Page 14 of Slow Burn Summer

She led and Liv followed, pausing at the kitchen window to check the coast was clear. They moved in unison, a cartoon tiptoed dash from kitchen to hallway, breathless as they made it out of the front door undetected, breaking into a run for the safety of the car.

“God, I feel sick.” Kate gasped, breathing hard.

“I loved it.” Liv laughed. “Same time next week?”

“I’m never doing that again.”

They pulled away and Kate’s shoulders slowly lowered from around her ears with every passing mile. She wasn’t kidding. That was the last time she was ever going to set foot in her old home. Being in there just now had made her realize how much her life had changed in a relatively short amount of time. Everything had imploded the day she’d walked in on Richard and Belinda, the ground around her littered with what felt like a series of emotional land mines. Her stability blown, her marriage in bits, her home a shell. She’d had her identity wiped clean, and it had taken a fair while to gather up what was left behind in the aftermath and piece herself back together. Not the same woman, though. The old Kate would never have found herself in the middle of a publishing industry experiment or put revenge prawns in her husband’s hummus. The old Kate had been shoehorned into a box, and only now was she starting to feel like a jack-in-the-box released.

She turned to Liv, laughter bubbling up her windpipe. “That was mad.”

“You’ve got your manuscripts, though.”

Kate nodded. She wasn’t even sure why she wanted them yet. A nebulous, unformed thought, a vague possibility. She was going to be a ghost author; was there any possibility she could finally become anactualauthor too?

8

If there was a moreglamorous, self-assured table of people anywhere in London that afternoon, Kate would have been surprised to see it.

She’d been welcomed at the publishing house like the bride at a wedding, hugged and double air-kissed by a reception line of faces, apart from Rachel from PR, who Kate hadactuallykissed by accident. Now she wasn’t sure how to tell her she had Ruby Slippers lipstick on the side of her jaw.

She’d been a bag of nerves about the meeting for days, her first official step into Kate Dalloway’s shoes, which that day happened to be nude heels to go with the forest-green jumpsuit Liv had helped her pick out.

Prue, the lead editor, whom Kate had chatted to briefly once or twice over the last couple of weeks by email, got to her feet and opened her mouth, then closed it again when Fiona raised her hand and started speaking without invitation.

“If I could just kick things off with a reminder that the actual author of the book must remain completely anonymous to everyone throughout the publication process, which includes most of the people in this meeting.” Fiona looked pointedly at Kate, whokept her bright red smile firmly in place despite the first shot. She was getting used to deflecting Fiona’s arrows.

Prue gazed at Fiona over the rim of her oversized patent-red glasses until she was sure the other woman had finished, then drew a breath and started again, probably equally accustomed to Fiona Fox’s abrasive agenting style.

“We’re all so thrilled to have you with us today, Kate, it’s great to put a face to a name. Speaking of which…” She paused to click a PowerPoint presentation into life on the wall with a wave of her arm. “Welcome to your new name!”

Kate Darrowbyappeared in large print on the wall.

“So we heard your suggestion of Dalloway, which was a great kick-off point, and we took a straw poll around the team and Darrowby came out as the unanimous winner. It’s fresh yet timeless with the right commercial feel, and I hope you’ll agree it looks terrific in print.”

Kate had practiced signing Dalloway numerous times over the last few weeks and become quite fond of it. Beneath the table she wrote “Darrowby” on her thigh with her fingertip and didn’t find it such a natural fit, but nodded anyway as she glanced nervously at Charlie, sitting suited and booted beside her, looking at home here in a way she couldn’t hope to emulate.

“Biscuit?” Rachel, the PR representative, pushed a plate toward her and Kate realized they’d been iced with her new name, looping turquoise letters against a white background.

“Oh my word,” she said, staring at them with a nervous laugh. “They look amazing.”

“So, we thought it might be helpful to go round the table and talk you through the plans we already have in place,” Prue said. “I know this will all be brand-new to you, Kate, so please do feel able to speak up if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense. For the record, authoring a book in quite this way isn’t something we’vedone before either, so we’re all feeling our way through this exciting new experience together.”

Everyone around the table nodded earnestly except Fiona.

“Oh, come on, we’re hardly reinventing the wheel here,” she barked. “Half the books on theSunday Timeslist haven’t been written by the name on the cover.”

Not a hair ruffled around the board table. Prue tucked her half-black, half-blood-red bob behind her ears as she paused to allow Fiona’s remark to hang in the air uncommented on, then clicked through to the next screen.

“And now…are you ready for a first look at your cover?” She added a flourish to the end of her sentence like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.

Kate’s breath caught in her throat. She already knew the book had been titledThe Power of Love,a micro-reference to the love song mentioned in the story and neatly encapsulating the overarching theme of the book. Back when she’d been quietly trying to write manuscripts herself, seeing her book cover for the first time was one of the standout moments she’d dreamed about.

And there it was, her cover, huge and beautiful, projected onto the boardroom wall, and the experience was every bit as pinch-me as she’d imagined it would be, even if she hadn’t actually written the book.

“Oh my God, I absolutely love it,” she breathed, staring at the intricate design of rose petals falling around the title against an inky, midnight sky. Things had felt abstract up to that moment, an unusual acting job, but seeing the cover with her new name emblazoned across the front brought things home on a whole new level. She might not have written the book, but right now she felt every inch the proud adoptive mother.

“Really strong,” Charlie said, beside her.

---