remains to be filled in—I found that quite interesting, though we’ll have to find another way into it. ‘TK,’ that’s too inside baseball, don’t you think?”
Orla felt like her stomach was dropping through her legs. The experimental elements. Floss must have sent an old version, a wild version, maybe from as far back as when Danny was around, filled with padding and errors and gaps and, she remembered, feeling like she might pass out, a sailboat made of lowercase r’s.
“Oh,” she said weakly, “I should explain what—”
“I think this could be quite a debut,” Polly said. “I don’t like the words ‘next big thing,’ I think they’re crass, but...” She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps, just for scale, think in those terms.”
“Are you kidding?” Orla stared at her.
Polly shook her head. She lowered her eyes to the salad the waiter was placing in front of her. The waiter did not look at Orla or ask if she wanted to eat. Polly frowned at the arugula, then picked up her fork with a sigh. “Though I do think,” she said, stabbing a tomato, “you may have some logistical issues.” Her eyes scrolled downward again.
Orla pulled her napkin up over her stomach. “This, you mean? Pregnant?” she stuttered. “Sorry. I don’t know what...”
Polly wiped her mouth. “I guess I just want to know,” she said, “how serious you are about becoming an author. If you’re making arrangements to have the time to be an author.”
Orla weighed her options. She wondered how Polly would respond if she let the whole truth roll out of her mouth. I am as serious about becoming an author as I am about being alive, she wanted to say. It’s the reason I’ve stuck it out here for years. It’s the reason I made myself blog about booty shorts. I used to be a girl who wrote after school until her legs got numb. And recently, yes—I got lazy. And distracted and lonely and pregnant. But I have only been this way for such a short part of my life. And I have been that other girl forever.
“I have a two o’clock,” Polly said coolly.
“I’m serious,” Orla said quickly. “Very serious.” It was suddenly clear to her, clear as the empty whisper-thin wineglasses cluttering their table: she would do whatever was best for this book, whatever worked for Polly Cummings. She had been giving things up for so long: Danny to Catherine, a decade to cyberstalking Danny, just about all she had to Floss. She had one thing left—her long-lost dream—and she was going to keep it. This was the truth, no matter who it made her: she couldn’t give it up.
Orla looked Polly in the eye and said, “I’ll figure something out.”
* * *
To her surprise, Amadou was at the curb when she came out. She hadn’t seen him since they cut back on expenses after Anna’s death, when they weren’t going anywhere anyway.
“What are you doing here?” she said, hugging him, watching herself in his mirrored glasses.
“Miss Floss asked me to come get you,” Amadou said. “For a surprise.”
In the back seat of his Escalade, she found some earrings in the well beneath the door handle. “I haven’t been driving any one client regular,” Amadou said quickly, as if it might make Orla feel bad to hear that he had replaced them. “No one special.” He nosed the car onto Forty-Second Street.
When he turned onto the FDR, Orla leaned forward. “Where are we going?”
“Oh,” Amadou sighed. He adjusted his GPS unit as it slipped down the inside of the windshield. “Somewhere new.”
* * *
Orla had never been to Brooklyn Heights. It was eerily quiet, with flat-faced, shuttered houses and streetlights out of a storybook.
Amadou pulled over in front of a massive three-story home. It had gray clapboard siding and a navy door flanked by thick white columns. Ferns, lime green and deep maroon, spilled out of the window boxes.
Orla got out of the car and walked around to the sidewalk, which was made of small, smooth slates, so unlike Chelsea’s shit-streaked concrete. She looked to her left and was surprised to find that, just a block away, the street dropped off and the river rose up to where she could see it. Past that, across the water, were the tall blocks of the Financial District. “What is this place?” she said.