Chapter 2: R.J. Lark
The cottage on Pine Lake is forty minutes from the Carter house and a hundred years from it.
Douglas thinks it belonged to my late Aunt Ruth, and that I keep it because I’m sentimental. He’s never been inside. He came up once, looked at the dock and the screen porch and the mismatched chairs, and said, “Mer, this is a teardown. Why don’t you just sell it?”
I bought it eleven years ago, in cash, with the advance for The Lantern House.
I was an English teacher when I married Douglas. Tenth grade. I loved it. I loved the kid in the back row who pretended not to care and then wrote the best essay in the class.
The day before the wedding, Constance sat me down in her library with a fountain pen and a stack of papers her lawyer had drafted. A prenuptial agreement. “Just a formality, dear. To protect the company.” I signed it in my wedding shoes, which pinched. I didn’t read it. I was twenty-five and in love, and I thought reading it would look like I didn’t trust them.
After the honeymoon, Constance said a Carter wife didn’t need to work, and Douglas said it looked bad for the company, and when Maisie was born, I let it go. I let a lot of things go.
What I didn’t let go was the writing. I wrote at the kitchen table between midnight and two, in spiral notebooks, in my own handwriting. A mystery about a woman nobody noticed, who noticed everything.
When I sold that first book, I told Douglas. I remember exactly where we were. The kitchen. He was eating cereal over the sink.
“Doug, I sold a novel. A real publisher.”
He laughed, kindly. “That’s cute, Mer. How much, five grand?”
It was four hundred thousand dollars. I never told him again.
I named myself R.J. Lark after my grandmother, Ruth Jean Lark, who raised five kids on a farm in Iowa and read a library book every single night. I set up a company, Lark House LLC, to receive the royalties. My agent, Jo Feld, became the only person on earth who knew my face and my pen name at the same time.
For eleven years I wrote two books in the dark for every one Douglas noticed I was alive.
I went to Constance’s book club once, as a guest, the year book four came out. Twelve women in her living room arguing about whether the housekeeper did it. Constance said R.J. Lark was clearly a man, “a retired detective, probably, with that kind of mind.” I passed the cheese plate and said nothing. I drove home laughing so hard I had to pull over on Sheridan Road.
The night of Constance’s birthday, I slept at the cottage for the first time. Really slept. I woke up to the sound of the lake and the smell of coffee, because Jo had let herself in at dawn.
She was sitting on the porch steps in her long gray coat, silver hair cropped short, a huge turquoise necklace she claims keeps away bad editors.
“You said yes to New York,” she said. “I’ve been waiting eleven years to hear that.”
“I’m going to do it,” I said. “The premiere. The morning show. My face, my name. No more hiding.”
“Good.” She didn’t smile. She held up a manila envelope. “Because a courier brought this to your house at seven this morning, and your daughter forwarded me a photo of it. She’s a smart girl. She knew where to send it.”
My stomach dropped. “Douglas.”
“Douglas.” She slid out the papers. “He filed for divorce yesterday. Before the birthday party, Meredith. He sat through dinner already knowing.”
I took the pages. My hands were steady. I’ve written this scene a dozen times for other women.
Then I reached the second page, and they weren’t.
Petitioner requests sole custody of the minor child, Maisie Carter, age fifteen. Respondent has no income, no career, and no independent means to support a child.
