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“Pretended to be a male author. Hired Chris. I might be able to guess, but I want to hear it in your words. From the top.”
Daphne did just that. When she finished, Sakura stared out the side window for at least five minutes. Then she said, “Figures.”
Daphne couldn’t read her tone and said carefully, “It figures that…?”
“That you’d go from ‘can’t get an agent’ to ‘half-million-dollar deal’ by putting a guy’s name on your manuscript.”
“It wasn’t just that,” Daphne said. “I tweaked the synopsis to emphasize the survival aspects and remove the hints of romance. Also, I said I—Zane—had an MFA, which I don’t.”
“How much of the book did you change?”
“None.”
Sakura shook her head. “Figures.”
“I can’t say that a man’s name made the difference,” Daphne said.
“Of course not, because if you even suggested it, there’d be pushback. Prove it, they’d say. You can’t prove it. Maybe your agent would have read it with your name on it. Maybe it would have sold just as well and been marketed the same. I can tell you it wouldn’t have been marketed the same, but then I’d be asked to prove it, and I can’t do that, either, because it’s not like I have an email saying to treat you differently because you’re a guy. I know it made a difference. It might—God help me—have subconsciously made a difference in how I pitched your book.”
Sakura looked at her. “You didn’t plan to pass yourself off as a man when you started writing the book. It was an act of desperation.”
“Desperation and wine,” Daphne said, forcing a wry smile.
“And you were afraid if you came out, you’d lose your shot at getting published.”
Daphne nodded.
“So, like you said, you and your lawyer friend decided to hire a guy for a few photos, maybe an interview or two.”
“It got out of hand,” Daphne said.
“By which time, it felt too late to do anything. Which it was, to be honest. Give me the option of having you come out prepublication or posttour, and posttour would have definitely been my choice.” She exhaled. “Okay, so where do we stand?”
Daphne told her about the second call from Milner. She wanted Sakura to be shocked, even angry, but the publicist only shook her head.
“I don’t know how that guy still has a job,” she muttered. “He had some massive hits twenty years ago, and now he just coasts. When Alicia wanted to buy Edge, he came in strong. Others said postapocalyptic young adult was dead, but he insisted Edge was different. By which he apparently meant that a man wrote it.”
Again, Daphne wanted to ask what Milner could do to her career. But that wasn’t Sakura’s job, no more than Chris going AWOL was Lawrence’s concern.
Which led to…
“Chris isn’t meeting us there,” Daphne said.
Sakura frowned at her.
Daphne gave an abridged version of the story, basically that they’d argued over the next move and Chris decided she needed to step forward as Zane. Then he left so she could do that.
She’d worded it carefully, letting none of her hurt seep in, casting Chris in the most neutral light.
“So you two agreed on this?” Sakura said.
Daphne hesitated, but as much as she wanted to protect Chris, she wasn’t taking a hit for him. “We argued, I walked out, and he left a note.”
Sakura stared at her. “What a dick move.”
Maybe this should have felt like validation, but Daphne wanted someone to tell her it wasn’t so bad, that maybe he’d even done the right thing. Except he hadn’t, and she knew that.
“That is some patronizing bullshit right there,” Sakura said. “People that good-looking always have a fatal flaw. Or fifty.” She stopped. “You guys are over, right?”
