Page 57

“Let me guess.” I smile at her. “I’ve also cost you fifty bucks?”

She gives a dry laugh. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. She meets my eyes, a silent challenge. “You’re here to make us profitable, right? You can start by earning me back my fifty dollars.”

I grab a book at random from the last box I just moved. The title readsThe Republic of Letters: Intellectual Networks and the Birth of Modern Thought.I flip the book in my hand, looking for the barcode, and look back up at Inés.

“This book’s fifty dollars.”

She crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows.

“That’s the challenge you’re setting me?” I ask. “Sell one book?”

“That’s sort of how publishing works,” Matt says, leaning back against his desk. “We print books; people buy them.”

“Look, Evan,” Inés says, “your father sent you here because it looks good to have his golden boy son step into our small, humble press. But none of us here are even remotely stupid. This imprint’s survived this long because your mother liked us, what we did, what we stood for. Now the well’s run dry, and even she knows we’re at the end of the road. So if you don’t realise this yet, I’ll tell you for free: your dad sent you here to supervise the end of Inkspill so that when Inkspill’s dead and buried, he can tell everyone he did everything he could to save it.”

I watch her as she speaks. She’s austere and forceful, just like Sophie. There’s no sarcasm or hostility in anything she’s saying, just a tired sort of acceptance.

And I understand her straightaway. Inés, like Sophie, doesn’t hate me, not really. She’s just trying to keep herself and her team safe. She’s expecting disappointment—but it’s not what shewants.

What she wants, deep down, is for me to prove her wrong. She’s passionate and fierce: she loves Inkspill. She wants to save it. Even if it means I get to prove her wrong in the process.

“I bet fifty dollars you wouldn’t turn up because if I were you, I wouldn’t have turned up,” she tells me. “We only have enough money to keep going until December. That gives you less than three months to make us profitable.”

I glance at the whiteboard near Inés’s desk, where the production schedule should be. The last column is December. The months after that are blank, as if the world ends with the year.

My heartsinks.

Fuck.Three months.

Every month since the gala has felt like a year, a century, an uncrossable expanse of time. But now that I’m here, now that I know I’ve only got three months to save Inkspill—and myself—I realise how short three months is.

It’s nowherenearenough time.

“Even with all the best will in the world,” Inés continues grimly, “even if you were actually a secret business prodigy, which, no offence, I doubt you are, even under the best of circumstances, your chances of succeeding would still be infinitesimal.”

“Great,” I say. “Look, I’m here now, and I don’t know what I’m doing, you’re right. But I’m going to figure it out. And if you guys are going down fighting, I’ll be fighting with you.”

“My hero,” Matt says drily.

I ignore him and turn to Inés, holding her gaze.

“Save your money and don’t bother starting another pool. I’m not going anywhere.” I shrug off my coat and toss it on the back of the linty desk chair, a cloud of dust rising from the desk, then settling. “I’ll make you back your fifty bucks—and a hell of a lot more.”

28

Pig Out

Sophie

I’m so busy focusingon work and my HLR plans that I stop paying Maximilian attention. He must take personal offence to this because he corners me outside a lecture hall one afternoon.

It’s late September, already dark outside. Students are spilling out into the hallways, shrugging on coats and debating class topics when I feel an arm lace through mine. I look up to see Max’s unpleasant smile, his grey-brown eyes fixed on me in a watery imitation of fondness.

“So I’ve heard your ex’s back in New York,” he says, pressing his shoulder into mine.

I don’t push him away, and I don’t smile. We walk slowly down the corridor, the crowd parting around us.

“And?”