Plot Twist In Paradise
by IAmHerEmma

 

 

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Chapter Two: Wine Won't Fix This Either

 

 

 

Sorrentino's was the kind of restaurant that wanted you to know it had opinions about olive oil. The walls were exposed brick, the lighting was warm enough to make everyone look like they were in a perfume ad, and the menu used words like "drizzled" and "nestled" as if the food had been gently tucked into bed before being served. I'd eaten here enough times to know the pasta was worth the pretension, but every time I walked through the door I had the distinct feeling that the restaurant was quietly judging whether I deserved to be there.

The maître d' was a tall man with a neat beard and the kind of rigid stillness that suggested he'd been personally assembled rather than born. He looked up from his podium as I approached and gave me the smile — the one they taught at whatever school produced people who stood behind podiums at overpriced restaurants. Polished. Professional. Absolutely no warmth behind it.

"Good afternoon. Do you have a reservation?"

"I'm meeting someone. Maribel Grant? She's probably already here. She's probably been here since twelve forty-five because she thinks arriving on time is the same as arriving late."

He blinked at me. Just once. A blink that said I am paid to be pleasant to you and I am earning every cent of it right now.

"Right this way."

I followed him through the dining room, weaving between tables of people who all seemed to be having more productive Tuesdays than I was, and there she was. Corner booth. Sparkling water already half finished. Sitting with the composed stillness of a woman who had never once in her life looked at her phone while waiting for someone because she considered it a waste of perfectly good thinking time.

Maribel Grant. Five foot six of absolute certainty in a cobalt blouse that probably cost less than it looked like it cost, because Maribel was the type who found quality on sale and considered it a personal victory. Her short hair was sharp and precise, the kind of cut that said I have things to do and my hair is not going to be one of them. Her posture was, as always, the posture of someone who had been raised by a woman who believed sitting up straight was a moral position.

She looked up as I approached and her mouth did the thing it always did when she saw me — a slight tightening at the corners that could have been a smile or could have been an assessment. With Maribel, it was usually both.

"You're on time," she said, as if reporting a minor miracle.

"I'm three minutes late."

"For you, that's early."

I slid into the booth across from her and set my bag down with the careful nonchalance of someone who was absolutely not nervous about this lunch. I was not nervous. I was a professional. I was a published author with four books and a viral hit and I was here to have a perfectly normal conversation with my editor over Italian food and nothing about this was going to be stressful.

I was very nervous.

"You look nice," Maribel said, and she meant it — Maribel didn't offer compliments she didn't mean, which made the ones she did offer feel like they'd been peer-reviewed. "The blouse is new?"

"Six months old. First time wearing it."

"Saving it for a special occasion?"

I smoothed the sleeve like it owed me something. "Saving it for a day I needed to feel like a person who had her life together."

"And how's that working out?"

"Ask me after the second glass of wine."

Maribel signaled the waitress with an economical hand gesture she'd probably been doing since birth. A young woman appeared almost immediately — dark hair pulled back, crisp white shirt, the eager competence of someone who could probably recite the specials in three languages and was hoping someone would ask.

"I'll have the branzino," Maribel said, without looking at the menu. Of course she wouldn't look at the menu. Maribel had probably decided what she was ordering while she was driving here. Possibly while she was calling me. Possibly last Tuesday. "And another sparkling water, please. Ade?"

I hadn't opened the menu. I'd been too busy trying to look like someone who didn't need to look at the menu, which meant I now had to actually order something without any information whatsoever.

"The, uh —" I scanned the first page with the panicked focus of a student who hadn't done the reading. "The rigatoni. With the —" I waved my hand vaguely at the menu as if the gesture would fill in the details I hadn't read. "Whatever's on it."

"The rigatoni alla vodka?" the waitress offered, with the diplomatic patience of someone who had seen this exact performance before.

"That one. Yes. And a glass of the Montepulciano."

The waitress nodded and disappeared.

Maribel reached for the bread basket and tore a piece off with the efficient precision of someone performing surgery. The butter went on in one smooth pass, corner to corner, no second stroke. I'd been buttering bread wrong my whole life and hadn't known until this moment.

