The Dead Romantics (15)

“But,” he added, “third person, please. The first-person kind of threw me off,” he admitted with a laugh.

So, I took a deep breath and I started. “She knew she would see a ghost when the crows came.”

And that was how I told him about the part of my life I couldn’t.

I told him about the ghosts of my childhood, and how rare they really were—some years without any at all. I’d seen a few in the city, but I never stopped to ask if they wanted anything. I didn’t really have it in me anymore, not after what I went through in Mairmont. I wanted to get away from that life—that part of me. And the best way to do it was to ignore them.

I never should have told him anything. I shouldn’t have even pretended that they were a story.

My younger sister, Alice, always said I was too gullible. Too generous. Too like the tree in that picture book, who kept giving and giving until there was nothing left. She said one day it would come back to bite me in the ass.

Lee Marlow did like to bite, but never my ass, and anyway I loved him, and he loved me, and we had a brownstone in Park Slope and he kissed me with such intensity that any echo of doubt fell silent between our lips. I might have been that weird girl who saw ghosts, but to him I was perfect.

Once he said, while we were out to dinner together and I had just told him about the time I had been woken up by the ghost of the recently deceased mayor, “You should try to publish this story. You might just make millions off it.”

“I tried publishing once. It didn’t work out. And I definitely did not make millions.”

He had barked a laugh. “Well, that’s because you wrote a romance.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, bunny, you know you can do better.”

I faltered. “Better . . . ?”

“No one’s remembered for a romance, bunny. If you want to be a good writer, you gotta make something that lasts.”

I didn’t know what to say. Honestly, I should’ve said something—anything—to rebuke him, but then if I did, he would ask how I knew, and I’d have to tell him that I ghostwrote for Ann Nichols. By then, we were two years into our relationship, and he knew I was always writing something, but I’d been sneaky enough to keep him oblivious. So I pressed on a smile and said, “I don’t know. I kind of like keeping this story to myself.”

“Someone else’ll beat you to that story if you don’t write it.”

Maybe if I’d pressed him, he’d have given up the ghost, too.

For the record, he never told me about the book he was writing. He didn’t tell me until it sold at auction for a million dollars—exactly what he said mine would sell for. It sold to his own publishing house. Where he was a senior editor. And when I read the deal report, I realized it didn’t tell me anything.


Gilligan Straus, at Faux Publishing, has acquired in a twelve-house auction world rights to Faux senior editor Lee Marlow’s untitled debut, and a second novel. William Brooks of AngelFire Lit brokered the deal.



And Lee wouldn’t tell me, either.

“It’s a book, bunny,” he laughed. “Be happy for me!”

“Of course I am,” I replied, because I was silly—so silly. I should’ve been happy for him. Ecstatic. It was a life-changing deal! He could quit his job, write full-time, do all of the things he’d told me he wanted to but couldn’t because work weighed him down.

And now he was successful.

I should’ve been happy—no, I was happy.

Genuinely.

Then one night, a few months after the deal, he left his computer open while he went to go pick up his laundry. I’d never snooped before—I never wanted to. I trusted him.

I was a fool.

Because he’d taken what he’d said to me to heart. That if I didn’t write the story that I wove for him, then someone else would.

I just didn’t think . . . I didn’t think it’d be him.

Three years and a day after I met Lee Marlow, I realized that I had gotten our story all wrong. I was the main character, but not in my own story.

I was the main character in his.

I was sewn into the pages, into every word, laced into every sentence. The book he sold was a book about my family’s funeral home. About the stories I’d told him. The ghosts. The funerals. The graves. The bullies who picked on me and called me Wednesday. Who poured ink on my hair. The memories of my parents dancing in the parlor late at night, when they thought their kids had gone to bed. Of me and my sister fighting over the urn of our grandmother, and the ashes scattering all over the floor. Of the stray cat named Salem who must’ve been hit by a car at least once a year and never died—until cancer took him fourteen years later.

It was all there. All of my secrets. All of my stories.

All of me.

He used me as inspiration, and then he just used me.

He used the book deal to quit his job, become a full-time writer, and when I confronted him about the story, he said to me—and I’ll remember it until the day I die—“Bunny, you can still write your romance.”

“That’s what you think I’m mad about?”

“You weren’t going to write this book.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Bunny, c’mon, aren’t you being a little unfair?” He had tried to soothe me as I elbowed past him on the way down the steps of our brownstone. His brownstone.