Page 7 of Toni and Addie Go Viral

Toni

Toni had been just this side of tipsy, and after a few minutes of standing in the rain looking for Adelaine, Toni headed back to the hotel. She wasn’t about to go back to the bar or pace the rainy streets.

I hope she’s okay.

Toni would never be a person people whispered about like they did her father—or her mother. Neither the trouble nor “that poor woman.” Chin up, steps steady, she made her way to her hotel room.

No beautiful Victorian damsels in the lobby.

Toni paused, considering a drink, but lobby bars at a conference felt like desperation, and even the flicker of hope that Addie was a conference attendee felt dangerous. If she had been a student, Toni would have never touched her.

She said she was a stage actor. It was all an act.

Despite herself, Toni still looked around as she walked through the hotel.

No beautiful Victorian damsels in the elevator.

Toni smothered a sigh and went to her room. Inside, she flopped on her bed and grabbed her laptop. She was on the verge of searching online for “Adelaine Stewart” and “Addie Stewart” and even “Victorian plays” near the address of the bar. Addie was a convincing Victorian.

“What am I even doing?” Toni muttered.

A fleeting encounter in a garden with a beautiful erratic stranger was not reason to go chasing after her.

If anything, it was another reason to go home.

Toni didn’t chase after women—or get their last names or numbers or emails—even after far more naked encounters.

There was no logical reason to chase after this woman.

Toni packed everything but her laptop into her bags and cracked a mini-bottle from the hotel room fridge.

The price of hotel liquor was absurd, but in that moment—dangerously in debt, fixated on a stranger she’d never see again, and imagining the magic of a ten- or even fifteen-thousand-dollar book deal—Toni wanted one more drink in her system as she sent the manuscript to Emily.

She opened an email, attached the book, and typed out: “If you hate it, just delete this email. Will not make it to breakfast after all.” Then she jabbed SEND .

What if it worked? What if I sold a book?

The thought of it working was irrational, but Toni had enough of her father’s dreamer genes to let herself imagine it for a moment. A solid deal. Maybe enough to cover a year of her mom’s care. Maybe enough to mean that Toni could just focus on her teaching career for one year.

Maybe if I found Addie, tomorrow we could celeb—

Toni stopped herself. There was no reason to think of Addie. She was a woman at a bar. Toni would never see her again.

But if I looked her up…

The temptation was undeniable. Toni typed in Addie’s name and found a page with a headshot and stage credits. There was a contact page, social media links, but the urge to send a quick email changed nothing. I just need to know she got home safely.

From: History Toni

To: Addie

I tried to find you after the bar. Tell me you’re home safely.

Toni

Ignoring a twinge of regret, Toni clicked on a flight change email. She needed to go home, far away from the maddening temptation to see Addie again. A few clicks later, Toni was scheduled to fly home within a few short hours.

She forwarded her itinerary to Emily with a “got to go. Sorry about London.” Anything that made her consider commitment was a thing that meant it was time to run. Her desire to see Addie was not something she could allow to take root.

Then Toni fell asleep dreaming about wonderful what-ifs: What if she sold a book? What if she ran into Addie again somewhere? She honestly wasn’t sure which was more daunting—or exciting.

After a blurry morning, Toni hopped a short flight from Edinburgh to London.

She didn’t buy in-flight Wi-Fi and search for more information on Addie Stewart.

Instead, Toni had napped briefly in-flight.

Currently she was navigating the stygian ring of hell that most people called Heathrow Airport while trying to get to her ringing phone without dropping her coffee.

That was Emily’s ringtone, or Toni would’ve ignored it. “Em?”

“You’re going to want to sit down,” Emily said without preamble as Toni answered.

Toni shifted her phone to the other hand, steered her hand luggage around a family with an assortment of kids, and said, “Airport. No sitting.”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Yes, headed to the gate.” Toni tried to keep her voice light, no despair, no panic.

