Page 1 of Rivals to Lovers
PART ONEThe Proud
Eliza never knew from where it came—the pangs for something bigger, something brighter. She only knew it came with increasing regularity.
—E. J. Morgan,The Proud and the Lost
At The Hill, you could look into the valley and see nearly everything that counted in this damn world: the trees and the flowers. The city? Why, a speck in the distance. I could not write in the city. At The Hill, I wrote and lived and gardened contentedly.
—from the collected letters of E. J. Morgan, edited by Estelle Morgan-Perry
CHAPTER ONE
Mo
Maureen Denton flicked a half-eaten tortilla chip out of her hair, then looked accusingly at her roommates. “Which one of you threw this?”
“Listen, you’re lucky there was no queso on that one, Mo. Next time, no promises.” Sloan handed her a napkin and narrowed her brown eyes. It was almost six on the first warmish day in April, and the patio was full of New Yorkers out enjoying the lingering daylight.
Mo was trying to enjoy, and trying to listen to, her friends, but it was hard while waiting for the most important phone call of her life. “I’m sorry. She said she would call by five and it’s seven and—”
“It’s barely six,” Sloan corrected. “I was giving my ratport, and you were a million miles away.”
“And the weekly ratport is a sacred roommate tradition and you need to take it seriously.” Mackenzie rapped her spoon on the table lightly. Mackenzie had been Mo’s first andclosest friend since she moved to the city. Today she wore a bright-orange-and-red dress that accentuated her ample bust and hips, a good example of what she declared “fat Ms. Frizzle flair.” Mackenzie had majored in theater before getting her master’s in library science and now put her talents into reading stories for the eager repeats at her morning story hours. As a librarian, she was very good at reading books and too good at reading people. “You’re worried it’s bad news.”
Mo scoffed unconvincingly. “I’m just worried we settled too fast on the nameratport. We should have called it a rodent roundup.”
“Rodent roundupsounds like a cowboy kids’ TV show from the 1950s,” Mackenzie said. “Ratports are serious rat journalism. Tom Brokaw levels of rat investigation.”
Sloan nodded. “Exactly. So, torepeatmy Emmy-worthy report: When I was leaving work today, there was a group of people in Times Square all circling this rat, who was standing up on its hind legs staring at the billboards. Little-rat-in-the-big-city vibes. Honestly, reminded me of your ex-boyfriend, Aaron.”
Maureen threw the chip back at Sloan. Sloan ducked. It was unfair, really. Sloan’s reflexes were impeccable from years of playing lacrosse.
Mackenzie shook her head. “Doesn’t beat my rats-holding-hands entry from last week.”
“Paws,” Mo said, finally reentering the conversation. She kept getting phantom vibrations in her pocket. Her roommates were angels for trying to distract her, but they failed.
That wasn’t a phantom vibration this time. Mo pointed at her phone.
“Go! We’ll pay and see you back at the apartment,” Sloan said.
“Good luck!” Mackenzie called after her.
The phone vibrated in Maureen’s hand, a detonation device. It might as well have been one. All her dreams could go up in smoke. She took a deep breath before accepting the call.
“Hi, Yuri.” Maureen tried to keep her voice level. Her agent had received the manuscript a month ago. Email was the most emotionally undermining invention. A letter was something you could kiss and send off or clutch to your chest before you opened it. An email? Nothing so glamorous. Her email, and the attached project, sat somewhere in the (digitally) towering stack of manuscripts for Yuri to examine, and she hoped it would succeed where her last one had failed.
A sigh across the line and a single word. “Mo.”
That one word from Yuri’s mouth chilled Maureen’s spine. Holding the phone between her ear and shoulder freed Mo’s hands to tie her long, blonde hair back with the omnipresent hair band on her wrist. “Oh no,” she said, “What’s wrong?”
Yuri Eikura was a senior partner at Eikura, Schier & Gurnett Literary, famous for having an eye for literary fiction. Four years ago, Mo had snagged Yuri’s interest with her first project, a novel about a waitress slowly dissociating from reality while she worked at her local barbecue restaurant. Unfortunately, though it hooked her fantastic agent, the book never found a publisher.The quiet novel, editors kept saying in their rejections. Why was quiet bad? Anyway, it was, and she had written something else. But second projects, ones written after you had already secured an agent, felt tenuous. What would happen if Yuri hated it? It felt like Yuri telling Mo she hated her literary DNA. Even though Mo’s first novel had beenbarely obscured autofiction, this novel, the one that had been sitting in Yuri’s inbox for a month, was the book she had wanted to write since she was thirteen years old.
“You hate it,” Mo said.
Yuri exhaled so loud that Mo could swear she felt the air move against her cheek. “Oh, I love it, that’s not the problem.”
The first half of the sentence didn’t compensate for the second. “What problem?”
“Can I tell you for one little second about how good the book is before I dive into the bad news, or do you want me to thwomp you right now?”
