* * *
Sincerely,
Angela Greenbrae
Editorial Assistant at Anthem Publishing
* * *
I unleash a groan the length of the Hudson River.
Dropping my head in my hand, I utter a few choice curse words.
Then, just in case I’m still dreaming—or really, nightmaring—I read the email again.
And one more time because evidently I like to pick at scabs.
Do I want to buy the remaining copies? Is this a new strategy to sell more books? The publisher only sold four.
Okay, fine, that’s not true. It was something like 154, but I know for a fact that my mom and dad bought ten, my mom’s sister purchased five, and my sister snatched up a bunch too.
I slump, disappointment heavy after I’d let my hopes rise.
It’s not as if I thought I was getting a million-copy print run for Target, but I was hoping the publisher might be sending good news about the paperback edition of the book. Perhaps a new marketing plan to lure a bevy of new readers for my deep dive into the most daring art forgeries of the twentieth century.
Instead, it’s an invitation to shell out.
I read the note once more in case I happened to miss a postscript about how this is great news because as soon as the publisher dumps these copies, they’ll print a ton more, all wrapped in silver bows and bursting with confetti.
But confetti never comes out of the carpet, and the note is the note is the note.
I hit archive, sending it out of my inbox and into the abyss of email storage. But the next email gut checks me too. It’s from my sister.
* * *
Hey Nora Roberts,
* * *
Mom and I are decorating this weekend. Can I persuade you to lend us your eye? I can Skype you, and we’ll do a video thingy. I have tons of new photos of the rug rats to hang, and no one rocks the art decor like you. If you want to come up to Vermont, I’ll even make you that spinach salad with chickpeas and chia seeds that you like, since I know you like to be all health nut when you’re not lured by diners. And you can sign some of my extra copies of your book for my friend’s book club. I bought extras because Amazon was having a crazy sale!
* * *
Xoxo
Holly
* * *
I couldn’t ask for a more supportive family. Truly, I can’t. My sister uses different names of best-selling authors to address me every time she writes. She puts me on a pedestal for my art skills. And she gobbled up my failed, pathetic book. Yet I hardly feel like I deserve it.
Starring the email so I can answer it later, I slide out of bed.
The floorboards squeak as I head to the stove in my tiny East Village studio to make a pot of tea. As I turn on the kettle, I call my agent.
Beatrice answers on the second ring. “Good thing you didn’t quit your day job, huh?”
I choke out a mirthless laugh at her attempt at levity. “Yeah. It is.” Though the day job has its issues too. “So what’s next?”
“I have plans! Big plans! But I need something from you.”
“Sure. What is it?” I ask, grateful that Beatrice is always strategizing.
“See, I’m poking around my inbox trying to find the proposal you sent me. I can’t seem to locate it, but once I do, I’ll pitch you to Anthem for another book. How does that sound?”
That sounds like . . . a big problem.
Red flames across my cheeks. “You don’t have it because I haven’t sent it to you.”
Beatrice is a half-full kind of person, so she says, “What are you waiting for? I’m sure it’s fantastic, and I could use some fabulous reading material. I just refreshed my email. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Let me try again.”
I cast my gaze toward my laptop, huddled in a corner of the couch. “I’ll be done with it soon, I promise,” I tell her as I fill the tea basket with leaves. But the truth is my publisher’s idea for a second book isn’t wowing me. Anthem said it would consider a proposal on art heists, but that’s been covered to death, and I haven’t found a new angle into it. Besides, “consider” doesn’t mean buy, and “buy” doesn’t mean the book will sell any copies. “I’m just trying to find the best hook.”
“Maybe you’ll find it in the next hour,” she says, and her tone is chipper, but it’s laced with a directive—get moving.
“But what about The Forgers?” I press, returning to the subject nagging at me, namely the book baby I wrote all while juggling a full-time job a few years back at a prestigious museum. Of course, the reason I wrote the book was to have more street cred in the museum world and move up. Can you say “fruitless effort”? “Isn’t there anything we can do? Get the rights back maybe?”
My agent peals with laughter. “Oh, sweetheart. Whatever would we do with the rights?”
I grab the kettle and pour the steaming hot water over the leaves. “I could self-publish it.”
“Oh, that’s so cute. I love your enthusiasm.”
“Lots of people self-publish.”
Her tone jerks to the right, veering straight into serious. “In romance. In mystery. Not in nonfiction. Sweetheart, go work on the heist book, wipe this nonsense about getting the rights back from your head, and find a great angle. Anthem will probably pay less. A lot less, but maybe this can be your breakout book.”
“It certainly can’t do any worse than one hundred and fifty-four copies.”
“Of course it could. It could have sold one hundred and fifty-three copies. Now, let’s talk hooks.” Something squeaks on her end, like maybe she just sat up straight in her chair. “Oooh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if Highsmith was robbed by an art thief today? I can picture it now.” She imitates an anchor on the five o’clock news. “And today, the once-vaunted auction house of Highsmith Associates finds itself the victim of a dazzling art thief who absconded with a Pollack.”