"So my assistant quit," she said.

"Another one?"

"The exit email was passive-aggressive. She said she needed to 'prioritize her growth in a less demanding environment.' As if demanding is an insult."

"To most people, it is." I took a sip of wine with the calm of someone who had never terrorized an assistant in her life.

"To most people, comfort is a career goal. That's why most people don't get anywhere."

"What did you do to this one?"

"I gave her constructive feedback on a filing error."

"Your version of constructive feedback makes most people update their résumé, Maribel."

"I told her that her organizational system looked like it had been designed by someone who alphabetized by vibes. Which was true. The S section had a folder labeled 'Stuff.'"

Third assistant in two years. Working for Maribel was like being an air traffic controller for a woman who believed she was the only plane in the sky. I loved her, but I would sooner chew glass than manage her calendar.

I took a sip of wine to hide the smile. This was the Maribel that people outside her orbit didn't get to see — the one who was genuinely funny when she wasn't trying to be, who could deliver a devastating observation with the same calm tone she used to order fish. The professional world saw the editor, the dealmaker, the woman with impeccable posture and a reputation for being difficult to impress. I got this version — the one who was still difficult to impress but would occasionally let you see her being amused by her own impossibility.

She'd been to a publishing conference in Chicago last month and described the keynote speaker as "the human equivalent of a LinkedIn post." I laughed, and she looked pleased with herself in the restrained way she had — a slight lift of the chin, a flicker of satisfaction that disappeared before it could be accused of being smug.

"How's David?" I asked, because I was genuinely curious and also because every minute we spent talking about her life was a minute we weren't talking about mine.

"David is fine. David is always fine. David has the emotional range of a golden retriever and the same enthusiasm for routine. He's training for a half marathon now, which means I have to hear about hydration strategies at dinner."

"That sounds romantic."

"It sounds like a man who has replaced one obsession with another. Last year it was sourdough. The year before that it was chess. I give the running until March."

The food arrived. My rigatoni was excellent — rich and creamy with just enough heat to justify the price tag. Maribel's branzino looked like it had been arranged by someone with a degree in architecture. She cut into it with surgical precision, ate three bites, set her knife and fork down in perfect parallel, and said:

"So. The book."

And there it was.

"The book," I repeated, picking up my wine glass because holding something felt better than having my hands just sitting there, available for nervous fidgeting.

"Where are we?"

"We're in a great Italian restaurant having a lovely lunch."

"Ade."

"Fine." I took a sip. Then a slightly longer sip. "We're... in the early conceptual phase."

"You told me that six weeks ago."

"And the concept has been developing beautifully. It's ripening. Like a cheese."

Maribel's face did not change, which was worse than if she'd rolled her eyes. An eye roll would have been engagement. What she was doing instead was just looking at me, steadily, with the patient focus of someone who had decided to wait me out and had brought enough composure to do it all afternoon if necessary.

"Okay," I said. "What if I told you I had several strong ideas and I was in the process of narrowing them down?"

"I'd ask you to name one."

"I don't want to jinx it."

"You can't jinx something that doesn't exist."

Fuck. She was good at this.

I caught the waitress's eye and raised my empty glass with the universal gesture for another one, please, and quickly. She nodded. Maribel watched this transaction with the expression of someone making a mental note.

"It's still the afternoon," she said.

"Time is a construct, Maribel."

I twirled rigatoni around my fork and shoved it in my mouth, which bought me approximately eight seconds of chewing time during which I did not have to speak.

Maribel waited. She was content to watch me eat pasta while formulating a lie. She probably found it educational.

I swallowed. "Okay, I don't have a book. I don't have a concept. I don't have a first line. I barely have a genre at this point. Are you happy?"

"I'm not happy. But I appreciate the honesty."

"Great. The honesty feels terrible. Can I go back to lying?"

"No." She picked up her fork again and took another precise bite of branzino. "Tell me what happens when you sit down to write."

