Page 65 of Now That It's You
A fleck of pastry cream made it look more like snot than shot and Meg wiped it off with her sleeve and tried again, her butter-slick finger slipping ineffectively off the iPhone screen.
Disappointment washed through her, but she pushed it aside. So what if it wasn’t Kyle? She’d been dodging his calls, unsure what to say now that they’d taken things to such an intimate level.
On her third try she managed to answer her agent’s call. “Hello?”
“Meg! How’s my favorite new client?”
She smiled and wondered if Nancy Neel said that to all the authors she represented, or just the ones who’d spent the last two weeks on The New York Times Bestsellers list.
“Assuming you mean me, I’m good.” Meg lifted the hem of her apron and wiped her forehead, belatedly remembering she’d cleaned her pastry bag on it earlier. She glanced in the mirror over her sink, admiring the giant blob of lemon cream in the center of her forehead with a big strip of lemon peel that made her look like a pitiful unicorn. She used her sleeve to wipe it away, grateful this wasn’t a video call. “I’m busy, but good,” she added.
“Excellent. Did you get those documents I sent over about German translation rights?”
“Yes. I haven’t had time to look at them yet, but as soon as I finish up this catering job, I’ll?—”
“That’s right, I forget you still have a job.” Nancy sounded almost amused by that. “Well, as soon as I start sending you royalty checks, it’ll be your call whether you want to keep that up.”
Meg picked up a cream puff and pried the top off, thinking about whether she’d ever want to give up catering entirely. “I love cooking,” she said. “And baking. And coming up with new recipes.”
“Of course you do. But now’s the time to dream big. More book deals, maybe a regular column or even your own television show.”
“Television?” The word echoed in Meg’s ears, and she set down the cream puff to grip the edge of the counter. “Sure. That sounds good. All of it.”
God, she sounded like an idiot. Nancy had to know Meg was in way over her head when it came to dreams of fame and fortune, but at least she was polite enough to treat her like a real professional instead of a clueless kid.
“The sky’s the limit, Meg.” Nancy cleared her throat. “We just have one tiny issue to deal with.”
“Right,” Meg said, and felt herself crash back down to reality. “You mean the lawsuit?”
“I mean the lawsuit. You’ve spoken with the attorney I asked you to meet with this morning?”
Meg nodded, which was dumb, since Nancy couldn’t see her. “Yes. Franklin. He seemed very nice.”
“We don’t want him to be nice. We want him to be an animal in the courtroom.” She seemed to pause then, probably recognizing a court battle was the last thing Meg wanted. “If it comes to that, of course.”
“Right,” Meg said. “I talked with him quite a bit about verbal agreements and collaborative work and what might hold up in court and?—”
The words got hung up in her throat, and Meg felt her hands start to shake at the thought of this whole thing blowing up in such a dramatically legal fashion. Maybe it wouldn’t need to escalate that far.
“The Midland family’s not backing down, Meg.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “I know.”
“You know I signed you as a client with the understanding that this work was yours alone,” Nancy said, and Meg braced herself for a lecture on how she’d misrepresented herself.
But instead, Nancy just laughed. “And as far as I’m concerned, The Food You Love cookbook is yours alone. We just need to find a way to prove that.”
“Okay,” Meg said, opening her eyes and feeling like she’d dodged a bullet somehow.
“Look, it would be helpful if you could dig through your records from that period when your ex-fiancé agreed to take those photos,” she said. “Anything that shows his state of mind at the time or the kinds of things you discussed before he started clicking away.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“The more detail, the better. Old emails, maybe love notes he might have left you—anything that talks about his intention to take those photos as a favor to you as your fiancé and not as a collaborator who expected a portion of the proceeds.”
“Right,” Meg said, hearing a glum note in her own voice. There were no love notes. There never had been, which hadn’t bothered her before. Meg cleared her throat. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“It’ll all work out,” Nancy said. “Try not to lose too much sleep over it.”
