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One week ago

I ’ m in Dublin on Monday. Can we meet?

Emily read the sentence for what was at least the tenth time this hour, hoping that this time, the words would reveal what Beth Blake, an editor at Morningstar Books, wanted to talk to her about.

Out of the blue. On short notice. And in person .

Now, after all this time.

Because there were only two possibilities, and both of them were bad.

The last time this had happened, it had changed her life. Six years ago, a different editor at Morningstar had messaged to say they wanted to publish her novel and commission her to write a second, in exchange for an amount of money that sounded like a lottery win. Five years ago, The Witness had debuted as a number-one bestseller – but ever since, Emily had struggled to write the follow-up. A pandemic happened, buying her time, but she’d failed to take advantage of it. The ‘how’s it going? Just checking in!’ emails started to lose their jaunty exclamation marks, then decreased in frequency. Two years ago, they’d stopped coming altogether. Her agent retired. Her editor at Morningstar moved on. Emily stopped trying to write.

Finally, she stopped pretending to be trying.

Admitting defeat, if even just to herself, lifted a thousand pounds off her shoulders but lodged a permanent brick of dread in the pit of her stomach. After all, she’d signed a contract she hadn’t fulfilled. She’d been paid an advance on royalties for a book she’d never delivered, and that money was long gone. Every single morning her first thought upon waking was, Today could be the day someone at Morningstar remembers me.

And now, this afternoon, the email.

Emily angled her phone so Alice could read the message for herself. They were standing inside the door of BOOK WITH US , a new bookshop off the quays whose signage contained no upper-case letters, watching people gather for the launch of the inaugural issue of a literary journal. The event was scheduled for six, which in Irish time meant proceedings would reluctantly begin at six-thirty. That was only five minutes from now and yet the crowd was still embarrassingly sparse and mostly made up of contributors and bookshop staff.

Emily hoped there’d be a last-minute influx, for Mark’s sake.

She had come because she was duty bound; Loose Leaf: Vol. I contained a new poem by her boyfriend. Alice was in attendance because when Emily first saw Beth’s email, she’d panicked and begged Alice to meet her here, even though she’d known her best friend for twenty years and ten minutes would’ve been long enough to know that this wasn’t her scene. But she needed someone to talk her off this ledge, and she wanted to let Mark enjoy his night in the limelight.

Or under the harsh fluorescents of this mostly empty bookshop.

‘That’s it?’ Alice said, frowning at the phone’s screen. ‘That’s the whole message?’

Emily nodded. ‘What do you think?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I feel sick.’

‘That’s probably just from this wine.’ It was classic book-launch fare, cheap and room-temperature; Emily had met Alice at the door with a glass in each hand. ‘What is this place, anyway?’ Alice asked, looking around. ‘I thought I’d got the wrong address. It looks like some kind of wanky pseudo-Scandi design studio from the outside.’

The head of another attendee, a serious twenty-something reverently stroking a hardcover copy of House of Leaves , snapped in their direction.

‘It’s a concept store,’ Emily said, lowering her voice in the hope that Alice would too. ‘According to Mark.’

‘What’s the concept? Shut in Six Months?’

Emily shot her friend a warning look, even though she thought Alice had a point.

The tables on the shop floor had nothing on them, but did have chairs tucked underneath: an invitation to sit down and read the book you hadn’t yet paid for and mightn’t ever need to now. The walls were fitted with narrow picture-ledge shelves that could only display books one or two titles deep, and facing out. There was no B ESTSELLERS bay, and despite being in the path of thousands of tourists visiting nearby attractions like the Ha’penny Bridge and Temple Bar, there were no Ireland travel guides, postcards or copies of Ulysses either. It was more like a gallery displaying books than a shop offering them for sale. They’d never turn a profit at this rate.

Which makes it the perfect place to launch something like Loose Leaf, Emily thought, and then immediately felt bad for thinking that.

When she’d got here, she’d discovered that the ‘literary journal’ Mark had been on about for weeks was ten A4 pages printed on someone’s home inkjet, inexpertly hole-punched and bound with brass fasteners.

‘That’s the point,’ he’d said when he’d seen her face, and she’d said, ‘Oh, right. Clever,’ even though she didn’t think it was, especially.

His naked need for her not to be unimpressed had cracked her heart a little.

