By the time his plane touched down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Andrew had already had three drinks too many. Kimberly suggested they go straight to dinner to prep for the next day’s writer meeting.
They dined at the Chicago Cut Steakhouse and reviewed strategy for wooing the rumored-to-be-headstrong writer Jackie de Wulf. Kimberly asked that she be allowed to soften her up before Andrew swooped in to close the deal. Kimberly watched him closely as she cut into her porterhouse. “So how are things on the home front?”
“Fine,” Andrew said. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
Kimberly shrugged. “I don’t know. You just seem a little distracted.”
“Just thinking about the client.”
“Oh. Too bad.” Kimberly smiled coyly and glanced down at her low-cut neckline. “I was hoping I might be the cause of your distraction.”
Andrew looked away, at a loss for how to respond.
Kimberly seemed to sense she’d raised his temperature. “Andrew, just know that . . . if you ever need someone to talk to, I have pretty good ears.”
Andrew struggled with an uneasy mixture of flattery and guilt. He shouldn’t be having this conversation.
Kimberly smiled warmly, raised her wineglass. “To success.”
They touched glasses, and Kimberly’s eyes lingered on Andrew until he was forced to look away.
Andrew and Kimberly arrived at the Peninsula Hotel by taxi just after ten and checked in. As they exited the elevator on the seventh floor, Kimberly invited him to her room for a nightcap and to review their strategy for the next day’s meeting. “Come on, it’s still early.”
Andrew yawned. “I’d better take a rain check. I want to be sharp for our meeting.”
Kimberly nodded, but he could tell she was disappointed. “All right, then,” she said. “If you change your mind, you know my room number.”
Andrew watched her head down the hallway toward her room and drew a deep breath. He could no longer deny it: he was teetering on a precarious cliff.
And Kimberly would love to pull him over the edge.
When Andrew got to his room, he checked his cell phone and had a voice mail waiting from Beth.
“Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to make sure you got there okay. I’m going to bed, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow after your meeting.”
Andrew thought about calling and waking her up, then decided against it. She was still mad at him, that much he could tell. But at least she called.
Andrew and Kimberly joined their prospective client for lunch the next day in a booth at Lou Mitchell’s on West Jackson Boulevard. Jackie de Wulf was only twenty-seven, but her jaded cynicism made her seem much older. She was brash and shrill and knew everybody in the joint by name, including the homeless guys who lingered outside.
Jackie was not one to mince words and quickly made it apparent she was not the least bit impressed that a hotshot New York literary agent had flown to see her two days before Christmas. She expected no less for a writer with her gifts.
“I don’t trust you agent types,” she said. “Especially ones that look like you two.”
“Oh? How do we look?” Kimberly said.
“He looks like a snake oil salesman, and you look like the snooty girl who blackballed me from the sorority.”
Kimberly laughed. “You think I’m the sorority type?”
“You got the face, the bod, the hair. You saying I’m wrong?”
“Dead wrong,” Kimberly said. Andrew worried that an epic catfight was about to derail the meeting and their chances of signing the hot, young writer.
“I was in college less than a year,” Kimberly said. “And then I was arrested.”
“Arrested?” Jackie said. “For what? Too much hairspray?”
Kimberly smiled. “Resisting arrest. It was during a sit-in to protest the Iraq war. I punched a cop who happened to grab me a little too low on my anatomy. I have a pretty good right hook, and he lost a couple of teeth. For some reason, college didn’t want me back after that.”
Andrew gaped at Kimberly. Something she’d failed to mention in the job interview.
Jackie de Wulf took Kimberly’s measure, and for a moment, Andrew wasn’t sure which way it was going to turn. Then the writer slowly nodded and looked over at Andrew. “And how’d you come to work for this suit?”
“I work with him, not for him,” Kimberly said. “And don’t let the Armani and pretty-boy look fool you. Andrew’s a lot like me, not afraid to kick some butt when he has to. You’d be a fool if you didn’t sign with him. Sorry to be so blunt.”
Jackie sat back, a glimmer of a smile creeping into her eyes. Apparently Kimberly’s tough-girl gamble might have paid off.
Andrew raised his wineglass. “To the girl with the killer right hook.” It was late evening, and Andrew and Kimberly shared a candlelit table for two back at the Peninsula’s Pierrot Gourmet. They clinked glasses of red wine. “I cannot believe you reeled her in with that cockamamie story.”
Andrew raised his eyebrows. Who was this woman sitting across from him?
“Okay,” she said. “I fudged a little bit. But it worked, right?”
Andrew grinned. “Sure did. You’re going to make a great agent someday.”
