The Decoy Girlfriend(4)

“No, that’s okay.” The girl tosses it on the nearest shelf. “Someone can put it back in the bin later.”

Stunned, Freya follows its trajectory with wide eyes. It takes her a moment to connect what she saw with the casual dismissal, and when she does, it punches through her mind like fog.

“You’re nicer than I thought you would be,” the older teen comments. “Way more down-to-earth. You know, considering.”

Um, considering what?

Freya stares at both girls in confusion. “Pardon?”

“Mom! Can you come take our picture?” The older girl flashes Freya a grin. “My friends won’t believe that I met the real Mandi Roy without a photo. This is seriously so unreal.”

Freya’s stomach feels scooped out. “Yeah. Unreal.”





CHAPTER TWO



Well, that cemented today as an official shit day. And it’s not even over yet. The only silver lining is that no one was around to witness Freya’s utter humiliation posing as Mandi, forced to share the girls’ annoyance that they couldn’t buy the books they wanted because no one was working the register.

The second the girls and their mom left, she dug around to find a former employee’s name tag to wear and slipped her blue reading glasses back on. She is absolutely not getting mistaken for Mandi again.

Compounding Freya’s run of bad luck, not long after finishing her Cup Noodles, now bloated and cold, an email notification pops up on her laptop screen. There’s only one person it can be, only one person who even contacts her through her author-specific email anymore—her literary agent, Alma Hayes.


Hi, Freya!

Checking in on how the book is coming along. I know it’s part of your process to keep your first draft close to your chest, but your editor is champing at the bit to read! It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be done. I’m more than happy to run my eyes over it for some light edits, too. Let me know how I can help. We’re all still so excited!



The email is light and breezy, but to Freya, Alma’s subtext is clear: You’re out of time, and soon your contract won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. And just in case your first draft is absolute crap, I need to read it first and potentially run interference before your editor’s poor eyeballs have to suffer it.

Okay, that’s probably the imposter syndrome talking, but still. An overdue book is not a good look.

Freya can do this. She has to do this.

Maybe it’s time to go old-school; in the past, handwriting on scraps of paper sometimes helped unclog her creativity. Inspired, she seizes a ballpoint pen from a pink moth-printed Etsy mug and poises it over the back of an envelope she ripped into earlier.

Freya should use one of her numerous notebooks—she has enough to open her own stationery store, her mom always said, though it never stopped her from buying yet another pretty one for her daughter—but Freya can’t bear to deface them with scribbles of ink. If she was putting pen to paper, then her words had better be the kind of stuff worthy of permanence. Nothing less than perfect. A Final Thought, not something she would want to cross out later, marring the clean, crisp pages and filling her with guilt.

Freya presses the pen into the envelope, willing the words to flow, but her brain is full of soft static.

Why is writing so hard? She wishes she could just fast-forward to the point in her life when everything is okay and her word count doesn’t make her want to cry. Clenching the pen between her fingers, she lets the ink swirl mindlessly, daydreaming about how she wished her interaction with those teenagers had gone: that they recognized her for her; for her book, which meant something to readers, once upon a time.

Stori’s fingers, glittering with stacked silver rings, snap in front of Freya’s slack face. “Earth to Freya! Please tell me that dreamy look on your face means you were lost in thought while working on your book. Or daydreaming about a hottie,” she adds thoughtfully. “Sam Heughan comes to mind . . .”

This joking around is kinda their thing. Last week it had been Regé-Jean Page of Bridgerton fame. Today, apparently, Stori was obsessed with Outlander.

Freya grins. “Natalie Dormer, actually. And I just wrote the best paragraph of my life, I’ll have you know,” she informs her, forgetting that Stori is blessed with the preternatural gift to see through any lie.

Lofting a perfectly arched eyebrow, Stori tugs back Freya’s laptop screen, revealing a blank page. “You just deleted the best paragraph of your life, you mean, Queen of Delete.”

Freya snorts. “Only if ‘best’ is synonymous for ‘garbage.’ And I know you’re teasing me, but if that’s the only royal title I get in my lifetime, I’ll take it.”

“Freya,” Stori groans. She sounds as resigned as Alma. In a second, she’s going to repeat one of the writerly quotes she picked up from the authors who do events at her shop.

Here it comes: “If you want the joy of having written, you must first write. You’ve been staring into space and doodling your signature on the back of that envelope for two straight minutes with your usual thirsty-for-Henry-Cavill smile on your face.”

“What?” Freya sputters. “I wasn’t—”

She glances down. Ah. Yes, she was.

In her defense, blank white envelopes are just begging to be scrawled upon and throwing away perfectly useful paper is just wasteful.