Catch up on the previous chapters here
Ben paused to chuckle self-deprecatingly. “Sorry. I’ve been practicing for the tour. It’s, uh … it’s not something I really imagined when I started writing.”
Tyler nodded, head still bent over his notes. “It’s fine. Go on?”
“Right, so.” He took another drink of water. “Rosie’s unmoored at the start of the book, and Cal’s there, just trying to offer her some stability, but she rejects it.”
“She rejects him?” Jack suggested.
Ben shook his head. Did both of them read the book, or only Tyler? “She ends up using him. Relying on him, but not giving anything back. And then, at the end … well.” His smile should say something like You already know this part. “She just disappeared.”
“Right, so.” Tyler tapped his pencil on the notepad. “What’s Cal do after?”
He’d practiced the answer to this one, too, and he blinked. “There is no after. The book ends.”
“Right, but.” Tyler smiled a little. “If it were you?”
“But it’s not me. He’s a fictional character in a fictional situation.” Ben shrugged. “Thom suggested I use C as the first initial of my pen name, because it helps blur the line, but there is a line. It was inspired by true events, sure, but I don’t think you can even say it was inspired by real people, because I never met any of them. I had these basic sketches of who they were, but even that didn’t entirely work for the book, once I got going. Cal exists between the first and the last page, but anything else has to be answered by fanfiction.”
“You’re not working on a sequel?” Jack jumped in.
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“A couple reasons. If your first and second are related, people just expect you to keep writing those same characters forever, and it loses you readers if you don’t. They get upset if you try something new. And I don’t have an idea for the sequel—I don’t know what happens next.” He shrugged again. “When I know, I’ll write it. If I ever know. I kind of think Cal’s just going to be left hanging forever.”
“He could get over her,” Tyler suggested, and shrugged when Ben frowned at him. “Just saying. It’s a possibility.” His grin grew sly. “Gatsby could have been a great man if he’d just gotten over Daisy.”
“Uh.” Back to this, huh? “I thought you said Cal was Nick.”
Tyler waved that away. “You have to have some idea where Rosie went. Book Rosie. The character your narrator’s obsessed with.”
Thom had warned him about this kind of thing, too—readers chasing the happy ending, or at least a more conclusive ending—so he’d been working on his answer. “Cal runs through his ideas in the book.”
“Refresh us.”
Shrugging, he leaned forward to pick up the copy they’d left sitting there where he could see it. Seriously, if Tyler’s wife was an English teacher, didn’t he know the value of returning to the text? “Still looks weird to me like this,” he murmured, flipping pages close to the end. “You want me to read this to you?”
Tyler’s smile was strained. “Go right ahead.”
Because they’d wanted him to say it, in his own words, so they could make a comparison. They shouldn’t have left the actual book within his reach. He cleared his throat and hesitated. “This isn’t the part I’ve been practicing for the tour.”
Jack waved a sort of regal by your leave hand.
Good. He took a slow breath and stopped himself from clearing his throat again, reading: “Part of me isn’t surprised she’s gone. There wasn’t much holding her here—the final weeks of her degree, sure, but what does a piece of paper matter when you’ve lost so much? So much, and so quickly. And the shock of walking in and finding Hailey like that … it’s no wonder she doesn’t want to go back to the apartment.
“I wasn’t enough. Not in the face of all that. God, could anyone be? One line isn’t a safety net, so maybe she fell right on through. She’s just gone, a pebble dropped into a dark pond without a ripple, and I’ll spend my whole life wondering whether, if I were brave enough, I could find her.” He closed the book and looked at them expectantly.
Tyler nodded at it. “There’s some stuff after that. A, what do you call it, epilogue.”
He nodded back. There was.
“What’s in the epilogue?” Jack asked.
Was that a real question because he hadn’t read it, or another attempt to get Ben to slip up? “It’s just a brief glimpse at Cal’s life a few months later. He gets called in to that apartment to fix a leak and wishes he could’ve fixed everything else before it broke irreparably.” He paused, then decided to add it: “He means Rosie, not the apartment.” Did that earn him a smirk from Tyler? He thought it had.
“So he thinks she’s broken.”
That was blunt. “I suppose so.”
“But that’s all you’ve got?” Jack pressed. “Rosie, broken Rosie, fell through the cracks?”
Ben considered it—honestly considered it—and nodded. “Yeah. I think she did.”
“People don’t do that in real life,” Tyler argued, like he was explaining to him and placating Jack at the same time. “They need money, or they reach out to old friends and family, or their fake ID gets flagged …”
“You said Lida-Rose Dawson did.” He tried not to smirk. “So. Looks like sometimes people do.”
Jack scoffed and rolled his eyes.
“But that’s what you said,” he persisted. “Nobody’s heard of her since right after, right? So … she fell through the cracks.”