“So I guess this means you’re happy I came along,” Kimberly said.
“Of course.” Andrew took a sip of his wine. “I couldn’t have signed her without you.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“What do you mean?”
Kimberly’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I think you know.”
Andrew swallowed hard. He had to get out of there. He could almost feel himself clinging to the cliff edge, with his fingers slipping.
“I think I’d better call it a night,” he said. He drained his wineglass and slid his chair back from the table.
Kimberly leaned back in her chair and slowly nodded. “Me too,” she said.
But her eyes said something else entirely.
An hour later Andrew sat on the edge of his hotel room bed in his pajamas and robe, cell phone in hand. He thought about Kimberly in her room down the hall and felt a wave of relief. He’d done the right thing; he’d dodged a bullet. Tomorrow they’d go back to New York, and the first day back after the holidays he’d request to have her transferred to another agent. Why tempt fate?
He wanted to call Beth to share the day’s good news, but how could he tell her about signing the client without mentioning Kimberly? What would he say? Should he just tell her the truth? She was already mad at him; a confession of his deceitfulness would only make it worse.
He sighed and laid the phone on the nightstand. She was probably already asleep. Maybe he should wait until morning. Then again, he hadn’t talked to her all day. She’d be worried.
A knock on the door stirred him from his thoughts. He opened it to find Kimberly standing there, dressed in a Chicago Bears sweatshirt and shorts.
“Kimberly? You’re still up?” Andrew said.
“Too excited to sleep.” She held up a thick, dog-eared manuscript. “Andrew, I think I’ve found our next client.”
“You brought submission manuscripts with you?”
“A few,” she said. “No point in wasting time.”
Andrew couldn’t help being impressed. Whatever else this woman might be, she was certainly a go-getter. “Okay . . .”
“His name is Calvin Wright—the author, not the character,” she said. “He’s African American. It’s his first novel, and I think he’s really, really good. Not just salable—well, that too—but actually good.” She stepped into the room and launched into an animated summary of the plotline.
Fifteen minutes later, when she had barely taken a breath, Andrew raised a hand to stop her. “Hold on,” he said. He went to the minibar and opened the fridge door. “What are you drinking?”
“What do you think of the story?” Kimberly said.
Andrew left her hanging for a moment. “I think it has potential.”
Kimberly beamed. “In that case, I’ll have a soda water on the rocks.” Andrew took out the soda water, plopped it on the counter. He checked the ice bucket. Empty.
“Need to make an ice run. Be right back.” Andrew paused before heading out the door. “I really do like it,” he said.
As he walked down the carpeted hotel corridor, ice bucket in hand, Andrew imagined Kimberly back in his suite, checking her hair in the mirror. Her motive for showing up in his room was not solely to talk about a potential new client, and they both knew it.
He found the ice machine alcove at the end of the hallway, filled the bucket, then leaned his head on the machine.
Might as well stall his return for as long as possible.
Back in Carnegie Hill, Beth was curled up in a chair by the window, her favorite cozy blanket draped over her, her fingers wrapped around a mug of hot cocoa. Why hadn’t Andrew called her all day? The digital clock on the lamp table read 11:23. Next to it sat a framed wedding photo. Not the official one, but an outtake: Beth shoving a piece of wedding cake in Andrew’s mouth and missing to the north, smearing his nose. They were both laughing, thoroughly relishing the carefree moment.
Beth took a sip of cocoa and mustered a smile. She had just let him walk out without so much as a kiss good-bye. What if he were in an accident? What if his plane went down? What if she never saw him again, never got the chance to make things right?
Beth picked up her cell phone and stared at it for a moment as if expecting Siri to tell her what to do. She shouldn’t have to be the one to reach out. He should be calling her. But Beth had long since come to realize that she was always the one to make the first overture.
She breathed a pained sigh and dialed his number.
“Hello?”
The voice was female, and for a moment, Beth thought she’d dialed the wrong number. But that was impossible. Andrew’s cell was programmed into her phone.
Maybe he’d lost his phone somewhere and some stranger had answered, hoping to discover the rightful owner. But no, the voice was familiar. Beth had heard that voice many times before when she’d called him at the office.
Kimberly.
Beth yanked the phone away from her ear and stared at it as she heard the voice repeat, “Hello?” Kimberly had to know it was Andrew’s wife calling. She had to be looking at Beth’s face, smiling up at her from Andrew’s phone.
Beth hung up and tossed the phone away as if it were radioactive. Kimberly knew who it was. She knew, and she didn’t care.
Which had to mean that Andrew didn’t care either. About Beth, about their life together, about . . .
About anything that mattered.