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  Chapter Three

  I woke the next morning to the sun shining through a gap in the curtains. I turned to see Lauren, unbothered by the streaming light, no doubt still in the sex coma I’d put her in last night. I looked at my phone and I saw it was only ten minutes till my alarm was due to go off anyway, so I switched it off so as not to wake Lauren and crept out of bed, heading for the shower.

  Lauren wasn’t working today and I knew she would probably appreciate some extra sleep with the hours she had worked that week, attending the health problems of the locals. Sometimes, during my day, I would wonder what she was doing and I would try to picture her, perhaps listening patiently to an old person, giving them her advice as well as a dose of compassion. It warmed me to imagine her like that.

  I got out of the shower and began to get ready quietly, but the door creaked open and Lauren came in and sat on the toilet.

  ‘Sorry, desperate.’

  I didn’t love that she was peeing in front of me, but I’d learned to tolerate it. This was what couples did, apparently. Having not been in a serious relationship since my twenties, I was used to being able to brush my teeth without being busted in on and this was one of many adjustments I’d had to make to accommodate coupledom.

  ‘Would you like some breakfast before you go?’

  ‘No time. I’ll grab something en route.’

  She nodded and I left her there, still in mid-stream. I was glad of an excuse to get out.

  I was in my car, on the way to my meeting with Barret and Foster. Well, almost. I was currently stuck in traffic. I wasn’t too concerned about being late though, I’d anticipated the jam and left extra time to sit here and wait it out. My phone rang and I grabbed it from the passenger seat. I didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice of a youngish man I didn’t recognise spoke nervously in my ear.

  ‘Hi Julia, this is Max Barker from Barret and Foster. I’m Jill’s assistant.’

  Jill was Editor in Chief and leading the meeting today. We’d been having meetings and dinners for the last six months and were on fairly friendly terms at this point.

  ‘Hi Max, I’m just on my way to you now.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m calling about. I’ve been asked to let you know that the meeting has been cancelled.’

  It was a bit last minute and had made my morning a little anticlimactic but I shrugged the disappointment off fairly quickly. I noticed a teenage boy walking on the pavement passing my car, with a small scruffy dog on a lead. The dog looked happy.

  ‘Oh, alright. Did you want to reschedule now or…’

  I heard him swallow thickly and a sudden bad feeling filled my stomach. I was still staring at the dog as it continued down the road, hoping to not hear the bad news I suddenly knew was coming.

  ‘That’s the other thing I’ve been asked to let you know. Barret and Foster have decided not go forward with your book. I’m sorry.’

  The dog’s tail was suddenly all I could focus on, the joyful wagging a juxtaposition with the abrupt wretched feeling this phone call had thrown at me. I tried to collect myself as the dog disappeared around the corner, no doubt on its way to better things. Max, in his sensitivity, let me take a moment. The shock began to pass and in its place was confusion and anger. But I was determined to hold those feelings in check.

  ‘Can I ask why that is, Max?’

  ‘Errm, from what I can gather, they decided that they had taken on too many properties at the moment and some of them would need to be shelved for the time being.’

  Some people would have taken some hope from the phrase ‘for the time being.’ But not me. I know a cowardly euphemism when I hear one. I realised that I was not going to get a satisfying answer from Max, who I remembered with sudden fury, was a lowly assistant. Not only were they ditching my book, they were palming me off with a lackey. And he was giving me this devastating news over the damn phone. Not only was I angry, now I was insulted.

  But I wasn’t going to lay that on the man who had been given the crappy job of calling me. I was going to save it for the person who merited it. I made my voice as casual as I could, given the circumstances.

  ‘Max, would you put Jill on? I’d like a quick chat with her, just to get a few more details.’

  There was a pause and I knew I was about to receive another lie before he even spoke.

  ‘She’s a little busy right now. Can I get her to call you back?’

  I gave a small bitter laugh.

  ‘No, that’s OK. She doesn’t need to call me back. I’m coming in.’

  I hung up the phone before Max could protest and I could imagine the small flurry currently going on at Barret and Fosters. Max would right now be going to tell Jill how I’d received the news. And she’d be finding out that the meeting she had tried to weasel out of was about to happen anyway, whether she liked it or not.

  The traffic cleared and I pulled off down the road, as fast as I could.

  Chapter Four

  The elevator doors opened on floor three of the building and I strode into the reception area. I’d had twenty minutes in the car to build up quite a head of steam and I was here for answers, real ones. They were reneging on an agreement and they hadn’t had the good grace to sit me down and explain exactly why. And now they were about to find out that I was not someone who would allow myself to be treated like this without speaking up.

  The girl on reception (Selina, I think her name was) saw me coming and her face dropped a little. She’d clearly had a heads up about my arrival.

  ‘I’m here to see Jill Fraser.’

  ‘Errm, do you have an appointment?’