“We don’t have any Pollacks. And art thieves aren’t usually ‘dazzling.’ They’re usually just thieves. Also, how is hoping for a one-in-a-million chance of a theft going to work as a hook?”
“I’m just trying to get the creative juices flowing. Maybe you can embellish. For instance, what if a Warhol was stolen? Or maybe a Koons? Wait. What if our intrepid thief stole a Banksy?”
“We don’t have any of their work.”
“What could a thief steal, then?”
“I’m currently curating a collection of love letters, some from Corey Kruger. I’m showing them this morning.”
She squawks. “The washed-up child actor who has six love children from six different women?”
I wince at the cold, clean truth of her question, then answer with as much dignity as I can muster. “Yes. The former Teen Beat sensation.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s a different angle for sure. But perhaps you could put an ad on Craigslist, find an aspiring cat burglar, and stage a heist of love letters from has-beens? Now that would make for an interesting pitch. Think about it, dear.” Barely taking a breath, she segues from my floundering career as an author. “Now listen, I have to run. I have breakfast with the head of one of the big five about a book I’m taking to auction. The writer just won season two of Anyone Can Dance. I do love a good memoir from a rising celeb. Must go.”
“Bye, Beatrice.”
She’s gone before I even say her name.
As I finish my tea, I check my email again, hoping for a reply from the human resources director at the Whitney Museum. There’s an opening in the American antiques department, and I’ve been trying to make my case for an interview. I would kill for an interview.
Well, not kill.
But I’d definitely sell my soul to the devil.
My inbox is empty, so it looks like I won’t have cause to bargain with Lucifer this morning.
A collection of love letters can be quite a coup for an auction house. One of our competitors recently auctioned off some from President John F. Kennedy; another sold epistles written aboard the Titanic; ye
t another peddled a gorgeous, plaintive note from a rock star, the paper bursting with emotion-laden lines like Say you’ll be mine, say you love me madly all through the long and lonely nights, and put me out of this abject misery, this all-consuming pain. The missing is too much. It’s making it hard to write, to think, to eat. Come to me again, and I will give up everything for you.
Here at Highsmith, ours are from an actor whose star burned brightest in the eighties with Goobers! It was one of those films that defined a generation, a tale of outcast kids banding together, so it’s too bad that his iconic turn in that flick was eclipsed by his role in a sex tape several years later. With a hooker. Who became the mother of his third child.
He didn’t write her a love letter though.
The high point of the collection is this masterpiece, written to the first woman he eloped with. Pre-hooker hookup, if you’re keeping tabs.
* * *
I love you. I fucking love you. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly, and cameras love lights, and men love women. I love you madly, so madly it’s making me CRAZY. I want you to be mine. I’d give up all my earnings from Goobers! just to have you back. I messed up big time, but I LOVE YOU. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
* * *
I mean, really.
He couldn’t even come up with another way to say “Forgive me.” How about at least a “Please forgive me for cheating on you, since I’m a lowly schmuck”?
But on the bright side, we have a potential buyer and the interest of a local reporter, both of whom are getting a viewing before the auction later this week.
I guide them to the glass case on display. “As you can see here, we have a collection of authentic love letters from Corey Kruger to Lily Wilder, his first wife, written in 1988. She is the mother of his first child.”
“I thought she was the mother of Albany, his third child?” The question comes from the potential buyer, Felicity, a long-nosed, dark-haired woman in distressed jeans and snakeskin boots with an Instagram feed’s worth of makeup on her face.
I plaster on a smile. “No, Albany Kruger is his firstborn. Buffalo his second. Butte the third, Des Moines the fourth.”
“And Phoenix and Dallas are the fifth and sixth,” Felicity answers like a contestant on a game show. Shaking her head, she smiles, seemingly bemused with her forgetfulness. “I can’t believe I messed up Albany. But seriously, how cool was Corey for naming his kids after the places where they were conceived?”
“The coolest,” I say, longing once more for the days when I worked at the Met, curating American art. But unfortunately, turns out my direct boss there was running a forgery ring, and his underlings were let go in a purge of everyone within spitting distance of him.
Including this underling.
The fact that I’d been researching great forgeries of the last century didn’t help me earn the benefit of the doubt. So much for a book giving me more credibility in my field.
I’m still radioactive by association, it seems.
The woman stares at the letter, reading it like she’s enrapt by the words, mouthing each line then bringing her hand to her chest. “He really did love Albany’s mama.”
“Yes, he certainly believed he did,” I say diplomatically.
The reporter, a weathered woman named Zara who wears a long braid down her back, clears her throat. “You don’t think he meant it, then?”
I meet her inquisitive gaze. “Don’t we all say things with honesty in the moment, even if they don’t bear out over time?” I have to believe that we do. It’s how I make sense of the wreckage of my love life. In the last decade, I’ve fallen in love, fallen out of love, been engaged, been unengaged, been single and loving it, single and hating it, and single and who the hell cares.
And I’ve been left brokenhearted by a man who flew to the other side of the world.
