stood outside Tristesse, bouncing with anticipation, mouth tilted up to the speaker, one hand supporting a tray of fairy cakes. ‘I was just passing.’ Lie.
There was a buzz and a click and she threw herself through the front door. Balancing the tray she skipped down the corridor towards Reception. The fairy cakes were a bluff. She'd been making batches of them all morning, studding alphabet sweets in the icing to spell out highly amusing and piercingly appropriate lines from classic literature.
At least, that had been her plan. Turns out the surface area of your average fairy cake is not nearly expansive enough to accommodate your classic literary quip. And anyway, even had the cakes been bigger, there weren't enough e's in her bag of alphabet sweets to manage more than a couple of zingers from Shakespeare and the opening line of Moby Dick. In the end she gave up any attempt at cake intertextuality and settled on dropping random letters onto the icing. She was adamant that if you squinted at the last batch you could see a couple of lines from Emily Brontë.
But the fairy cakes were a decoy. A subterfuge. ATrojan horse in sponge form.
She eyed the stacked boxes that lined the narrow passageway, paying more attention to them than usual. One of them could contain her book. She'd been waiting for this moment since Tom announced that the edit was finished. He was happy. Or, as happy as the scowling Frenchman ever got. The manuscript had been scoured for solecisms, corrected for commas; it was ready to go to the printer, he announced. And what about the cover?
‘That is up to the publisher,’ he'd said. ‘Trust me.’
And she had.
Tom had insisted that the delivery date was a rough one, that the books could arrive any day that week. She wasn't taking any chances. But she didn't want to seem too keen. Hence the deceptive fairy cakes.
‘Hi, Jane,’ Roddy greeted her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Yeah, I was just passing,’ she repeated, attempting to sound casual. ‘I was baking this morning and made too many of these.’ Lie.
‘Ooh, fairy cakes. With alphabet letters. Nice touch.’ He took a bite out of one, then snapped his fingers and said through a mouthful of sponge, ‘You know what would be brilliant—if you used the letters to spell out, y'know, famous lines from novels!’
‘Genius!’ she exclaimed with rather too much surprise. ‘I should do that.’ She waited impatiently while he polished off the cake.
‘Umm …’ she began.
‘He's in,’ Roddy nodded towards Tom's office door, ‘if that's what you're asking.’
‘Oh good. Good to know. That he's in.’ She scanned the small Reception room, trying to identify any new boxes. ‘Umm …’
‘Was there anything else, Jane?’
Her gaze fell on a stack propped in front of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Nicola Ball. They were unopened boxes, shrink-wrapped and pristine, lacking the telltale scuffmarks that indicated stock which had been left lying about the office for weeks. Jane snatched a pair of scissors from Roddy's desk and set about prising open the topmost box. The flaps sprang open and there before her lay four snugly fitting hardbacks.
Her heart sank: it wasn't her novel. The hot pink cover was dominated by a photograph of a grinning little girl under an umbrella, beneath the title, Happy Ending. Relief immediately replaced disappointment; it was an awful cover, and the title stank. What kind of a writer would come up with …? Jane's eye slipped down to the author's name.
Her name.
No. That made no sense. She hadn't written a novel called Happy Ending. She read it again and felt a sudden sensation of falling, as in a dream, and was aware of eyes watching her. She glanced up at the cut-out of Nicola Ball. The young novelist's knowing, cardboard expression said, ‘I told you so.’
‘Hey,’ said Roddy, studying the top row of fairy cakes with a quizzical expression. ‘I'm pretty sure that's the last line of Wuthering Heights. Jane?’
But she had gone.
‘I'll call you back.’ Tom replaced the receiver as Jane barrelled through the door, brandishing a copy of her novel, her face red with fury. With a grunt she launched the hardback in his direction. He ducked and it hurtled past his ear, slamming against the wall.
‘Now, Jane …’ He held up his hands defensively.
‘Happy Ending? Happy fucking Ending!? What happened to The Endless Anguish of My Father? You bastard, you changed my title! To that?!’
‘I told you. The first time we met, I said it must go.’
‘But we never discussed it.’
He shrugged. ‘I knew how you'd react.’
The supercilious, condescending … she quickly scanned the room for something else with which to assault him and immediately found just what she was looking for.
‘Careful,’ he cried, ‘that's my Young Publisher of the Year award.’
Jane weighed the gold-coloured trophy and drew back her hand. ‘Runner-up,’ she said, heaving it at his head.
It flashed past him.
‘Sonofa—’ cursed Jane, disgusted at her aim—two throws, two misses. What the hell was she doing?
She slumped and the fight went out of her. She studied the man before her, searching his face for a sign, for whatever it was she'd missed that revealed his true nature. Like some spotty teenage girl she'd been distracted by his outward charms. God, she felt such a fool. ‘Who are you?’
‘What?’
‘All that time we spent together working on the manuscript. No one's ever got me the way … You told me to trust you. I did.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘It was a lie. That man would never have done this.’ The words caught in her throat. ‘I don't know you.’
‘Look, it was a terrible title and I changed it,’ he said gently. ‘There's no point being upset about it. What's done is done. Let's move on.’
‘How can this be so easy for you?’ Her voice was low, restrained. ‘You bastard.’
He flinched and colour rose into his cheeks. Now he was angry. ‘Perhaps because I am not a talented writer whose dad left her with a pathological inability to stop worshipping her own pain.’
‘Worshipping my …’
He closed his eyes, trying to regain control of himself. ‘Please, sit down. Let's talk about the launch.’
‘You know what,’ she said quietly, ‘our deal is one more book and then what's done is done.’
She wanted to turn smartly on her heel, head held high and march from his office. From his life. She needed a good exit, something to show him what she was made of—a full stop at the end of their stupid little relationship, or whatever this was. But her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. And with each step she told herself don't look back. Don't look
