“I never learned her name.”
“It’s Solinde,” Elgar says firmly.
“Elgar, what’s happened?”
“I . . . the Smithsonian called. Apparently, my typewriter vanished. Back in December.”
Lucy goes silent again. “I see,” she says at length.
This is why Elgar likes his pseudo daughter-in-law so much. She’s clever. Cleverer than him, at any rate. She catches on to things faster, understands the depths of things more. She even found things in his own writing he hadn’t realized he’d put there in the first place. She’d written a whole PhD thesis about it. (It had been a bit horrifying to read, if he was honest—made him feel naked in ways he hadn’t experienced since his first weeks as an MFA student.) But she’s smart, and he doesn’t have to spell things out for her, which he likes.
“And it didn’t come back when the books returned?” she prompts.
“No.”
“And the rest of your . . . your stuff?”
“Right where it should be. Thank god.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, huh.”
There’s a shuffle and a thump from the other end of the line, and the sound of papers being moved around. “Okay, well, I guess there’s nothing else to really worry about. Nothing else is missing, nothing’s happened. It’s been quiet.”
Another silence, telling and tense, echoes down the figurative line from Canada.
“Do you ever worry it won’t be?” Elgar asks, the confession blurting out.
“Do you?”
Another telling pause. It sounds like she’s waiting for him to confess more. And, to be honest, there is more to confess. For all that Lucy is cleverer than him, Elgar is also not stupid. He knows that she doesn’t have a very high opinion of his social graces. And for all that he likes her, Lucy Piper, quite frankly, intimidates him.
She’s exactly the kind of woman that had made him a sweaty, nervous mess when he was a young geek. She’s self-assured, intelligent, speaks two languages, and sometimes seems to be sneering down her pert nose at him. He’d been frustrated and angry when women like Lucy overlooked him in favor of asshole jocks who treated them like garbage. He told himself that “nice guys finish last,” that women only wanted jerks, and then wrote a world where people like him, people who didn’t fit in, people like Kintyre Turn—who didn’t want to conform to what other people told him he should want—won the day. Where people like that got to be the hero, were free to behave however they liked, and got whatever they were entitled to have, because they strove for it. A world where women threw themselves at the Good Guys, and rewarded them with the sex, the servitude, the wifely submission that they deserved, simply by virtue of being Good Guys.
A world, Lucy had told him in the strongest language, and more than once, where being a woman completely sucked.
In the end, it turned out that Elgar had written the perfect romantic lead . . . he just hadn’t made him the main character. Women like Lucy Piper were looking for men like Lucy Piper: confident, generous, thoughtful, self-assured, compassionate. People who treated women like people instead of rewards for leveling up. People like Forsyth Turn.
Elgar knew this. Well, he knew it now. But it was sometimes difficult to relinquish old habits and prejudices. And if he was honest with himself, he’d admit that Forsyth Turn, his own creation, intimidated him, too.
Sometimes, it was hard not to feel like a slow child while trying to follow their rapid-fire, jargon-filled conversations. Sometimes, it even made him feel resentful. They did their best to explain when they caught him staring down into his cup—tea, wine, beer, or the strange liquors Forsyth kept bringing home, trying to find replacements for the nonsense ones Elgar had made up, which Forsyth missed terribly. But even that made Elgar feel stupid. No, not just stupid . . . puerile.
He was glad he’d already written all three books of the Shuttleborn trilogy, because there were days when just thinking about Lucy’s pursed frown of distaste made him snap his laptop closed and waste his work-time watching junk TV.
It makes it hard to write when you know that there are people in another world who literally suffered because of what you did, that there are people in this world who are disappointed with your every attempt. And as excited as Elgar is that Flageolet Entertainment has picked up the Kintyre Turn series and is in the midst of pre-production for the big television adaptation, he also secretly fears that if he has any hand at all in writing the scripts, those changes will affect Hain, Kintyre and Bevel, Wyndam and Pointe, Forsyth and Alis.
Initially, he’d asked to be present in the Writers’ Room, to work as the story consultant and maybe write an episode or two. Now, the most his agent has managed to get him to consent to is an agreement that he’ll read the scripts from home. He’ll send in notes and suggestions to keep the characters recognizable and the setting accurate, and otherwise remain hands-off.
He doesn’t dare do anything more.
And Lucy’s question—a simple, loaded “do you?”—makes all of this old self-loathing, resentment, and worry swirl into a hard ball behind his larynx. He swallows, trying to banish it back.
“Maybe I worry a little,” he says. “But I . . . I don’t want to waste every minute worrying, you know?”
Lucy sighs. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I get it. Look, I . . . I don’t think there’s anything more to this. I hope there isn’t, anyway. And you’re right. There’s no point in getting worked up if it’s nothing. It happened months ago. I mean, years might have passed over in Hain by now.”
“Is that how it works?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah?”
Lucy snorts. “I have no fucking clue.”
Elgar catches himself chortling, and presses his palm against the rain-cooled windowpane in front of him. The laughter feels good. Feels like it’s pummeling