“Exactly. And Kruger’s words didn’t really prove true,” Zara says with a scoff.
“But he’s settled down now. With his new wife. And they seem so, so, so happy,” Felicity points out. “Clearly he must have learned from his mistakes.”
“Perhaps his affections for so many women helped eventually lead him to make better choices,” I offer, since apparently my job is now to defend washed-up celebs. “After all, Corey is sober, and he’s a spokesperson for a mattress company. So there’s that.”
“I love his mattresses,” Felicity says, as if she’s talking about his muscles or his sense of humor.
“Why do you think his first wife kept this letter for so long?” the reporter asks as she studies it.
“Maybe she wanted a different ending for their love story,” Felicity offers with a hopeful grin. “Maybe she kept them because she hoped he’d come back to her, and these letters were her connection to him.”
“But he never did come back. He hardly even saw his child,” the reporter points out. “Do we know why Lily’s selling them?”
I could tell her the truth. That Corey Kruger’s first baby mama is just like Highsmith Associates—in need of moolah. My boss took this collection on because love letters are hot, he’d said. Because it could give us a foothold in the love letter market. Because he’s trying to make a once-great auction house great again.
As for Corey’s first wife, she’s selling because she can.
But I won’t share that, nor will I divulge that she told us she doesn’t care one lick for the mattress man.
That’s not going to help my cause—the cause of keeping this job to pay the bills as I sort out what the hell to do with my upside-down career. I sidestep into the truth, peddling the hope that buyers search between the lines of love letters. “She felt that since enough time had passed, she was ready to share them with the world.”
Felicity smiles happily as she reads the letter again. “If I had a letter like that, you bet I’d share it with everyone. Would you?”
Would I?
When I’m seventy and an auction house comes to me and asks me to sell the letters that Hunter Armstrong wrote, would I? There weren’t many, and they were more like love notes, but he was crazy romantic at times, slipping little missives into my purse, my jacket pocket, and under my pillow.
* * *
Dear Presley,
* * *
You.
I think of you.
I dream of you.
I want so much more of you.
* * *
Xoxo
Hunter
* * *
I kept them all.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t sell them.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t need the money.
But mostly I’d say no because I don’t want anyone ever asking me if I hoped our story had had a different ending.
There is no other ending for us.
I finish the showing, head to my office, and bury myself in work till lunch, when I devote an hour to researching ideas for a new book proposal.
As I outline heist ideas, my phone buzzes with an intercom call—my boss.
“Presley!”
“Yes, Daniel?”
“I have incredible news I can’t wait to share. Can you come to my office?”
“I’m on my way.”
Incredible news? At the rate my day is going, that means he’s laying me off.
I head down the hallway, saying hello along the way to Cassandra, a jewelry specialist, and to Chen, who handles Asian art, before reaching my boss’s office, where I find him with a phone cradled against his ear.
“Terrific, Oliver. That sounds terrific. We’ll talk soon. Cheers.”
He hangs up and points to the phone. “Fantastic fellow in London. He’s keenly interested in American art and antiques. Hoping to do business with him.”
“Is that the news you wanted to share?”
He laughs, shaking his head. “No. That’s still percolating.” He gestures for me to come in, so I do—then stop when I see the photo on his computer screen.
3
“Welcome to New York. Thank you so much, and we hope to see you again on a flight very soon.”
As the jet stops at the gate, the captain turns off the speaker, and I unbuckle my seat belt and stand.
Twenty-one hours on a plane and I feel like a million bucks. Stretching, I shift my neck back and forth, roll my shoulders, and snag my carry-on.
Nothing beats first-class travel.
I slept a full ten hours over the Pacific. I also showered in LAX during our layover in the middle of the night, even though I could have gone to my nearby condo and showered there, since the City of Angels is where I call home when I’m here in the United States. But the airport was easier, and that’s something I never knew was possible when I was a kid growing up with barely two nickels to rub together—there are actually full showers in the first-class lounges at many airports. And they’re fantastic, so I’m fresh as a goddamn daisy as I step off the plane late Monday morning and make my way through the airport, heading for the baggage claim, where I’m instantly assaulted.
It’s an out-of-the-blue ambush, and I’m smothered by laughter and a cloud of ivory soap scent. “Surprise!”
I hug my mom, not entirely surprised by the sneak attack.
After I untangle myself, I regard her silver-tinged hair, her crinkled smile, and the mischievous look in her warm brown eyes. “I told you I’d come by the house, Mom. You didn’t have to pick me up from the airport. I was going to take a Lyft.”
My mother is a bulldozer. “Please. It’s my pleasure. There’s no need for a Lyft. Tell me though—were you surprised?”
I tap my chin. “Let’s see. You engineered for Daniel Highsmith to track me down in Queenstown in between shoots, you suggested the Valentina family contact him to hire me, and you regularly email my producers. I’d say surprising me at the airport isn’t at the top of your recent exploits, but it’s completely in character.”
P.S. It’s Always Been You: A Second Chance Romance Page 3
