The Decoy Girlfriend(15)
“And don’t forget getting us in,” adds Ava Capshaw with a giggle, doing a little tipsy twirl in the strawberry-pink baby-doll dress that got a slight eyebrow raise from the bouncer. She’s easily the most modestly dressed person in here. “Thanks for having Mandi Roy’s faaaaace.”
“Shhh!” Freya hisses, casting a glance around them. “This is the last time.”
“You always say that,” Mimi says with a wink. “And it never is.”
The lie comes easily. “Well, now that the writing is flowing, I don’t need the high anymore.”
“Proud of you, Freya,” says Steph. “And I’m knocking this one back for Stori—who sadly couldn’t join us—for drumming up a full house at her amazing bookshop and organizing the best event I’ve had all year.”
“We’re supposed to be toasting you!” Freya protests, bumping Steph’s shoulder with her own while throwing up a mental thank-you to all the gossip sites that listed this place as the hottest It Spot, because despite what her friends think, she’s barely stepped outside Stori’s neighborhood the whole time she’s been here.
“Yeah, Steph, let us have this,” says Hero—from Shakespeare, not Fiennes—Crane with a laugh. “When was the last time Kirkus called any of us a ‘tour de force to be reckoned with’?”
“Or how about ‘an auto-buy author at the top of her game’?” chimes in Ava. “?‘An utter delight from the first page to the last page’?”
Mimi taps her chin, pretending to think, showing off nude almond nails with just a hint of sparkle. “Oh, that’s right. That would be never.”
“?‘Scorching, sizzling, spicy.’?” Hero recites the words like she’s reading them off a Google search. She blinks, ignoring Steph’s groan. “They’re really running out of ways to say you write the best high-heat sex scenes in the biz, huh.”
Freya grins, sipping her champagne. “Don’t forget that reviewer who said Steph wrote the most satisfying climax she’d ever read and swore on national TV that’s how she and her husband got pregnant.”
Steph huffs. “Okay, now I know you’re trying to embarrass me.”
Mimi giggles. “If that was ever in doubt, we weren’t doing a very good job.”
“Okay, can we talk about how cringey it is that men say ‘We’re pregnant’? Like they go through even a minute of the agony of their body changing?” Ava makes a face. “I can’t believe I married a man who thinks that is in any way an appropriate way to make a birth announcement. Twice.” She pats her still unnoticeable baby bump before reaching for her mocktail. “Maybe the third time’s the charm and I’ve successfully purged the phrase from his vocabulary.”
“Wouldn’t bet on it,” teases Steph. “Jonah’s a giant dork.”
Ava sighs in pretend defeat. “You’re right, so I won’t even gasp in outrage.”
Mimi’s thirty-two and went through a zen Mother Earth–like pregnancy last year, reveling in the size of her belly and glowing like a goddess, no Instagram filter required. When she’s not writing bestselling middle-grade fantasy-adventure series, she runs a popular parenting blog.
On the other hand, this is Ava’s third with her high school sweetheart, and she’s borne none of her pregnancies with grace, swearing each one will be her last as she screams for the epidural she always thinks she won’t need. She’s Freya’s age, but she’s already a whole adult in a way Freya feels she never will be.
Ava never makes it a secret how impossible it is for her to write book-club women’s fiction with two kids under four. She’s always run ragged, barely squeaking by on her deadlines. Last year, the turnaround for her copyedits was so tight that Mimi and Hero split the pages between them while Steph and Freya took over her social media promo.
At some point or another, they’ve all leaned on the writing group for help. So why is it like pulling teeth for Freya to be honest with them about her—oh lord, even saying this hurts—writer’s block?
“Freya, you’ve barely touched your drink,” says Mimi. “Everything . . . okay?”
Four pairs of eyes slide from the flute held loosely in Freya’s hand to her face.
The implication is obvious, especially after Ava’s segue.
“So not pregnant!” Freya yelps. “If I was, don’t you think I would have led with that?”
And the thing is, she would. These girls are her sisters, her family. They found one another through Twitter pitch contests, critique-partner matchups, and fangirling over sneak-peek snippets, Spotify playlists, and dream casts of their characters. They made it through the query trenches together, sharing solidarity screenshots of agent form rejections, impersonal batch rejections, and this close passes so specifically brutal they made them want to quit their daydreams.
The only thing stopping them was one another. Their strength, their support. It’s held them together like superglue through Freya’s grief when her mom died; the breakdown of Mimi’s first marriage and the IVF struggles during her second; Hero’s gender-affirming breast implants; Ava’s book-promo burnout and gargantuan to-do lists in her too-short days; Steph’s growing pains as she founded a mentorship group for new writers at the same time she was getting her farm-animal sanctuary off the ground.