Chapter 2
“There’s no way he knows.”
For the first time in our lives I am outstriding Lyla as my heels make their wobbly way down the hall. Up another layer of stairs, and we enter the second floor with its own set of plush carpeting—royal blue this time—and wallpaper alternating between men in caps pushing ladies on swings and maidens dancing round and round to what must’ve been quite the lively jig.
I round the corner.
“It was just one page—”
“One page is enough,” I interject.
“He barely looked at it. Not to mention we work in a publishing house, and every other sheet of paper in this building is a manuscript.” Lyla levels her gaze. “C’mon, Sav. You don’t even use your real name. You’ve just exercised the whole point of a pen name—”
“That’s not the issue,” I say without slowing. “The issue is he read enough to know it wasn’t Pennington Publishing material. He knows it’s romance.” I lower my voice to a meaningful hiss. “Romance.”
This must be what it feels like to be a criminal. I’m about as straitlaced as the Keds tucked inside my lower desk drawer waiting for the second the clock ticks to 5:00 p.m. Never skipped a class. Never cheated on a test. But now, harboring . . . fiction? And not just fiction, but romance? And not just romance, but my romance—my romance that I was not only reading, not only writing, but working on during work hours?
If Ms. Pennington had picked up that sheet, that would’ve been it.
I’d have been chased out the door, dodging copies of Medieval Limericks for Lovers and The Practical Houseplant chucked at my head.
I need to get this somewhere safe—now.
We pass doorframe after doorframe of entrances to various offices. There’s a hum in the distance of people downstairs, the shuffling of bodies slowly moving outside, everyone with a job—picking authors up from airports and hotels, heading to the conference center to set up.
The hallway up here is unusually quiet.
I’m going about fifteen miles an hour, easily toe-to-toe with any Olympic walker, when Lyla grabs the tote strap across my shoulder and yanks. My heels tangle in the carpet.
I stop. Turn around, careful to keep a protective hand over the bag.
“Ooooookay, dearie,” Lyla says. “I hear you. You don’t want to lose your job to domineering overlords. I get it. But if you want to keep it, that means you actually need to follow directions. Which, at this moment, is going outside.”
“I have to find a place to dump this,” I say, hearing a creak and darting my eyes over her shoulder, then behind. “If I get rid of all the evidence and act nonchalant, maybe he’ll forget what he saw. Or I can insist he didn’t see what he saw.”
Lyla raises a brow. “So . . . you want to . . . gaslight . . . your new boss. You do hear yourself?”
I can tell by her eyes. I know it. I know I look like I’ve lost it. But anyone would if they’d spent every spare minute of the past three years talking to imaginary characters in their heads, dreaming about the story they’d created, staying up late on more nights than they could count putting that story onto paper.
Being an editor at Pennington Pub is my job. And being a writer is my dream—my very personal dream.
And I can’t risk both by letting my manuscript fall back into his hands.
Lyla blinks, charcoal-black eyelashes drifting down and then back up to meet her eyebrows. It looks like it’s taking absolutely everything in her to avoid rolling her eyes. “Fine. Just stash the goods in your desk and let’s go. Okay?”
She waves an arm down the hallway like Vanna White showing off a yacht behind a shimmering curtain. “Before we really do get fired. You heard the new boss. Head to the lobby so we can stand around like sorority girls welcoming the newest pledges on the lawn.”
“Right. But . . .” I pull away from her arm, backtracking out of her reach. “I . . . I forgot a book Oswald has been asking about. He wanted to see if he could get an advance copy of Jenny’s February release—”
“Thriving in Premenopause?” Lyla asks. “Why would old Ossie want a copy of Thriving in Premenopause?”
But before she can say anything more, I turn and book it down the rest of the hall.
“Are you at least going to bring back my bag?” she calls out.
“Three minutes!” I repeat over my shoulder and turn the corner.
As my footsteps widen the space between Lyla and me, I feel as if I’ve entered the last moments of the Titanic before it completely submerged. In a world typically humming with conversations and people passing to and fro, all the hallways are dead. The wallpaper—probably dating back to Titanic days itself—doesn’t help the mood. Everything around me screams the same vibe I would’ve felt had I been a passenger back then, recklessly running back, deep into the lower levels of the ship, to grab one last priceless thing.
I wind around the corner and take my first step onto the small spiral staircase in front of me. The tiny, ornate steps barely contain the balls of my feet. Halfway up and my breath comes in short spurts as I grip and regrip the curving railing. Had this not been my home, my refuge, had I not ventured up this very staircase so many of the last 687 days, I would’ve without question lost my footing.
A stretch of faded yellow wallpaper greets me at the top of the stairs. There is no carpeting on this floor, only creaky hardwood screeching like an off-key violin with every step. I can only assume the unusual lack of maintenance on this floor is because nobody ventures up to the attic level. Who cares about improving a floor nobody except the rare visiting author treads on?
I move to the door at the end of the hall and check my watch.
Two minutes and twenty seconds. Perfect. If anyone asks, I just had to step away for a twenty-second bathroom break.
The door is closed. There is a simple black plaque beside it, just as all the rooms at Pennington Publishing are marked. In small gold script it reads Storage. It’s not what we actually call it—we all call it the ARC room—but at any rate, that’s its given name.
Nothing wild. Nothing out of the ordinary from any publishing house. Just . . . an ARC room.