  ‘Selina, can I be honest with you?’

  She nodded and I leaned forward slightly, resting my hands on her desk.

  ‘We both know that I did have a meeting here this morning. And then it was cancelled, along with my book, in a pretty spineless manner. But I’m going to have the meeting anyway’ I said calmly.

  She looked pensively at me

  ‘Well, Jill is out for the morning.’

  I felt sorry for her. She was yet another person who had nothing to do with this decision but had been put in my way. Plus, she’d always been nice to me. Maybe even a bit nicer than was necessary for a new author. With that in mind, I leaned into her even further.

  ‘Selina, I know this is nothing to do with you’ I said kindly. ‘And the last thing I want is to get you in trouble, but I just want you to be straight with me. She’s here isn’t she?’

  She didn’t answer, which was still an answer.

  ‘OK, I’m going to walk into Jill’s office right now. And you can tell her that you told me she was out. But, mega bitch that I am, I wouldn’t listen to reason and I went to find her anyway.’

  I winked at her and her mouth twitched up at the corner.

  I walked down the corridor and threw Jill’s door open. She was at her desk, mid phone call, and she looked up in astonishment. I stood there, not saying a word, waiting for her to speak first. She spoke into the phone.

  ‘Michael, I’m going to have to call you back.’

  She put the phone down and gave me her most professional smile.

  ‘Julia! I’m so glad you could come in.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Is that so? Then we’re still having the meeting you tried to cancel? Fantastic.’

  I sat down in front of her desk. She’d obviously acclimated to the changing situation and was now going to pretend that it was going as she planned. The only indication of her tenseness was the hand she ran inelegantly through her shoulder length grey hair.

  ‘I presume by now you’ve heard the news? I’m so sorry, Julia, I know it’s a blow.’

  I smiled viciously.

  ‘It’s more than a blow, Jill. It’s a breach of contract. We have a written agreement. You gave me an advance.’

  She picked up on that last point quickly.

  ‘Yes, we did, and we want
you to know that we won’t be asking for that back, as a gesture of goodwill.’

  I sighed, irritated.

  ‘I don’t care about the money, Jill. I want to know what happened. Everything was fine last week. What changed?’

  ‘There have been some changes at the top and missives have been sent down to tell us that we need to ‘slim down’ our output. And unfortunately, there happens to be another title with some crossover appeal with your book and it’s further along. So we made a tough decision.’

  It sounded plausible but then why had she been so sneaky about it all? There was more to it.

  ‘What changes at the top are you referring to? You’re editor in chief, surely this comes down to you.’

  ‘We’re owned by a larger company, Julia. We’re just a hand on a body. I still have to answer to someone.’

  I sighed, frustrated.

  ‘You know I can sue, don’t you?’

  She nodded and for the first time, she looked at me properly and I glimpsed the human underneath the businesswoman.

  ‘I know you can, but if I were you, I’d walk away. Our pockets are deeper than yours. It’s not going to be worth it, Julia.’

  I sat back in the chair and shook my head.

  ‘Come on, Jill. What really happened?’

  She looked torn and that confirmed to me there was indeed more to this than she had let on. I played the last card I had.

  ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’

  I watched as she made a difficult decision.

  ‘Look, our parent company did had some personnel changes. During those times, there’s usually some reshuffling that dribbles down and we have to shelve some projects as a result. That all true.’

  She looked down at her hands, and a little shame crept into her voice.

  ‘But I lied. There was no novel similar to yours. I was given specific instructions to kill your book.’

  I stared at Jill, aghast. She looked uncomfortable. It was obviously risky for her to reveal this to me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Reading between the lines, someone at the top really does not like you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know any more than that, Julia. I’m sorry.’

  I was shocked. Who would do this to me? And why? Suddenly, an even worse thought occurred to me.

  ‘This parent company. Do they own any other publishing companies?’

  Jill rubbed her temple.

  ‘Yes. All the major ones, and a lot of the smaller ones.’

  I stood up, suddenly feeling a sweat run down my back.

  ‘So the odds that someone else is going to print this book, or anything else I write, are pretty much non-existent.’

  She paused.

  ‘It’s not impossible.’

  ‘Just unlikely.’

  She nodded. I turned to leave.

  ‘I’m sorry, Julia. This is why I couldn’t deal with speaking to you this morning. It’s shitty to have to break something like this to someone when you don’t even know why. And I had a feeling you were going to see straight through it.’

  I barely heard that, my head was already elsewhere.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Jill. Like you said, you’re just a hand. I need to find the head.’

  I walked out.

  Chapter Five

  I was sitting in the car outside my house. I’d been there a few minutes. I didn’t want to go in because Lauren was there and she was going to ask about the meeting. I was going to have to explain that the book was dead, and because somewhere along the line, I’d pissed off the wrong person. It sounded bad in my head.