‘It’s probably just a friendly check-in,’ Alice said now. ‘Which is why she’s being so casual about asking you. I bet she’s coming over anyway, for something else. They have an office here now, don’t they? Let’s be real: this woman is not flying over from London especially for a meeting on Monday morning that she only suggested you have on Friday afternoon. She’s got other things happening. She’s just hoping to fit you in.’

‘A friendly check-in?’ Emily repeated. ‘After two years ?’ She shook her head. ‘Not a chance. This is about the money. They want it back.’

Her headline-making six-figure advance had consisted of an equal amount for each title, which was paid in stages throughout the publication process. One of those had been ‘commencement’ – they had paid her, literally, to start writing the second book. And she had. She’d drawn up a plan, saved a new Word document, started a fresh notebook and everything. But since it was an advance against royalties and she’d thus far failed to finish writing it, Morningstar were well within their rights to recover that sum.

These days, Emily’s bank balance typically ran to only three digits and, more often than not, there was a minus sign at the start. The idea of owing that amount of money, of needing to suddenly, somehow, come up with a sum that large …

The wine’s vinegary afterburn surged up into her throat.

Alice rolled her eyes and said, ‘That never actually happens,’ which was no consolation because she didn’t know anything about publishing outside of what Emily had told her over the years. Alice was a dentist.

‘It’d be fair,’ Emily said. ‘They’ve given me so much time and I’ve never given them anything.’

‘ Could you give them something? I mean, what if you went home, mainlined Red Bull and just went hell for leather for forty-eight hours?’

‘Maybe,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I don’t see what the problem is. Didn’t Donna Tartt take, like, ten years?’

‘Yes, but to deliver a book by Donna Tartt . This isn’t quite the same situation.’

Alice took a slow, deliberate sip of her wine.

The door to the shop swung open, letting a roar of street noise into the space. Everyone in the huddled group Mark was a part of turned hopefully towards the sound, but it was just a man with a suitcase who quickly realized he was in the wrong place and promptly left again.

Mark saw Alice. She waved at him. He waved back, but made no move to come join them.

‘He doesn’t like me,’ Alice said.

Emily rolled her eyes. ‘Not this again.’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘He’s just intimidated by you, that’s all. I mean, you are qualified to brandish a drill inside people’s mouths.’

Emily caught Mark’s eye and tried to smile reassuringly.

‘I should really hire you to write our website copy,’ Alice said, giving her a sidelong glance. ‘I presume you haven’t said anything to him?’

Emily shook her head.

Honesty wasn’t always the best policy in a relationship where both partners’ professional situations were so agonizingly opposed. Mark was constantly writing a novel but had never managed to get one published. He scraped together a living mainly by writing book reviews, submitting poems and short stories to the kind of literary journals that paid in free copies, and working in a branch of a well-known bookshop chain, selling other people’s realized writing dreams for eight hours a day, three days a week.

Including hers, presumably.

He’d never mentioned it, but the paperback of The Witness was still in print and the odds were, in a busy city-centre bookshop, he’d served at least one customer buying a copy of it by now.

Meanwhile Emily, having got her dream, had let it die. She was in a job that had nothing to do with books – a call centre that handled the helpline for a supermarket chain’s customer loyalty card – and that was a relief. She still had a publisher waiting for a novel that they’d promised to pay her handsomely for once she delivered the manuscript, but she hadn’t managed to write a word of it.

Not a good word, anyway.

They were both standing with their feet planted firmly on the other’s faraway greener hill. Mark longed for the opportunity she was ostensibly throwing away, and she wished she could go back to where he was, full of words and possibility and daydreams, free of the choking pressures of a legal agreement, expectation and a ticking clock.

At least, for now, they were still holding hands across the valley.

Emily wanted to keep it that way.

‘You should go,’ Alice said. ‘I mean, I think you have to go. Call in sick and go find out what it’s about. And it’s just a meeting with a nice woman who works in publishing. What’s the worst that could happen? Either this is about the next book, in which case you say you’re still working on it, or they want the money back and you have to go away and figure something out. But it’s better to know, isn’t it? Your imagination is always worse. And maybe it’s not even about what you think. It could be something good .’

‘Yeah,’ Emily said noncommittally.

As a tinkling of pen against glass signalled that proceedings were set to begin and a hush descended, it occurred to her that, actually, there was a third possibility as to why an editor at Morningstar might want to meet with her.

Out of the blue. On short notice. And in person.

Now, after all this time.

And it was much worse than her inability to write a second book, or her having to find twenty-five grand from somewhere.

This thought made her chest freeze up in panic.

They’ve found out .