Chapter 5: My Secret Name
The premiere was at a theater on Forty-Second Street, three weeks to the day after Constance’s birthday. Red carpet. Photographers. A giant screen above the stage showing a lantern glowing in a dark window.
I wore a deep red suit Jo picked out. I wore my grandmother’s silver pen on a chain. And I walked down that carpet with my daughter’s hand in mine.
“R.J.! R.J., over here!”
I’d imagined that sound for eleven years. It was louder than I thought.
The gossip story had lasted about thirty-six hours. Then Maisie posted a video. Fifty-one seconds, in her mustard hoodie, sitting on the floor of the back room at the cottage with a stack of notebooks.
“My mom didn’t abandon me,” she said into the camera. “She wrote nine books at our kitchen table at two in the morning while my dad told everyone she was boring. Anyway, the headline is fake. Also, I’m coming to the premiere. Bye.”
Four million views by breakfast. The site took the story down. Sienna Hale’s agency posted that she was “no longer affiliated with Carter Development.” And two of Douglas’s biggest investors called him to ask, very politely, why his family was trending.
Inside the theater, I stood at the microphone, and the lights hit my face, and I said the sentence.
“Good evening. I’m R.J. Lark.”
They stood up. All of them. I didn’t hear the rest of my speech. I just know I said it.
I saw Douglas afterward, in the lobby. I don’t know how he got a ticket. He was standing by a pillar in his charcoal suit and burgundy tie, watching strangers line up to shake his wife’s hand. A woman asked me to sign her arm. A man told me The Lantern House got him through chemo. A teenage girl cried and said, “You’re my favorite writer in the whole world,” and Maisie said, “Mine too,” and they hugged like old friends.
Douglas waited until the line thinned. Then he stepped in front of me.
Behind him, a girl of maybe twelve tugged her father’s sleeve and pointed at me. “Dad. Dad. That’s her.” Douglas turned to look at the girl, then back at me, as if he were trying to see what she saw.
“Mer.” He looked older. “I watched the whole thing. You were incredible. I had no idea.”
“I know,” I said. “That was the whole problem.”
“Come home. We’ll fix this. I’ll drop everything. The lawsuit, Sienna, all of it. We can be a team.”
“Doug,” I said, “you spent nineteen years deciding what I was. Furniture. Boring. No original thought. You don’t get to decide my next chapter. You’re not in it.”
The divorce was final in March. Delia handled the prenup in one meeting. Lark House stays mine, as Constance’s own clause intended. Maisie lives with me at the cottage now, and sees her father on weekends, when she feels like it. Douglas is learning to ask her what she’d like to do.
Book ten comes out in June. It’s dedicated to her.
One more thing. At the New York signing the next morning, near the end of a three-hour line, a white-haired woman in a lavender tweed suit stepped up to my table. She set down a first edition of The Lantern House with an old blue inscription inside.
“I’d like it signed again,” Constance said. “Properly. In front of witnesses.”
I uncapped my pen. Under the first inscription, I wrote:
It was never a forgery. Neither was I. R.J.
She read it twice. Then she held the book against her chest like a girl, and for the first time in nineteen years, my mother-in-law didn’t say a single word.