  But I was only delaying the inevitable. I climbed out of the car with a heavy heart and went in the house.

  I walked into the living room to find Lauren reading on the sofa. She looked up at me with a smile that fell quickly away when she saw my face. There was no point in putting a mask on right now.

  ‘Are you OK? You look like someone died.’

  I sat down next to her.

  ‘That’s not far from the truth. The book deal is off.’

  She was aghast.

  ‘What? Why?!’

  ‘Someone at the top of the food chain has apparently decided to destroy my career.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That’s what Jill told me. Someone who owns the publishers made it clear that I was not to be published. By anyone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. But I’m going to find out.’

  Lauren stared into space for a moment, acclimating to this change.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  She sighed, still shocked.

  ‘That’s dreadful.’

  I slumped down on the sofa.

  ‘Yep.’

  She paused.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I just told you, I don’t know yet.’

  ‘No, not about that. I meant in general.’

  ‘I haven’t really had time to think about that. This happened less than an hour ago, Lauren.’

  But she was stuck on something.

  ‘But, does this mean you’re not going to be an author? You’re just going to keep working for The Informer? I mean, do you think that’s what you’ll do?’

  I looked at her for a second, her furrowed brow and thousand yard stare, and I understood exactly what her problem was. She’d never liked me working for the scandal website but I’d always been a real writer doing it to pay the bills. In her mind, I’d been an about-to-be-published author. Now, I was just a gossip writer. I was still the same person, but the frame she’d had me in had changed.

  ‘Does it matter if that’s what I do?’

  She shook her head quickly.

  ‘No, of course not!’

  But it was too late, I’d seen that glimmer of doubt. I stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I barely glanced at her as I walked out of the living room, headed for the door, and a place free of the judgement I felt from her.

  Half an hour later, I was in a dingy bar, already into my second double vodka. I was trying to use the alcohol to stop the awful thoughts crashing around my head but it wasn’t working. My mind continued to turn on my problems, calculating my next move. Problem one, the book, and the person responsible for this shittiest of days. I’d done a little googling on my phone as I drank and discovered that Barret and Foster was owned by Murphy House, a multinational, and that it’s CEO Phillip Murphy had recently died of a heart attack at eighty-two years of age. There was no news on his replacement available yet. It was going to take more than a quick search to discover who had decided to fuck me on this biblical level.

  Problem two, Lauren. It was possible that I’d seen something that wasn’t there, but I didn’t think so. It was also possible that I’d simply caught her in a bad moment, and that she was having her own shocked reaction to my bad news. But I was concerned that it went deeper than that.

  I quickly finished my drink and ordered a third one. I necked that and ordered a fourth. The bartender raised an eyebrow but poured it anyway. I found I was beginning to feel a little drunk, and with it came self-pity. I began to feel like my whole life had collapsed, seemingly in a matter of hours. I’d had everything and now nothing.

  On that thought, a light, lilting, beautiful female voice popped my miserable little bubble.

  ‘Julia?!’

  I turned from the bar and standing in front of me, like the ghost of sorrows past, was Penny Stone.

  Chapter Six

  It had been a quite a while since the thing with Julia Hawke happened. I shouldn’t say ‘thing’. That’s the wrong word to describe it. ‘Thing’ makes it sound casual, and I’m not going to pretend it was that. It had been extremely significant, world altering in fact.

  It had shifted the direction of my life from a village girl who had every intention of marrying her childhood sweetheart and runni
ng the family shop, to becoming a city girl with dreams of being a writer. You might notice that I’ve left out the current state of my love life from that summary. I’ll admit, it’s pretty quiet in that department. I haven’t been a nun exactly. I’ve had a few dates here and there, with both boys and girls. But none of them really took.

  I guess it was because those early days with Julia had been an exhilarating time, and I hadn’t found anyone else who could quite fit that bill yet. Nevertheless, I wasn’t looking for another Julia. I didn’t see her through rose coloured glasses. There had been good reasons that the relationship had ended. She’d found it difficult to be honest with me and that had been at the heart of what had killed it. Even if I could have forgiven some of the things she’d done, I simply couldn’t trust that she would ever show me the full picture. So I guess what I wanted now was someone who could excite me, but also be open with me, completely real even when it was hard. And I hadn’t found that person yet, but I was prepared to wait for him or her.

  I also thought that perhaps I was starting to tip in preference toward the second pronoun. But the fat lady hadn’t quite sung on that and I wanted to keep myself label free until I felt more certainty on it. It felt like a big move to say definitively one way or the other, and although I was not the scared little country mouse I had started out as when I’d arrived at Medford, old habits die hard. My natural cautiousness has not quite deserted me yet. I’m still essentially the same girl, after all. These days, I like to think of myself as Penny 2.0. New and improved, but hopefully still with everything that made the original model good.