My agent was a bulldog. She fought for my first book brutally and without backing down because she legitimately loved it. I knew that was a blessing. Though I had exactly zero friends in the industry—in equal parts because the industry was a pit of snakes and because I didn’t really make friends easily—I knew plenty of authors were forced to settle for subpar agents too obsessed with their own social media followers and image to even read the books they were representing. The era of celebrity was seeping in, making agents more obsessed with how the author’s social media platforms were going, instead of how talented they were.
So sure, some of it was luck. The rest was talent. A lot of it. Tragedy had followed my family around enough to make sure I had plenty of demons to pull from. And I was a damn good writer.
Hence the huge first advance.
And a bigger second.
And third.
And so on.
Because I didn’t choke after the success of my first novel, like a lot of authors did. I got better. Sure, that seemed cocky, but I didn’t really care.
Emily had my first book, Skeletons of Summer, Dead Doves, and my most recent, Blackened Roses, among her collection. My own favorites. The first, a story of a young girl murdered by an uncle after he assaulted her, and she navigates the underworld deftly enough to talk to his son and convince him to kill his father and then every other child molester he could find.
The second was about the apocalypse. My ode to The Stand in a way. But instead of the flu, it was a disease that brought out the true, violent natures of all the people on earth. Spoiler alert: everyone destroyed each other.
The third was about a woman who moves to a small town that she later finds out worships the Devil. Initially, she tries to do something about this. Sacrificing of virgins and committing vile acts was wrong. But then she got sucked in, sick of pretending she was a good person. So, she joined in on worshipping Satan.
Happy Ever After.
I got so much hate mail from that one, my agent had a bodyguard following me for two weeks because she was worried I might die before I could produce another book.
I didn’t die.
Much to her delight.
Though I still hadn’t produced the book.
Which was why I was here. In a dead woman’s house, looking at her worn copies of my books, surrounded by her things and my own doubts.
Instead of thinking about the book I was meant to write, I put my own back and snatched an old Stephen King, poured myself a glass of wine, and snuggled into a chair. It counted as research, right?
Chapter 3
“She screamed at first. The knife cut through her flesh easily, blood flowed happily. But she still screamed. Later, she lost the energy to scream. I missed it.”
I was contemplating trying to cut my own hair when my phone buzzed. Wasn’t that what people did in the midst of some kind of personal crisis, breakup, or trauma? They hacked off their hair with blunt scissors and it worked perfectly as a metaphor in movies but I wasn’t sure it would do the same thing out here in the real world.
If this little cottage, with its earth tones, boho rugs, dreamy tubs, and a murder scene was the real world. It was my real world. For now.
The contemplation of all of this took long enough to send the call to voicemail, as I had intended. Wasn’t that also what people did in the midst of crisis? Shut out anyone and everyone in their life that actually gave a shit about them?
Sure, the list of people that actually, genuinely, gave a shit about me—the real me—was pretty fucking short so it wasn’t going to take much effort to shut them out.
Then I’d just have all the people who loved me for who they thought I was. Who would love me until someone better came along, they out grew me, or they died. A cheery thought.
For now, I put down the idea of cutting my hair. I put down the phone.
I did not pick up the laptop.
Katy answered later in the day.
She’d probably been performing surgery, or writing some article to be put in a medical journal that thousands of students would cite for their Ivy League school essays.
“All I’ve had to eat today is wilted kale, dark chocolate, and I ran out of Argentinian wine before