But even as I grab hold of the old glass knob, I feel a tingle.
Magic.
The door creaks in a kind of screeching harmony with the floorboards as I push it open. Inside, the ceiling slants precariously low this way and that, matching the exterior of the old Victorian house and its multigabled roof. The room is dark in the windowless space, but without hesitating I take three steps forward, two right, sidestep a cardboard box, and reach blindly up for the chain. The lightbulb flares to life, illuminating everything in a vintage yellow hue.
Books.
Rows and rows of books.
Aisles of books. Shelf after shelf, crate after crate of books as far as the eye can see.
I inhale the smell of old pine, baked insulation, and freshly printed paper and move to the next aisle, where I pull on another string. The light roars to life, then another. Floorboards creak as I pass aisle after aisle, trying my best to ignore the glinting hardcovers and sheening paperbacks of new releases.
I can’t help it. There’s something about being in a room filled with free books that always makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop.
Every publishing house has an ARC room—a place dedicated for advance review copies of books about to be released. Influencers and bookstagrammers need to see advance copies so they can polish and post their reviews on time. Authors need ARCs for endorsement blurbs. Magazines and publications need a lengthy lead time in order to get their articles lined up for release. And yes, on the rare occasions Pennington authors visit the office, their book-loving souls always spring to life at the mention of a trip to the ARC room. In fact, on more than one occasion I’ve had to drag an author out of the room when he or she took my words “Take whatever you want” to heart.
(And no, as I’ve had to explain multiple times, taking six copies of the same book for “Christmas presents” isn’t what we have in mind when we offer.)
But I can never be too hard on them. I understand them.
Free books.
Free prerelease books.
Only a true reader would understand. Saying the music-to-ears words, “Browse around. Anything in this room is yours”? Well, the cobwebs bordering the bookshelves and hovering around corner crevices always start to glint like gold. The room suddenly smells like a field of tulips. Every creak in the floorboard is a choir singing, “Hallelujah.”
Even if books were all the room contained, it’d be magical enough.
But . . . it’s not just books.
It’s more.
I stop before three identical filing cabinets against the slanting wall of the farthest corner. The cabinets themselves look as old as the house. The metal is cracked and rusted on every corner. Cobwebs cling to each handle. The whole thing looks like nobody has touched it in a hundred years. Just how I like it. Just how, I know instinctively, the one before me liked it as well.
With one swift glance behind me and the same growing anticipation I always have, I grab the center handle and give it a tug. Feel the drawer give.
I still remember the shock the first time I opened this drawer. I was just a little fledgling at Pennington at the time, and it had been a particularly hard day. Ms. Pennington had just given me a public tongue-lashing over my “overuse of useless and distracting flower pictures” on a PowerPoint during an editorial meeting. This had come right after my supervisor, Giselle, had thrown out some not-so-subtle clues that I’d taken a major misstep in going on a date with her ex-boyfriend the week prior. When someone asked if we could get rid of a leftover box of books from the previous meeting, I jumped at the opportunity to be alone.
I remember how I crept into the room, barely making a sound, feeling that with one small creak something sinister would surely jump out from behind the shadowy bookcases. I remember seeing the metal cabinets in the corner and how I thought it looked like a good spot for storage. How I tentatively gave that little handle a tug. And how, instead of what I’d prepared for—the single drawer scratchily sliding out, revealing a bunch of forgotten files—the entire face of the file cabinet swung open. It took everything within me not to cry out as I stumbled back, tripping on a box of old books in the opposite corner along the way. My head had grazed a massive cobweb on the wall, and I’d spent the rest of the day breaking out into fits imagining spiders crawling through my hair.
But the discovery I made in that moment was well worth it.
Pulling Lyla’s tote close, I hunch to half my height and carefully step through the open door.
One push against the back of the metal cabinet, and it swings open as well.
My personal wardrobe to another world.
And suddenly I’m here.
The room is dark, illuminated only by the window and its streaming light just below the cone-top roof. I glance at the stained-glass sparrow, the purple of its wings shading the beanbag in the center of the small turret in violet hues, as my fingers find the chain and tug. The lightbulb swings as it comes on, revealing the beaten, wine-red Persian rug in the center of the floor and the curved bookcases rimming the shoebox-size room.
Books. Dozens of them, brought here—like the rug, like the beanbag—not by me but by someone before.
Covers of books framed in cheap wood hanging along the wall, all signed by their authors. Stacks of books forming a sort of side table on either side of the beanbag. One half-read overturned book with cracking spine waiting impatiently on top of a book stack for me to return and finish.
Slowly, over the past two years, I’ve been adding to the books, inserting my own favorites into the treasures harbored here. Ones I love. Ones that mean something to me as well.
I’ve always felt it was our little secret—mine and the mysterious person who made this their secret refuge before me.
Our little sparrow room.
Our little hideaway.
I check my watch. Three minutes and twenty seconds. (And 4678 steps! I may just hit 5K by lunch!) Not even time to organize the mess. Only time to drop and go.
I feel exposed flipping the tote over and spilling the crumpled, beaten sheets all over the rug. I’ve never left my manuscript here before. For that matter, I’ve never brought it to work at all, until today.
And yet, where better to hide your secrets than in your secret hideaway?
With one more long look at the papers at my feet and with the silent promise of return as soon as possible in my heart, I pull on the string to turn off the light and leave it all behind.