Her Perfect Life Page 22

  He stared at all those spines on his shelf: sixty-six. It was like seeing them all for the first time. All those hours, days, weeks—they were all right here in front of him. This was the physical manifestation of his marriage to Clare, the evidence of it. Not photographs, not mementos or trinkets from trips, not memories of a life spent together. It was sixty-six books.

  Of fiction.

  He looked down at the book he held in his hands, her last book, number sixty-seven. “Which of these things is not like the other?” he whispered to himself.

  “Simon?”

  He turned and saw Eileen, looking exhausted and life blown, standing in his doorway. “Come in,” he said, turning back to his shelf. “I’ve just been contemplating the meaning of my existence. Not in the ways I was contemplating it last night, so don’t worry.” When she didn’t immediately respond, he turned to look at her. She was just standing there, staring into the void. “Eileen?” he asked. “Everything okay?”

  Her eyes shifted and met his. “Yes…no. I guess I’m doing the same…contemplating the meaning of my existence.”

  “How’d the call go?”

  She shrugged and walked into the room. “Fine. Weird. I don’t really have any idea, but I think he knows I know. Or at least, he suspects I might. He wants to talk when I get home.” She lowered herself into one of the armchairs in front of his desk.

  “Do you know what you’ll do? Do you think you’ll really forgive him?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea. I don’t even know if that would be possible.”

  He lowered his feet to the hardwood floor and came down off the top of his desk, moving around to the front so he could sit in the armchair next to hers. He handed her Clare’s book. “There is something about this book. I feel like the answers I’m looking for are here, but I’m not seeing it clearly.”

  She turned the book over in her hands, ran her fingers over the book’s description and quoted praise. Halfway down, her fingers stopped. “Donna Mehan?” Eileen looked up at Simon with questions in her eyes. “She wrote a blurb for A Perfect Life?” she asked, pointing to the quoted text. “I thought, after what happened in Brooklyn, they hated each other now?”

  He knit his brows. He hadn’t ever understood how the praise from Donna had come to be for this book. “As far as I know, they did. When the finished book released, and I saw that…I never got a straight answer from either Clare or her editor. Only that Clare had reached out to Donna personally with an advanced copy of the book. Apparently Donna read the book and well…” He shrugged. “As you can see, she had nothing but gushing praise for the work.”

  “Her old roommate?”

  “The same.”

  “Did they make up or something?”

  “I don’t really know. Actually, that’s what I’ve been sitting here thinking about. She is my wife, my most successful client. I’ve lived with her for sixteen years. Her whole life, as far as I know it—” He pointed to the shelves in front of them. “That’s it. Right there. It’s what we talked about. It’s what we planned about. It’s what we ate, slept, breathed. For the most part, anyway.” He turned and met Eileen’s eyes. “I have no idea if she made up with the one person on the planet I would have said was her mortal enemy. But now that I think about it, I’m not sure that how they felt about each other would really have anything to do with Donna’s reviews. Was she mad at Clare way back? Absolutely. But did Donna hold that grudge all these years and use her literary platform to take a public dig at Clare’s work every so often? I don’t think so. I think Donna really did hate all this.” He swept his hand across the span of shelves in front of them. “But having read her response to this book”—he nodded at A Perfect Life in Eileen’s hand—“it makes me believe that her criticism was always her honest opinion about the work, not Clare.”

  “And this book is really so different from Clare’s others?”

  “Completely. From the premise to the point of view, thematic elements, pacing, character development…it’s just an altogether different sort of book from her others. There are elements to Clare’s other works that her fans have come to love and expect, their commercial appeal, heroes and heroines to root for, tears that lead to happy endings. These are the reasons Clare topped the Forbes highest-earning author charts for the last six years. People all over the world loved to escape into her worlds, safe in the knowledge that they would emerge from the other side feeling like they had just lived a life that is more exciting, more colorful, more emotionally terrifying and uplifting than anything they ever find between their nine-to-five and doing the dishes after dinner.”

  Eileen smiled and nodded. “I remember that much about them. Back when I used to read them, they were a great escape.”

  Simon nodded. “But this?” He put his finger on the book. “Her typical fans are mostly hating it, or feeling ambivalent at best. Too depressing. Too real. Too literary.” He scoffed. “So she pleased the Donna Mehans of the world and alienated all her bread and butter.”

  Eileen opened the book to the first page of the first chapter. “Why do you think she wrote it?” she asked him.

  Simon thought about her question for several seconds. “I’m not sure. To prove she could? To shut Donna up, or impress her? Maybe she just got tired of what she was writing and wanted to do something different. Any of that could be true.”

  “But you think it’s something else.”

  He stood up and walked over to the shelves that held all Clare’s other books. He studied their spines, as if some obvious clue could be deciphered from those sideways titles. “It’s just a feeling. Like, everything changed for Clare when she started working on that book. And I don’t just mean her writing, although that was completely different as well.”