“She didn’t fall,” Jack spat. “She had help from someone right here in this building just because she’d duped him and his son. Who’s in the same situation, by the way. Nobody’s heard from him, either, so—”
“Jack—”
“— she could’ve killed him, too, for all we know,” Jack finished. “Except we can’t say anything about it, because then it’s slander, but hey, maybe you can use it in your next book.”
Tyler cleared his throat and straightened some papers, but Ben wasn’t sure if that was because Tyler was actually upset with what his partner said, how much he’d revealed, or if this was all part of some act. “If Rosie was going to turn up somewhere else, where would that be?”
Ben gestured at the book. “I’m sorry, guys, but that’s all there is. She’s gone, he hasn’t seen her by the time the epilogue rolls around, and that’s it. The book ends. All books end. If there was more, I would’ve written more, but she just fell through.”
“That doesn’t happen in real life!” Jack shouted so loudly that Ben jumped. The blond agent slammed both fists down on the table and got up, storming from the room.
“Uh.” Tyler pushed his chair back and stumbled to his feet. “Just, uh—wait a minute okay?” he requested, taking off after his partner.
A minute, huh? He checked his watch, then looked around the room. There wasn’t a mirror anywhere, and he didn’t see any telltale lenses. He was a bit of an expert on those, so he knew where to look, and what to look for. Their folder was still on the table, and he committed the nearly-random arrangement of the papers to memory before pulling it closer and turning things right-side up.
How much warning would he have before they came back? If it was just one of them, he’d probably be quiet, but if it was both of them … they might be arguing. Loud and angry. That could give him enough time to—
Shit, they were serious. And no wonder they’d jumped all over him for the bus driver and the neighbor—they were in here, too, along with notes about Dawson’s alibi. Which was recorded as her alleged alibi. His heartbeat was too loud in his ears for him to have any hope of hearing them return, but his eyes skimmed for a name. Hillier. They said the agent’s last name was Hillier, so if he could get the boyfriend’s name—
Voices in the hallway. Fuck. At least he’d kept the papers in their same order so he didn’t have to try to shuffle them as he turned them around, tugging one out the way it had been, and he sat quickly with the ARC of his book, opened to one of the sticky notes and frowning as he pretended like he’d just noted which part was marked.
“Listen, we want to thank you,” Tyler said as he swept the notes together and into the folder without even looking at them. “And if there’s anything else … look, I know we’ve got what Cal thinks, but …”
Snorting, Jack held out his hand for the book, snapped it shut, and left the room.
Tyler sighed as he looked after his partner. “Sorry. This … it’s worse because it’s one of us, you know? Here, I’ll walk you out.”
The agent didn’t take him all the way out—he held out his card when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor—but that was all right. It helped a bit that he didn’t stand there and watch Ben leave, to see if he shuddered or needed a deep breath or who knew what.
He held the shakes off until he was parked in his own garage again and just waited, riding it out, before even trying to head inside.
To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: April 12, 2019 3:05AM
Okay I know you don’t like it when I say this, but I’m thinking it, and I just need you to not dismiss it just so you don’t have to listen to me say it, okay? That’s two okays in a sentence, but there you go. I know this whole thing is very much not okay, and I’m not okay, but I need to be able to tell you what the brain weasels are doing, because they don’t just go away. Maybe I can pen them up and put them someplace you won’t see them, but that doesn’t mean they disappear.
What if it’s me? What if I’m cursed? What if the worst thing you can do is go for the whole rest of your life with me? I’m serious. I’m not thinking voodoo or magic or something, but … what if I just attract broken people?
That’s a thing, right? And it’s not just karma or something about the energy we put out into the world, but seriously. What if the sort of person I am attracts the sorts of people who are destructive and make dangerous choices and maybe die from them because that’s part of who I am, deep inside?
My dad was drunk the night my parents died. Did I ever tell you that? The roads weren’t good anyway, and he was just over the limit, but that’s still drunk. Maybe they still would’ve crashed if he’d been sober, but that’s a question we’ll never have an answer to. There’s no parallel universe where things happened slightly differently and I grew up with my parents instead of Gran and I have more than three albums of photos and this limited number of fading memories, and maybe it’s not the drinking thing, but the orphaned thing.
And look, honestly, up until this year I thought your life was just freaking perfect. You’ve got the family, you’ve got the money, your parents still like each other, you don’t have student loans and you didn’t even need those scholarships … You dismiss a lot of things because you’ve never had to worry about them, and then you didn’t even want to tell me how you’re feeling, about all the pressure, because I guess I hide it well, too. But you’ve been honest with me, and I need to be honest with you, even if you don’t want to hear it. Maybe especially if you don’t want to hear it.
What if it’s me?
Chapter Seventeen – coming January 17
Rebecca Frost 