really wants to leave forever. This time she really wants it to be different.
Because now there is Robert McClore, the single bright spot in her life, the one joy that is slowly enabling her to detach from the fear, from the rest of her life that is so dark.
Tonight Robert is taking her to Stonehenge for dinner. It is a tiny, romantic inn in Ridgefield, and he mentioned she should bring an overnight bag in case they feel like staying—he has booked a room, but doesn’t want to seem forward, is leaving the decision in her hands.
And she knows what her decision will be.
This time, for the first time, she thinks she may have fallen in love.
On the other side of town, Robert McClore leans back in his chair, sips his cappuccino and smiles to himself with satisfaction.
Chapter four. Already! Never has a book been easier to write. It is as if he is writing on autopilot, the words flowing from his fingertips in a way they haven’t since—well, probably since his first novel.
Writing was so creative back then, but of late it has felt more and more like a business. He has contracts to fulfil, books to write: one book a year, whether inspiration strikes or not.
It has become a job, and one that he is starting to find dull.
The business of outlining, of researching, of sifting through to decide which bits are relevant and which bits are not, used to light him up with passion.
The moment when characters you thought were pivotal suddenly become irrelevant, when others, supposed to have been bit parts, end up driving the plot, taking over the book, filled him with pleasure.
Everything about being a writer used to excite him, but these past few books have felt mechanical, as if he is just going through the motions.
Something has to change. This he knows, as much as he knows that the creative process is all about change.
He always starts a book with an outline, but has to be fluid, malleable, has to accept that the characters will take over, and that it’s quite possible the finished book will be nothing like the book he had in mind.
This is why he couldn’t ever do as his agent wants him to do, and take on ghostwriters, employ a team, others to write his words.
Oh he knows others do it, knows it is the Warhol Factory mentality that would thrill his audience, those who want instant gratification, who e-mail him daily demanding he produce more, telling him they can’t bear the wait for a new McClore book, but he can’t.
His agent, his publisher, suggested a ghostwriter for a series of mysteries, but this book is so easy to write that he will be finished in a matter of weeks, doesn’t need a ghostwriter. How could a ghostwriter possibly tell his story, how could a ghostwriter have really known what it was like being married to Penelope, the affairs, the anger, the volatility?
How could he possibly entrust that to someone else?
He started off with pseudonyms for everyone, started off writing in the third person, but halfway through the first chapter he wrote it as it was, in the first person, just as he experienced it at the time.
He can change the names later, will definitely change the names later. But right now, Penelope is Penelope, he is Robert, and everything is just as it was. The clubs, the restaurants, the parties, the celebrities. They will be changed, names will be made up, because this is a work of fiction, at least as far as everyone else is concerned.
The only person who knows is Tracy. And she doesn’t actually know anything, but it was her idea, and he said it was an interesting one. She doesn’t know how close the story is, though. He wouldn’t tell her that. Even Kit, whom he has come to trust implicitly, doesn’t know. He has his own computer in his study, password-protected, and is not printing out each chapter, as he usually does, to give to Kit to proofread; he is just writing, and will wait until the end before printing it out.
In many ways, this is the easiest book he has ever written. It does truly feel, as Tracy suggested, that this is the one story he has always been destined to write, a story that is, as a consequence, remarkably easy to tell.
He thinks of all the women’s fiction that peppers the shelves of the local library, the local bookstores, fiction that