  “Different how?”

  “Well, the pace for one. Like I said, she typically churned out five or six books a year. But when she started working on that one, it took her over a year to get even the first draft finished enough to send to her editor. Then she agonized for months on end over revisions. They almost didn’t make her deadline date because Clare kept insisting on changes—minor stuff too. And the movie? Jesus, the script writer was working off one of the earliest drafts, and the whole production got the green light early so the movie release could coincide with the book release. She was pissed with me for weeks for allowing the movie rights to be sold off so quickly. She had always been indifferent about all the Hollywood stuff before. So, things had been tense between us for a long time, but when I think back…it all started right around the time she first began working on it.”

  He turned and faced his sister-in-law. “Which makes me wonder, What was the trigger for that book? For the change?”

  “Can you remember what was happening for her then? Anything unusual? Does she have any friends you could ask?”

  He scoffed and shook his head. “Friends? Not that I’m aware of anyway. She has people who work for her. I’m not sure she’d have called them friends. The only other living thing that was close to Clare…” He stopped.

  “What is it?” Eileen stood up from her chair.

  “I didn’t even think about…but surely that wouldn’t have been it. Right around the time she started writing A Perfect Life, I’m almost certain it was before, Clare came home from visiting your mother in the city, and she found Charlie dead in the road, right in front of the house. Clare, she was a mess, and I was in New York for editor meetings. She blamed herself because in a rush she forgot to close the garage door. She was convinced she ran him over herself.”

  “Oh, God! I remember him from Christmas, such a sweet dog. And Clare was so crazy about him. She must have been heartbroken.”

  “It was horrible. I don’t think she ever really got over that. Finding him that way. Henry told me later that he couldn’t pull her away. She just knelt out there in the road, staring down at his litt
le body. Henry said it was like she was in shock. He almost called 911, he was so worried about her. But she eventually snapped out of it, picked Charlie up herself, and carried him to the backyard. Henry offered to take care of it, but she insisted she would handle it herself and sent him home for the day.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She got a shovel out of the shed and dug a little grave for him, right near the blackberry bushes on the south side of the lawn. The next day she ordered a small, custom headstone made for him. It’s still out there.”

  Eileen sighed and looked like she was thinking all this over. “I know it’s very sad, but do you really think…I mean, honestly, that how she felt about her dog would be enough…?”

  “To send her over the edge? No, not really. But it is the most obvious thing I can think of that was a very big deal to her at the time. When I got home from New York two days later, she still hadn’t left her study. She slept on the couch in there and ate what little food there was in her mini fridge until I got home. And she stayed in there for the whole next week. It made me practically crazy. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I even went and got another puppy, from the exact same breeder Charlie had come from. She was furious with me, wouldn’t even look at it. Told me she didn’t ever want another dog again. So yes, it was traumatic, but I don’t believe Clare, even with all her eccentricities, would be driven to suicidal thoughts simply because her dog had died…even if she really thought it was her fault.”

  “But?” Eileen asked. “Something was different.”

  “Yes. I mean, she was always reclusive, but she completely withdrew. From me, from her editors, from her fans. She holed herself up in that room and wrote that book in the span she would normally take to write ten. I don’t understand it. Any of it. And I need to. I can’t shake this feeling, like somehow I missed something, something that could have saved her if I’d just been able to see it.”

  “Simon, you can’t possibly think—”

  “Can’t I? With all that change in her…and she writes a fucking book where the main character kills herself in the end? I am her agent, her husband…” He shook his head and felt the hot ball of grief building at the back of his throat again. “Why didn’t I see it?”

  Eileen looked down at the book in her hands. “You said she didn’t have any real friends. But she used to.”

  He didn’t follow what she was saying.

  “Donna Mehan,” Eileen said. “She lived with Clare for over five years, and whatever may have happened to drive them apart, they were once friends. And now, Donna did this for Clare.” She held up the book. “She might know something. If Clare was in contact with her, she might be able to help us figure this out.”

  “What? You think I should email her?”

  “No,” Eileen said, reaching for the phone on his desk. “I think you should call her. Right now.” She lifted the receiver off its cradle and held it out to him.

  He didn’t move. Call Donna Mehan? “I can’t do that,” he blurted.

  “Why not?”

  He scoffed. “She’s…Donna Mehan.”

  “And my sister, your wife, was Clare Collins. You want to get closer to your why? Start with what small clues we have.”

  “Even if I wanted to, it’s not like I just have her num—”

  “What?” she asked him, still holding the receiver.

  “I don’t have her number, but I do know her agent.”

