 Porsche
917
/
10
Spyder Can-Am when I was thirteen,” he says, his voice so low I can barely make out the words. “I crashed it into an old oak tree on Dad’s estate. The tree died and Dad never forgave me.”

Backstory is a funny thing. It can make its way to paper or stay tucked away in a writer’s head, buried in the gray matter under shopping lists and bra sizes. In this case, I planned to unveil the background of the scar later on in
Stolen Secrets
. Yes, our stunning young man had to be rich, beautiful, and broody, but if I could show my readers he was raised by unloving wolves, they would ultimately see his vulnerability and fall in love with him. And the readers
must
fall in love with him, as Ellen had suggested. Those are the rules.

In this case, the details of the scar, which occurred to me while driving past a huge oak that, every fall, turns a spectacular orange, never made it to paper. They lived in my head.

I can take this apart a thousand different ways, but the fact remains that the man sitting in front of me is the perfect physical manifestation of Aidan Hathaway. Without another word, I pick up the paper recycling bin and puke bits of fig and goat cheese into it.

“Jesus, Sadie,” Aidan Hathaway says. “That’s disgusting.”

Still holding the bin, I back away from him until I’m flat against the wall. I slide down to the bamboo floor.

“Are you ill? Were the figs contaminated?”

I hold up a hand for him to stop. Please just stop talking.

“Don’t move,” I say. My voice is oddly distorted. But I seem to get my point across because Aidan does not get up and run away. He sits very still, his eyes bouncing from me to the puke.

Pushing the bin in front of me, I crawl on all fours out of the office. If I stand up, there is a good chance I will pass out. Finally, I make it to the bathroom. I stow the recycle bin in the shower and pull the curtain to hide the evidence. I splash cold water on my face, which appears red and blotchy in the mirror’s reflection. My eyes are dilated. I look like your garden-variety crackhead.

“You’re not crazy, Sadie,” I tell myself. “It’s all just some big misunderstanding.”

I’ve gotten away with some outlandish plot twists in my day, but even I’m not buying the misunderstanding bit. I dry my face, take a big swig of Listerine, and creep back to my office. I peer inside. Aidan sits with his perfect feet up on my desk and his hands clasped behind his head. If I were to lean back in my desk chair that far, I’d end up on my ass, but he looks comfortable.

Strange things happen in life. What’s important is how we deal with them. Or at least that’s what Greta always says. I step into the room. Aidan spins toward me.

“Do you know a woman named Clarissa?” I demand.

“No,” he says quickly. But his expression is one of puzzlement, as if the wisp of a memory floated by, much too thin to grab.

“Are you sure?” I push.

“I . . . I don’t know,” he says. “No. I don’t think so.”

I lunge for the Xanax on the desk behind him. I’m over my limit, but sometimes more is better. So what if I fall asleep on my feet?

“It’s very important,” I say, “for you to tell me the last thing you remember.”

He closes his eyes and concentrates.

“It’s vague,” he says. “I remember a flash of light and pain in my leg. And I was with . . . Lily.”

“And?”

“And this Clarissa person showed up! This awful woman!”

He jumps out of the chair, hands clenched into fists. A vein throbs in his neck.

“Lily just vanished. Into thin air,” he says, grabbing me by the shoulders. I stagger backward. “And then Clarissa said the only way I could save Lily was to go after her. She offered me a deal.”

“The deal she gave you was forty-eight hours to find your ladylove, uncover the magic spell, and get back,” I add.

Aidan stops short.

“How do you know?” he asks.

I remember the first time I read Hemingway and how I marveled at his exquisite economy of words. It’s hard for me to get away with that style when mostly I’m searching for new ways to describe basic fornication. But I give it a go now.

“I wrote you,” I say. I gesture to the laptop as if that will somehow explain my bizarre statement.

“Wrote me?” he says. “Like a letter or an e-mail?”

Then again, sometimes an economy of words leads to confusion. I tell him about how after his father’s funeral, he drank the Macallan 1926 in his bathroom all alone and cried. I tell him about Lily’s shirt and the lipstick in the elevator. I tell him about how they locked eyes in the hallway at the reception for the new champagne.

Aidan has gone so white, I can almost see through him.