Chapter 1

Cara

I hadn’t showered, and I’d been wearing the same frayed jeans and grey thermal for two days. I knew I looked rough when I left the apartment, and did it anyway.

Two days after I set fire to my own career, I walked into The Last Drop, ordered a flat white, and pretended everything was fine.

The Last Drop smelled like dark roast and vanilla. I had been coming to the cafe almost daily for the last three years. I had a favorite table, a usual order, and a nodding acquaintance with the morning staff. It was a place that felt comfortable and familiar and safe.

I found my table on the back wall, under a print of some Italian street I had long since stopped seeing, and opened my laptop.

One thousand, four hundred and twelve words. That was what I had written so far on my third novel. I hadn’t added any new words to the document in weeks. I looked at those words the way one looked at a car that wouldn’t start. Then I looked at the blinking cursor.

Then, sensing something was off about the energy of the place, I looked up.

The café was mid-morning busy. There was a middle-aged woman in a blazer at the next table. Two men were sitting by the window networking over coffee. A teenager in enormous headphones was curled up in a chair, wholly unbothered by everything.

I envied that teen so completely it made my teeth ache.

All of them, except the teenager, were staring at me. Not dramatically. Nobody was pointing at me. But there were glances. The kind that skipped away too fast to be accidental. The blazer woman looked up from her laptop screen and back down. One of the networking men said something low to the other. They both looked at me and then quickly ducked back behind their paper coffee cups.

I knew how I looked. Rumpled clothes, hair that had been a bun two days ago and was now half up and half down.

But I had brushed my teeth. That had to count for something.

My flat white arrived. Jess, the young, effortlessly pretty barista, set it down with a smile that looked forced.

I wrapped both hands around the cup and looked back at my one thousand four hundred and twelve words.

I put my fingers on the keys.

I took them off again. My mind wandered restlessly.

I was at the Vantage & Cross autumn gala two nights ago. It was a black-tie, rooftop venue. I wore a silver dress and a mood that had made me feel beautiful and powerful. That mood should have been a warning sign, but I had ignored it. I remembered the first two hours clearly. I had led clever conversations, elicited laughter from people I didn’t know. I felt untouchable. Electric.

After that, though, the rest came back in pieces, like my memory was a broken mirror. I heard my own voice, speaking too loud. I saw the face of a publicist I’d apparently cornered near the bathrooms. I saw the look on my editor’s face when I interrupted a private conversation to say something I couldn’t fully reconstruct now, but had seemed, at the time, extremely necessary.

And a broken chair. A fragile, spindly-legged thing they used at banquets, smashed to pieces in a corner. I didn’t remember how it broke, but I had a bad feeling it was broken because I had thrown it.

I vaguely remembered the cab ride home. I remembered crying in the backseat while the driver nervously watched me in the rear-view mirror. I still wasn’t sure why I was crying, but it probably had something to do with the broken chair.

Yesterday, I stayed in bed with the curtains closed, surfacing only for glasses of water and the bathroom. I felt the deep shame of knowing I’d done damage I couldn’t account for.

Today, I pulled myself out of bed through sheer determination and came here. Because this coffee shop, and the routine of writing in the morning, was what normal felt like.

I desperately needed to get back to normal.

“Excuse me.”

The blazer woman had turned in her chair. She had a kind, motherly face and the careful expression of someone who was about to deliver bad news.

“Are you Cara Lennox?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been online today?”

I hadn’t been online today.

Jess, who was just delivering a chai to the next table, moved closer and turned her cell phone toward me without being asked.

It was the Shelf Life channel. It was a popular online platform covering publishing, film, television, and pop culture gossip with over eleven million subscribers. It was basically an online tabloid that loved to talk trash.

I had done an interview with them once, three years ago, after my first novel had gone viral. That now felt like a different person, a different life.

The thumbnail stopped me before I reached for the phone.

Leanne Farris, a senior editor at Vantage & Cross. She was thirty-one, a Yale graduate, with a golden blond bob so precise it looked digitally rendered. Leanne, who had called my second novel one of the most emotionally intelligent debuts of the decade. Leanne, who had been my editor for four years and who knew—had known—every tender thing about how I worked and what it cost me.

I had counted her as more than a professional colleague. I thought she was one of my closest friends.

She was sitting across from an interviewer in a clean studio set, hands folded in her lap, looking composed and professional, as always.

I took the phone from Jess’s hand and pushed play. The volume was up as loud as it could go, broadcasting the clip clearly throughout the cafe.

“—decision wasn’t made lightly,” Leanne was saying. “Vantage & Cross has enormous respect for Cara’s work. Her first two books were genuinely brilliant. I mean that.”

“But you’re cancelling the third?”

“We’re stepping back from our current agreement, yes.” She paused, just long enough to signal gravity. “What happened at the gala made it very clear that Cara isn’t in a place right now where she can fulfill the professional obligations a publication of this scale requires.”

“Can you speak to the broader concerns?”

Leanne pressed her lips together. “There have been concerns for a while about Cara’s mental health. And I—” she stopped, as though the words physically hurt her. “I blame myself for not acting sooner. We should have insisted she get support before the project progressed as far as it did. We failed her in that way.”

“She’s spoken publicly before about depression and bipolar disorder,” the interviewer offered gently, purposely adding kindling to the fire.

“Yes.” Leanne nodded. “And I want to be very sensitive here because mental health is something I care deeply about. But there’s a difference between struggling and being in a place where you can maintain the reliability a professional relationship requires. Continuing to act as though she is capable would be—” another dramatic pause, “—unkind. To everyone, including her.”

The chyron read: VANTAGE & CROSS DROPS CARA LENNOX AMID CONCERNING BEHAVIOUR.

“Our genuine hope,” Leanne said, “is that Cara takes this time to get the professional help she needs. She’s a talented woman. I truly hope she finds her way back.”

The video ended.

Café sounds continued around me. The espresso machine hissed. There was a burst of laughter from some young artists seated at the table by the window.

I set the phone down on the table with care, lest I drop it.

Or throw it.

My hands were shaking.

I looked at my laptop. At the one thousand, four hundred and twelve words and the blinking cursor.

I could feel the way the room shifted. Jess retrieved her phone and moved behind the counter with slightly too much cheerful bounce. The blazer woman turned back to her screen but hadn’t typed anything. The networking men had gone too quiet. Someone stood near the door with their phone angled just slightly wrong.

They were filming me.

Eleven million subscribers. The trades would pick it up by afternoon.

Concerning behaviour.

Mental health.

Professional help.

Leanne said it all so carefully, with her hands folded in her lap and her voice tuned to the frequency of reluctant pity. She would never admit that her pity was a weapon. No, she was just a woman doing the painful, necessary thing as she smeared my reputation and destroyed my career.

I looked at the cursor.

I thought: write something. You have to write something or they win.

The cursor blinked once. Twice. Three times. Like it was mocking me.

I closed the laptop and pushed my chair back quietly. I left the flat white half-finished on the table.

I didn’t look at anyone on the way out. I kept my eyes on the door and my face carefully expressionless.

Outside, the air was cold and indifferent. I stood on the pavement for a moment, clutching my laptop case.

I didn’t know where to go.

I only knew I couldn’t go back in The Last Drop.