  In two quick steps, he stood at his desk and was taking the phone from Eileen before he had a chance to think this through or change his mind. Eileen was right. What the hell was he thinking? Everything was turned to chaos in his world. The old rules of professional etiquette did not apply here. He didn’t care if he needed to hunt down the Queen of England to get the answers he wanted; he would find a way and do it. He put the hardline receiver down and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. In ten seconds he was scrolling through his hundreds of contacts until he landed on Susan Gomes, Donna’s agent. He had both her office and cell numbers. He touched the cell and switched his phone to speaker so Eileen could listen in.

  “What should I say?” he asked Eileen as the phone began to ring.

  Eileen shrugged. “Just ask if—”

  “This is Susan Gomes,” the voice from his cell phone suddenly announced.

  “Susan, hi,” he jumped in, still not sure of exactly how he was going to approach this call, explain why he needed what he wanted. “It’s Simon Reamer.”

  “Simon?” Susan asked, her shock evident. “Oh, God…I’m so sorry.”

  He closed his eyes. Everyone already knew everything. The whole publishing world would be in shock over what Clare had done. There was no need to explain anything to anyone. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’m calling because I need to get hold of Donna. Clare recently reached out to her.”

  “For the blurb request—I remember.”

  “I’d like to speak to her. See if she knows anything.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, and Simon imagined Susan was weighing this request, determining the appropriateness of it and how she would go about meeting it. “I’ll call her cell right now. Is this a good number for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll let her know you want to speak with her about Clare and give her your number.”

  “Of course.” Even in a situation like this, there was no way Susan was going to violate the privacy of her biggest client. “Just please…let her know…I really need to speak to her.” His desperation and vulnerability colored his every word.

  “I will. And again, my deepest condolences,” she finished and hung up.

  He laid his phone down on the desk, ignoring the streams of text message and email alerts that had been pouring in since the news broke about Clare. He couldn’t imagine ever dealing with any of it. He would ask his assistant to go through it all and make the appropriate responses later in the week.

  “Do you think she’ll call back?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. The last time I saw Donna was at that big release party for Clare’s fifth book.”

  “I was there,” Eileen said. “I wonder if I met her.”

  “Maybe. Things were pretty ugly between—”

  His phone rang loudly, echoing off the solid wood desk. It was a New York number but not someone from his contacts. He tapped the answer and speaker icons. “Hello, this is Simon.”

  “It’s Donna. How can I help?” she asked.

  Her sincerity and urgency were obvious. Whatever harsh words and flaming reviews had been exchanged between Donna and his wife in the past, he could tell Donna wasn’t giving any of it a moment’s thought right now.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for calling us back so quickly.”

  “Us?” she asked.

  “Yes, I hope you don’t mind, but I have you on speaker. Clare’s sister, Eileen, is here too.”

  “Eileen? Yes, I remember you from that release party Clare had.” Her sigh came through the speaker. “I really am so sorry, for your whole family. I still can’t believe this has happened.”

  It was a nice way of putting it, he thought. Clare’s suicide was something that has happened. Like Clare had only suffered an avoidable accident instead of willingly pointing a 9mm handgun at her chest and blowing her heart out.

  “Simon? Did I lose you?” Donna asked.

  “No, I’m sorry…I’m just…”

  “We were hoping you might be able to help us.” Eileen leaned closer to the phone on the desk between them.

  “I can try,” Donna said. “What do you need?”

  Eileen looked at him, unsure of what to say. He didn’t know either.

  “Well, this might sound strange, so bear with us. We’ve been trying to figure out, well, to be frank, why Clare would do this. And nothing makes any sense, bu
t we can’t ignore how different her last book was, especially the ending.” His voice cracked a little. He took a breath to steady himself. “And I know you’re familiar with some of her work—”

  “All of it,” Donna interrupted.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked.

  “I’m very familiar with all of Clare’s books. I’ve read every one. And the ones I reviewed, I read at least twice.”

  He and Eileen met each other’s eyes. “What?” she mouthed.

  “Um…okay, I guess that really surprises me,” Simon finally said. He could add that, given the mostly negative reviews over the years, he didn’t really think Donna Mehan was a fan of Clare’s books, but figured he should leave that out since he was asking for her help now. “But I know she spoke with you about the blurb, and we were wondering if you could let us know if you had any insights into… I don’t really know how to put this, but basically into what Clare might have been thinking lately? I know that sounds—”

  “It doesn’t sound weird. Obviously something big happened for her, I mean for her to… I’m sorry, are you okay if I just speak plainly? And by plainly I really mean blunt like a hammer? Because I actually do have some thoughts, but given the current situation, and also how the both of you are likely feeling right now, what I have to say will probably come off as indelicate at best.”

  A panic of nerves broke loose inside him. When he had called, he half expected for Donna to either not respond at all or give him a verbal shrug. Sorry, I have no idea. She knew something, something that would maybe confirm his worst fears—he was a shitty husband and should have done more to save his wife from herself.