I peer through the window of the restaurant, then check the time on my phone. I’m late—I’m never late. Not the first impression I was aiming for.
“Grant, you’re a thirty-four-year-old heir. For most of us, our jobs are tied directly to our ability to eat.”
“See?” he says. “This is the kind of worldview I’m done with. You can be so cold sometimes, Nora. Chastity and I want to—”
It’s not intentional—I’m not trying to be cutting—when I cackle out her name. It’s just that, when hilariously bad things happen, I leave my body. I watch them happen from outside myself and think, Really? This is what the universe has chosen to do? A bit on the nose, isn’t it?
In this case, it’s chosen to guide my boyfriend into the arms of a woman named after the ability to keep a hymen intact. I mean, it is funny.
He huffs on the other end of the line. “These people are good people, Nora. They’re salt of the earth. That’s the kind of person I want to be. Look, Nora, don’t act upset—”
“Who’s acting?”
“You’ve never needed me—”
“Of course I don’t!” I’ve worked hard to build a life that’s my own, that no one else could pull a plug on to send me swirling down a cosmic drain.
“You’ve never even stayed over at my place—” he says.
“My mattress is objectively better!” I researched it for nine and a half months before buying it. Of course, that’s also pretty much how I date, and still, I end up here.
“—so don’t pretend you’re heartbroken,” Grant says. “I’m not sure you’re even capable of being heartbroken.”
Again, I have to laugh.
Because on this, he’s wrong. It’s just that once you’ve had your heart truly shattered, a phone call like this is nothing. A heart-twinge, maybe a murmur. Certainly not a break.
Grant’s on a roll now: “I’ve never even seen you cry.”
You’re welcome, I consider saying. How many times had Mom told us, laughing through her tears, that her latest beau had told her she was too emotional?
That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.
“I’ve got to go, Grant,” I say.
“Of course you do,” he replies.
Apparently my following through with prior commitments is just more proof that I am a frigid, evil robot who sleeps in a bed of hundred-dollar bills and raw diamonds. (If only.)
I hang up without a goodbye and tuck myself beneath the restaurant’s awning. As I take a steadying breath, I wait to see if the tears will come. They don’t. They never do. I’m okay with that.
I have a job to do, and unlike Grant, I’m going to do it, for myself and everyone else at Nguyen Literary Agency.
I smooth my hair, square my shoulders, and head inside, the blast of air-conditioning scrubbing goose bumps over my arms.
It’s late in the day for lunch, so the crowd is thin, and I spot Charlie Lastra near the back, dressed in all black like publishing’s own metropolitan vampire.
We’ve never met in person, but I double-checked the Publishers Weekly announcement about his promotion to executive editor at Wharton House Books and committed his photograph to memory: the stern, dark brows; the light brown eyes; the slight crease in his chin beneath his full lips. He has the kind of dark mole on one cheek that, if he were a woman, would definitely be considered a beauty mark.
He can’t be much past his midthirties, with the kind of face you might describe as boyish, if not for how tired he looks and the gray that thoroughly peppers his black hair.
Also, he’s scowling. Or pouting. His mouth is pouting. His forehead is scowling. Powling.
He glances at his watch.
Not a good sign. Right before I left the office, my boss, Amy, warned me Charlie is famously testy, but I wasn’t worried. I’m always punctual.
Except when I’m getting dumped over the phone. Then I’m six and a half minutes late, apparently.
“Hi!” I stick out my palm to shake his as I approach. “Nora Stephens. So nice to meet you in person, finally.”
He stands, his chair scraping over the floor. His black clothes, dark features, and general demeanor have the approximate effect on the room of a black hole, sucking all the light out of it and swallowing it entirely.
Most people wear black as a form of lazy professionalism, but he makes it look like a capital-c Choice, the combination of his relaxed merino sweater, trousers, and brogues giving him the air of a celebrity caught on the street by a paparazzo. I catch myself calculating how many American dollars he’s wearing. Libby calls it my “disturbing middle-class party trick,” but really it’s just that I love pretty things and often online window-shop to self-soothe after a stressful day.
I’d put Charlie’s outfit at somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand. Right in the range of mine, frankly, though everything I’m wearing except my shoes was purchased secondhand.
He examines my outstretched palm for two long seconds before shaking it. “You’re late.” He sits without bothering to meet my gaze.
Is there anything worse than a man who thinks he’s above the laws of the social contract just because he was born with a decent face and a fat wallet? Grant has burned through my daily tolerance for self-important asshats. Still, I have to play this game, for my authors’ sakes.
“I know,” I say, beaming apologetically but not actually apologizing. “Thank you for waiting for me. My train got stopped on the tracks. You know how it is.”
His eyes lift to mine. They look darker now, so dark I’m not sure there are irises around those pupils. His expression says he does not know how it is, re: trains stopping on the tracks for reasons both grisly and mundane.
Probably, he doesn’t take the subway.
Probably, he goes everywhere in a shiny black limo, or a Gothic carriage pulled by a team of Clydesdales.
I shuck off my blazer (herringbone, Isabel Marant) and take the seat across from him. “Have you ordered?”
“No,” he says. Nothing else.
My hopes sink lower.
We’d scheduled this get-to-know-you lunch weeks ago. But last Friday, I’d sent him a new manuscript from one of my oldest clients, Dusty Fielding. Now I’m second-guessing whether I could subject one of my authors to this man.
I pick up my menu. “They have a goat cheese salad that’s phenomenal.”