No breathlessness—despite the inability of people in airports to navigate with any modicum of common sense.

“What’s up?” Toni wasn’t running, per se, but traversing the connection at Heathrow made her feel like she should be.

For a nation that seemed to pride itself on being sensible, the Brits hadn’t figured out how to make an airport efficient—or maybe the airport was fine.

Maybe it was the casual meander of the thousands of travelers who all seemed to need to step directly into Toni’s path.

“I read your book on the train to London—”

“Is it awful?” Toni interrupted as she dodged a senior with a cane that she was swinging more like a golf club than a walking aid. “How far did you get?”

“All of it. Damn you, Toni. As a friend I want to tell you to talk to other agents. I want to be nonaggressive, but as an agent, grrr, I want to lock you down and make sure no one else can ever talk to you.” Emily laughed almost awkwardly. “I loved the book. All of it. Even the ridiculous title.”

Toni snorted a laugh. “You’re sweet, Em. The Whitechapel Widow was a joke title.”

“I am not laughing. I am trying to walk a line between being a selfish agent and giving you sound friend advice. There are more seasoned agents that you could talk to—”

“Nope. I’m not interested in anyone else, Emily.

I’m not starting a new career. I don’t want to deal with any of this.

I want to give it to you, and if it’s worth anything, you sell it.

Get me whatever you can. That’s it.” Toni saw her gate up ahead and picked up speed.

“I trust you. You know me and cope with my trust issues and hermit tendencies. Just… sell it if you can.”

When Emily was silent, Toni thought she’d disconnected. “Em? Are you still—”

“When do you board?” Emily asked.

“Now.”

“Do you want to think about this in-flight? Splurge on in-flight Wi-Fi. I can send you some thoughts on the market, editors, film agents. Options. Other agents to at least consider…”

There was an odd tone in her voice, but Toni chalked it up to worry over letting her down, so she said, “I trust you, Emily Haide. Whatever you can get for the book is cool. I just need realistic time to revise it, hopefully enough so it doesn’t interfere with my job at the university… I mean, if anyone even wants it.”

Emily made a choked laugh sound. “It’ll sell, and if you’re sure…”

“One sec.” Toni showed the gate agent her ticket and passport. Then she joined the masses boarding the cramped flight. “Sorry. Boarding.”

“Do you want to wait and talk first?” Emily asked. “If you do, that’s a valid plan. At the least I need to know if you’ll write a sequel. Selling a two-book is likely, and the London Book Fair is a great time to sell a book with buzz.”

Toni shoved her carry-on overhead, climbed over the aisle seat, and slumped into her middle seat.

Quieter now that she was surrounded, she said, “Two books works. You do your magic. Honestly, Em, whatever you finagle is great. I just don’t want to move Mom to a bad place because I can’t afford decent care for her, you know?

I was thinking I could sublet or sell my new place, but if you can get something out of the book or out of two books, it’ll buy me time and maybe let me keep my new place, which really is the best thing I can hope for, right? ”

Emily sighed. “I better not hear you telling me you regret this later, Toni. I swear—”

“No regrets.” Toni lowered her voice. “Do what you can, and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can come up with. It’s this… or juggling jobs and roommates.”

“Hang in there. I think this may work out a lot better than you think it will.” Emily sounded surer now, confident, and that did a lot to ease Toni’s nerves. Then she added, “Safe flight. I’ll call you on the other side.”

Toni disconnected with a sliver of hope that seemed almost too dear to be real.

Someone actually liked the weird middle-of-the-night thing she’d written.

Maybe it was just one friend, but that friend was an agent.

Emily knew the market and she actually seemed to think there was a publisher out there who might like it enough to want two books.

If Em’s math was right, and there was no reason to think it wasn’t, that could be thirty thousand dollars.

It still leaves a lot owed.

But owing one seventy was better than owing two hundred.

