“You’ve been doing it your whole life. Practicing, getting good, even if you never realized that’s what was happening. You’re like those kids that spend their childhood in front of a piano and then end up at Carnegie Hall.” He took a sip from his beer, his eyes never leaving hers, then lowered his bottle back to the table. “Clare, let me be the one that gets you to Carnegie.”

Chapter 25

Simon

If he wanted to, he could pretend she was upstairs right now. Locked away in her study; either buried, as she almost always had been, in her journals or sequestered behind her keyboard—writing, writing, writing. He had known Clare for sixteen years, been married to her for eight, and all that time, most of it had been spent exiled from her presence while she worked.

He sat on the edge of his mahogany desk, his bare feet on the seat of his black leather desk chair, staring at his bookshelves from a perspective of his office he’d never taken before. The three enormous bookshelves held the collective works of all his author-clients. Clare had been only one of twenty-three writers he represented, and yet, her books and their foreign translations filled up over half of the shelf space. Before she started writing A Perfect Life, she had averaged between five and six books a year. Ever since he found a publisher for her first book and opened the door to editors for her, Clare had basically taken over, stampeded the gates, and flooded the world over with her words.

He stared at all those spines on his shelf: sixty-six. It was like seeing them all for the first time. All those hours, days, weeks—they were all right here in front of him. This was the physical manifestation of his marriage to Clare, the evidence of it. Not photographs, not mementos or trinkets from trips, not memories of a life spent together. It was sixty-six books.

Of fiction.

He looked down at the book he held in his hands, her last book, number sixty-seven. “Which of these things is not like the other?” he whispered to himself.

“Simon?”

He turned and saw Eileen, looking exhausted and life blown, standing in his doorway. “Come in,” he said, turning back to his shelf. “I’ve just been contemplating the meaning of my existence. Not in the ways I was contemplating it last night, so don’t worry.” When she didn’t immediately respond, he turned to look at her. She was just standing there, staring into the void. “Eileen?” he asked. “Everything okay?”

Her eyes shifted and met his. “Yes…no. I guess I’m doing the same…contemplating the meaning of my existence.”

“How’d the call go?”