Page 32 of One-Star Romance

Still waiting to hear back from Leslie Wickham at Penguin, and she seemed quite passionate about this. She’s been passing around the manuscript at her imprint to generate excitement. I’ll follow up with her now. Remember, it only takes one yes!

Only one yes. She’d focus on that. Besides, Leslie was the dreamiest of her dream editors, the one who’d edited a couple of Natalie’s favorite books over the past few years. If Leslie said yes, these other rejections wouldn’t matter at all, and someday Natalie wouldn’t even remember the sting. She’d look back and say it was fate, that everything had led exactly where it was supposed to.

Natalie looked up and caught Rob staring at her in a level, searching way. She shrugged and stuffed her phone back in her pocket, then grinned with what she hoped looked like joie de vivre. “Let’s have that toast!”

Angus popped the cork of the champagne, sending it flying off somewhere into the living room. “To Rob!”

“And to Angus,” Rob said.

It only takes one yes, Natalie repeated to herself.

“To us all,” Angus said. “Making moves, making dreams come true!”

14

The next day, the sky finally cleared after lunch, the temperature warming into the midseventies. “We are going swimming!” Gabby declared as they washed their plates. “Well, we have to wait half an hour since we just ate. I’ll set a timer. But go put on those bathing suits!”

Everyone suited and sunblocked up, then traipsed outside. But Natalie hung back. It was a Saturday, so any news from her agent was highly unlikely. But just to be safe, she’d check her email one more time. Making sure that everyone was gone, she clambered up onto the table, letting out a grunt of pain. Oh God, her neck. She’d never admit it to him, but Rob had been correct: that couch was not meant for people to sleep on, or perhaps not meant for people to go within ten feet of.

She paused to stretch her neck out, then held her phone up to the ceiling. A text from Iman dinged:

IMAN: Sorry to contact you on a weekend, but figured you’d want the update. Leslie apologized profusely for the delay. She had a family emergency this week and is just plugging back in now. Said she’d aim to get me a definitive answer today. I’ll send over as soon as I get it. Fingers crossed!

A knot of anxiety and anticipation lodged itself in her throat, threatening to cut off her air supply. She would find out today. At any moment, maybe.

Nothing would change if she saw the email immediately versus a couple hours after it was sent. She would not lose an opportunity if she didn’t respond right away. It was the freaking weekend. Natalie would get down from the table and go in the water and then come back and check later.

But she could not move.

Not that she was stuck physically, though it would take a bit of effort to heave her aching body back down after the night spent tossing and turning on the torture couch.

She just could not make herself leave that patch of service. So, okay, she’d refresh her email one more time, then go.

She refreshed one more time. Nothing. She stayed.

Again and again, she refreshed, each time telling herself it would be the last, each time growing more frantic. She felt…addicted, like when, as a thirteen-year-old, she’d gotten really into playing this online game called Bubble Trouble. Each time she lost, she was convinced that the next time, she’d get to the next level, so she couldn’t turn it off. Eventually, her mom had to block the website on their computer. Now Natalie was waiting for proof that she’d get to the next level too—the next level of financial and career stability. The next level of being an adult.

How much could she have accomplished with all the hours she spent checking her email for news that would change her life? She probably could have learned Mandarin or gone to med school.

She climbed off the table, went to the bathroom, reapplied sunscreen, made it all the way to the door. Then she ran back to the table again for just one more check.

An unknown period of time slipped by, punctuated by false alarm emails: a sale on Old Navy’s flip-flops. A political candidate asking for “a chance to explain” why he needed her time and money, as if he were a deadbeat ex-boyfriend. And then she refreshed again, and the phone chimed with a notification she felt in her belly. Because Iman’s name had appeared on the screen.

Blood roaring in her ears, she read the email, Iman’s quick Looks like we’ve reached the end of the road with this one. Let’s regroup and find a time to talk, over a forwarded message from Leslie at Penguin. And then she pushed herself off the table, tripping out the back door of the house into the sun.

Gabby. She needed to find Gabby, to crumple into her arms, but she didn’t want any of the others to see. She couldn’t bear Angus’s loud sympathy, Melinda’s bluntness, Dante’s…whatever Dante’s deal was. She especially couldn’t face Rob and his infuriating superiority.

They were all on the main dock, Melinda and Dante playing music from a speaker, drinking beer, and shoving their tongues down each other’s throats. Rob was doing laps, Angus floated on an inflatable alligator, and Gabby was napping in an Adirondack chair, an open magazine splayed over her chest. Gabby looked so calm, a woman who had her life all figured out. Natalie crept closer, taking a side path, weaving around tree roots and low-hanging branches instead of walking down the main steps.

“Gabriella! Come in here and fight me with a pool noodle!” Angus yelled.

Gabby opened one eye. “I’m relaxing.”

Angus shrugged and jumped off his floatie. Melinda and Dante were wrapped up in each other. Now was the moment to beckon Gabby over. But Nat found that she couldn’t do it.

Because whatever Gabby said to comfort Natalie now would be hollow, half-hearted. Any of her platitudes about how the publishing world didn’t know what it was missing were sure to ring false. How could she know when she hadn’t read Nat’s work in years?

Nat had plenty of other people who wanted to know everything. Her mother. Her endlessly supportive writing group. The friends who had read and loved Apartment 2F (or who claimed to love it—Natalie now had trouble believing that anyone had really meant the positive things they told her), who kept asking when they could expect a new Shapiro novel for their shelves. But none of them were here.

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