“Doesn’t it bother you,” Noemie asks in the signing line, running a hand along the book’s glossy cover, “not seeing your name on it?”
It did. At the beginning. But now there’s a sense of detachment that accompanies a book release. As a celebrity ghostwriter, I’m not hired to be anyone’s coauthor—I’m supposed to write from their point of view. To become them. My first author, a Bachelor contestant who infamously dumped the guy on national TV after he proposed, was an utter delight, and she still emails asking how I’m doing. But I quickly learned that wasn’t the norm. Because then there was Maddy, and the book I just finished for a TikTok-famous personal trainer with his own line of protein shakes that really stretches the definition of literature.
Maybe there’s some satisfaction in clutching these several hundred pages I churned out at record speed, a tangible conclusion to all those late nights and canceled plans. And yet I can also completely divorce myself from this book in a way that’s either great or terrible for my mental health. Maybe both.
“It’s not my book,” I say simply, taking another sip from my Maddy DeMarco–branded water bottle. It’s like, weirdly good water, and I’m not sure I want to know why.
The signing line crawls forward, people asking Maddy to pose for photos before they head off to pay at the register. I can’t fault any of them for loving her the way they do. They want to believe that changing their lifestyle can change their life—after all, it worked for her.
“Thanks for waiting with me,” I say, and Noemie’s eyes soften behind her tortoiseshell glasses, her cynical exterior cracking for a moment. “I know this isn’t your ideal Friday night.”
“Considering I spent last Friday explaining to a client why we couldn’t guarantee them a cover story in Time, this is a definite upgrade.” She’s still dressed in her PR professional best: tapered slacks, daisy-patterned peplum top, a blazer draped over her arm. Long dark hair straightened and frizz-free, because she’s not Noemie if she has even a single flyaway. Meanwhile, in my cords, faded Sleater-Kinney tee, and a black denim jacket that’s too warm for early September, I must look like I haven’t seen the sun since 1996. No vitamin D for me, thanks.
“Can’t argue with you there.” I pick at a speck of silver nail polish, a tell my cousin will be able to see right through. “And hey, the longer we’re here, the longer I can pretend everyone else isn’t at Wyatt’s housewarming.”
Noemie grimaces in this familiar way I’m never sure whether I learned from her or the other way around. Noemie Cohen-Laurent is both my only first cousin and my closest friend. We grew up on the same street, attended the same schools, and now even live in the same house, though she owns it and I’m paying a deeply discounted monthly rent.
We both studied journalism, starry-eyed about how we were going to change the world, tell the stories no one else was telling. The economy pushed us in different directions, and before we graduated, Noemie had already been hired full-time at the PR firm where she’d interned during her senior year.
“I’m guessing that means you decided not to go?” she says.
“I can’t do it. You can go if you want, but—”
Noemie cuts me off with a swift shake of her head. “Solidarity. Wyatt Torres is dead to me.”
My shoulders sag with relief. I haven’t wanted her to feel like she needs to pick a side, even if there’s no risk she’d pick his. Still, she’s the only one who knows what happened between us a few weeks ago: one incredible night after years of pining I thought was mutual, given the desperate way his hands roamed my body as we tumbled into bed. I’d helped him unpack his new apartment, and we were exhausted and tipsy and just seemed to fit, our bodies snapping
together in this natural, effortless way. Wyatt’s dark hair feathering across my stomach, tanned skin shivering where I touched him. The way he dug his nails into my back like he couldn’t bear to let me go.
But then came the Can we talk? text, and the confession, during said talk, that he wasn’t looking for a relationship right now. And I was a Relationship Girl, he said, with all the distaste usually reserved for that one person who replies-all on a cc’d email. He valued our friendship too much, and he didn’t want either of us to get hurt.
So I pretended I wasn’t.
“We would have been good together, though,” I say quietly, forcing my feet forward in line.
Noemie places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I know. I’m so sorry. We’ll have a much better time tonight, I promise. We’ll go back to the house and order way too much Indian food, because I know how you love being able to eat leftovers for five days afterward. And then we can watch people on Netflix making bad real estate decisions with partners they absolutely should not be with.”
Finally, it’s our turn, one of the booksellers beckoning us forward. Maddy’s smile has barely slipped, an impressive feat after all those photos.
“Hi,” I say, thrusting my copy forward with a trembling hand, which is only marginally embarrassing. I wrote pages and pages pretending to be this woman, and now that she’s three feet in front of me, I can barely speak. Someone take away my communication degree.