After years of listening to Emily talk about publishers with shortsightedness and fickle tastes, Toni wasn’t so foolish as to think that meant that there was a deal, but today, a little bit of hope felt like a lot of reason to rejoice.

Most book deals were closer to ten thousand dollars than anything that people thought. A lot of writers were earning less than a professor—and worked just as many hours. Toni’s childhood desire to be a writer vanished when the reality of low pay, no health care, and no retirement plans kicked in.

Okay, the dream still existed, but she also had to be practical.

She wasn’t like her parents, chasing impossible maybes and hopes.

The only one who paid her rent was her. The groceries, the utilities, the car repairs?

That was all her. So she switched to chasing a career with stability and health care.

Shelve the dream. Focus on the other dream—teaching.

The good news was that Toni genuinely loved teaching, and maybe once she had secured tenure, she could write, too.

That was the evolved adult version of the dream.

Writing was a fine side gig, a way to indulge in the love of words and make some money at it.

It wasn’t enough to survive on unless she had a well-off spouse or a huge book deal.

Lots of writers had the spouse or the day job.

The huge deals? Those were pie-in-the-sky dreams.

I’m smarter than that.

Toni had considered self-publishing, which was a perfectly respectable plan, but the pace was brutal, and Toni was afraid that judgmental colleagues would use it to suggest she wasn’t serious about teaching. That left either waiting for tenure or self-publishing and hiding her identity.

I’d hate hiding any part of my identity.

The downside of being out since she was a teen was that Toni was of the “no secrets” mindset.

If it looked like a closet even because of dubious lighting, squinting, and the like, Toni wanted no part of it.

She had no illusions that The Whitechapel Widow was literary, but it was a fun detective story—which meant that the name on the cover would definitely be her own.

No pseudonym, no hiding, no closets. She didn’t live her life or career in closets, so she wanted to approach this the same way.

If anyone publishes it, of course…

She almost laughed at her swerve toward arrogance.

Every aspiring author knew the odds. The lottery was easier than a writing life, and that was a time-honored truth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disparaging remark on the “damned mob of scribbling women” still echoed among the literati—cis, straight, white men whose perspective often seemed to be that they had the innate authority to write any perspective well.

Never mind that the reality of life was different from that seat of privilege.

Give a man a pen, and surely, he could tell a more poignant story of a Victorian lesbian’s life. As if.

Not so different from academia, there, if Toni were honest.

Toni flipped her phone onto airplane mode, turned on her travel playlist, and connected her oversized headphones.

Pondering the challenges of academia, publishing, or money wasn’t going to do anything but create a spike in arrogance that she had no outlet for in the tiny space of her in-flight seat.

Oh, for a lovely Victorian role-playing woman in historical drawers…

With a shake of her head, Toni shoved that thought away and adjusted her headphones to drown out thoughts of Addie and of debt and of limitations. The headphones were too bulky to want to wear walking in the airport, but here in the undersized space of her seat they were perfect.

Block out the world. Block out everything.

No stress. No anxiety.

Another stray thought of Addie filtered into Toni’s mind, drawing a reluctant smile with it, and she wished they’d had a slightly longer time together.

Addie was a lot flakier than Toni’s usual type, and her insistence that she stay in character was strangely charming.

Whatever play or role she was exploring meant she’d embraced her Method acting to the point of convincing a Victorian specialist that she could be the real thing—and that was talent.

Idly, Toni thought she could change her main character’s name—which had changed at least five other times—to Addie’s name as a thank-you of sorts.

“Adelaine” was a suitable name for a gorgeous Victorian lady detective on the edge of discovering herself.

Maybe someday, she’d even see it and know that she was incredibly memorable.

If it sells…

If I get a chance to revise it for a publisher…

Doubts started to bubble, and Toni made a silly promise to herself—the sort she used to use to bribe herself when she was younger. If it did sell, she’d change the name to Addie’s as a thank-you for the strange encounter in The Lady’s Hand.