“Hi there,” she says brightly. “Who should I make it out to?”
“Chandler. Chandler Cohen.”
She squeezes one eye shut, as though trying to remember. Any moment now, it’ll ring a bell. We’ll laugh about her takedown of internet trolls in chapter four and roll our eyes at all the people-pleasing she used to do, documented in detail in chapter sixteen. “How do you spell that?”
“Oh—um,” I stammer, every letter in the English alphabet fleeing my mind at once. “Chandler . . . Cohen?” Maddy gives me a blank, expectant look.
No. It’s not possible, is it? That she wouldn’t even remember my name after all the back-and-forth? All her demands?
“You don’t know Chandler
—” Noemie starts to say, but I silence her with an elbow to the ribs.
Sure, I communicated mostly with Maddy’s team . . . but my name was on the contracts. The rough drafts. The endless email chains. I wrote this fucking book for her, and she has no idea who I am.
I must mumble out the spelling, but my vision blurs as she swoops her magenta sharpie over the title page, sliding in a bookmark and passing it back to me like a seasoned pro.
“Thank you,” I manage as Maddy waves us away with a sunshine grin.
Once we’re safely in the picture-book aisle, the one farthest from the stage, I let out a long, shaky breath. It’s fine. This is fine. Obviously, she wasn’t going to ask me to sign our book.
Her book.
Because that’s the whole point of a ghost—no one is supposed to be able to see me.
“You should have told her who you were,” Noemie says, one hand gripping her quilted Kate Spade and the other white-knuckling the water bottle. “I would have, if you hadn’t viciously attacked me.”
“It would have just made it more embarrassing.” I clutch the book tight to my chest because if I don’t, I might hurl it across the store. “Maybe she’s not great with names. She meets a lot of people. I’m sure she just gets . . . really busy girlbossing.”
“Right.” Noemie’s stance is still rigid. “Well, I’m still going to unfollow her.” And to prove it, she takes out her phone, only to have something else catch her attention. “Shit, it’s work. The wrong draft of a press release went out and the client is livid. I might have to . . .” She trails off, her fingers flying over the screen.
Every so often, it hits me that there are only two years between us, though Noemie’s life is wildly different from mine. When The Catch laid me off five years ago and eventually folded, unable to keep up with BuzzFeed and Vice and HuffPost, she was buying a house. When I was struggling to sell freelance articles about new local musicians and the evolution of Seattle’s downtown, she was juggling high-profile clients and contributing a respectable monthly amount to her 401(k). She’s twenty-nine to my thirty-one, but it’s almost shocking how much better at adulting she is.
Only two years, and yet sometimes it feels like I’ll never catch up.
“Go,” I say, nudging her with the book. “I get it.”
If I told her I needed her, she’d probably find a way to do both: comfort me and save her client. But most of the time, when work and anything else are fighting for Noemie’s attention, work wins.
“Only if you’re sure,” she says. “You want to go back home, fire up DoorDash, and save me a couple samosas for when I’m done?”
“I actually might stay
out a bit longer.”
She gives me a lingering glance, as though worried there’s something I’m not telling her. It’s the same way she looked at me when I learned about The Catch slashing its staff. My onetime dream job forcing me to find a new dream.
“Nome. I’m fine,” I say, with so much emphasis that it sounds more threatening than reassuring.
She gives me a tight hug. “I’m proud of you,” she says. “In case I didn’t say it before.” She did, when I turned in my draft and my revisions and then on the book’s release day, when she had to go into work early but had a spread of donuts and bagels waiting for me when I woke up. “You wrote and published a book. Two of them, in fact, with another on the way. Don’t let her take that away from you.”
I’m not sure I can put into words how much I love her in this moment, so I just hug her back and hope she knows. Clearly, I’m not the best at words today.
One great thing about this bookstore is that it has a bar, and I hate that on my way over, I have visions of Maddy sitting down next to me. I’d offer to buy her a drink and then tell her something that only someone intimately acquainted with Go Drink Some Water would know. She’d gasp, apologize, gush about how happy she is with the book. She’d confirm that all those months weren’t just a paycheck—they mattered.
Except this isn’t really about Maddy DeMarco at all.
It’s the bundle of self-worth tangled in the sheets on Wyatt’s bed, in the paychecks that don’t always arrive on time, in the lovely bedroom in my cousin’s lovely house that I’d never be able to afford on my own. It’s the persistent tapping at the back of my mind that sounds suspiciously like a clock, wondering if I picked the wrong career path and if it’s too late to start over. And if I’d even know how.
It’s that every time I try to move forward, something is waiting to tug me right back.
The two bartenders are immersed in what looks like a very serious conversation, so I have to clear my throat to get their attention. I order a hard cider that’s much too sweet, and before slipping Maddy’s book into my bag, I open it up to the title page.
If I weren’t already gutter-adjacent, it would sink me even deeper.
For Chandler Cone , it says in magenta ink. Drink up!
EMERALD CITY COMIC CON
At first, I intend to do exactly what the inscription tells me to: become heavily intoxicated, which is probably not what Maddy meant and also might not be possible with this too-sweet cider. I snap the traitorous book shut, letting out a sigh that draws the attention of the man a seat away from me.
I meet his gaze and give him an apologetic look, but instead of the judgmental frown I’m expecting, he nods toward my bottle of cider. “What are we celebrating?”
“The disintegration of my self-esteem, sponsored by my complete mistake of a career. And the funeral of a relationship that ended before it even began.” I lift the bottle and take a sip, trying not to wince. “It’s a wake, actually. I have a front-row seat to watch both those things implode. Spectacularly.” Or at least, Chandler Cone does.
“Those aren’t easy tickets to get.” He holds his hands together, then bows his head as though paying his respects. “Dearly beloved, we’re gathered here today to—”
In spite of everything, I burst out laughing. “I think that’s what you say at a wedding. Or at the beginning of a Prince song.”
“Ah shit, you’re right.” His mouth curves into a smile. “Good song, though.”
“Great song.”
In the most discreet way possible, I take a closer look at this stranger. I don’t think he was at the signing, but then again, the room was packed. He looks older than me, though probably not by much—auburn hair, shorter on the sides and floppy on top, graying a bit at the temples, which I discover in this moment is something I find very attractive. He’s in dark jeans and a casual black button-up, one sleeve unbuttoned at the wrist, as though he got distracted when he was putting it on, or maybe had a long day and the button simply gave up.
“I’m sorry, though,” he says. “About your work, and your relationship.”
I wave this off. “Thanks, but it’ll be okay. I think.” I hope.
I could easily
turn away, tell him to have a nice evening. Down my drink in silence and stumble home to takeout, trashy TV, and wallowing. I’ve never chatted someone up at a bar before—I’m usually too busy avoiding eye contact with other humans—but something about him compels me to keep talking.
Because full honesty: maybe my ego needs a little boost tonight.
“What about you?” I say, picking up my bottle and gesturing toward his glass. “You’re drinking alone because . . .”
When I trail off, I watch his face, catching a split-second flinch. It’s so brief, I’m not sure he’s aware he’s doing it—maybe I even imagined it. But then he collects himself. Seems to relax.
“Same as you. Career-related existential dread.” He motions to the pair of bartenders, dropping the volume of his voice. “I was going to head out twenty minutes ago, but then I got too invested in their personal lives.”
He taps a finger to his lips, and I strain to hear what the bartenders are saying.
“Those guinea pigs are not my responsibility. If you’re going to insist on keeping them in our apartment, you need to clean up after them.”
“You could at least call them by their names.”
“I refuse to call those little beasts Ricardo and Judith.”
“Just like you refused to do the dishes after that party you threw last week? The one with a build-your-own-chili-dog bar?”
“I want to call you out for eavesdropping, but I can’t blame you,” I say. “This is quality entertainment.”
“Right? Now I can’t leave until I know how it ends.” Then he raises an eyebrow, squinting at the water bottle I stupidly placed on the bar next to me. “Is there a reason your water bottle says . . . ‘Live Laugh Girlboss’?” He holds up his hands. “Not judging, just curious.”
“Oh, this? I’m part of a hydration-based MLM. I’m in really deep. They’ll be running the docuseries any day now.”
Without missing a beat, he calmly places his glass back down. Flicks his eyes around the bar. When he speaks again, it’s in a whisper. “Do I need to call someone for you?”
“Afraid it’s too late.” I give the water bottle a shake. “But if I can sell you a thousand of these babies, I might be able to get off with minimal prison time
”
“The thing is,” he says, drumming a couple fingertips on the bar, “I could probably find a use for three hundred. Maybe four. But I don’t know what I’d do with the rest of them.”
“You’d just have to find other people to sell them to. I could hook you up, give you all the training you need to become your very own boss.”
“I’m not falling for that one.” He’s grinning at me, his teeth a brilliant white. The longer I study him, the cuter he is. ...
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