"Nothing happens. That's the whole problem."

"Walk me through it."

"I open the document. I stare at it. I type something. I hate it. I delete it. I type something else. I hate that more. I delete it faster. Then I check my email, then I check Instagram, then I read a comment from someone named Brenda who thinks I'm ruining literature, then I compose a ten-paragraph response I never send, and then I close the laptop and contemplate a career in food service."

Maribel cut another precise bite of branzino without looking down at it. "How many words are we talking about? Total, across three weeks."

"Written or surviving?" I asked, already knowing which answer was going to be worse.

"Written."

"Maybe... a few hundred? Across all the attempts?"

"And surviving?"

"Zero. Absolute zero. The heat death of the literary universe."

Maribel set her fork down again.

"Look," I said, leaning forward because I was going to need both hands for the amount of gesturing I was about to do. "I know there's momentum. I know the numbers are strong. I know there's a window and I know windows close and I know every day I'm not writing is a day the algorithm or the zeitgeist or whatever is moving on to the next thing. I know all of this, Maribel. I am excruciatingly aware of all of this."

"Good. Then you also know that what made My Husband, My Bride work wasn't the algorithm. It wasn't the cover, it wasn't the timing, and it wasn't the zeitgeist." She said the word "zeitgeist" the way someone might handle a piece of fruit they suspected was overripe. "What made it work was that you wrote something emotionally specific. Something raw and honest that people could feel. And what I'm watching you do right now is avoid that exact quality like someone's going to grade you on it."

That landed. It landed because it was true, and Maribel had this deeply inconvenient habit of being true in ways that I couldn't deflect with a joke because the joke would just prove her point.

"I'm not avoiding anything," I said, which was itself an avoidance, and we both knew it.

Maribel's fork paused mid-cut. "When was the last time you wrote something that scared you?"

"Chapter fourteen scared me."

"Chapter fourteen was eight months ago. What's scared you since?"

Nothing. The answer was nothing. Because I hadn't written anything since, which meant nothing had the opportunity to scare me, which was — if I was being honest, and I really didn't want to be honest about this — sort of the point. You couldn't be scared of a blank page. You could only be scared of what you might put on it.

"I'm stuck," I said. The words came out quieter than I meant them to. "I'm really, actually stuck, Maribel. I have ideas but none of them have any heat. None of them feel like they could carry a whole book without collapsing halfway through. And the longer it goes on the worse it gets because now I'm not just trying to write a book, I'm trying to write a book that proves the last one wasn't a fluke, and I can't do both at the same time."

I stopped. I hadn't meant to say all of that. I'd meant to say something controlled and professional — something that acknowledged the problem without sounding like I was drowning in it. Instead I'd just laid the whole thing out on the table between the rigatoni and the sparkling water like a body at a crime scene, and now it was just sitting there, being honest, being embarrassing, being true.

I stabbed a piece of rigatoni with more force than the pasta deserved and ate it in silence.

Maribel listened to all of that without interrupting, which was how I knew she'd been expecting it. She picked up her sparkling water, took a sip, and set it back down with the careful placement of someone who was about to say something she'd been planning to say since before I'd walked through the door.

"Can I ask you something that isn't about the book?"

"That depends on whether the something is secretly about the book."

"It's adjacent."

"Adjacent is just 'about' in a nicer outfit."

Maribel pushed her plate forward half an inch — done with the branzino, done with the warm-up. "When was the last time you left your apartment for something that wasn't groceries or a lunch you were dreading?"

"I go places."

"Where?"

"The coffee shop on Seventh." I said it like I was presenting evidence in my own defense. "I tried writing there last week."

"That's four blocks from your apartment."

"It's a different environment. There are plants."

"When was the last time you did something fun? And I don't mean fun like a glass of wine in front of Netflix. I mean actually fun. Something that involved other human beings and at least one moment where you forgot you were a person with a deadline."

"I have fun," I said, and even as the words left my mouth I could hear how unconvincing they sounded. Like someone insisting they were a morning person while yawning.

"Name the last fun thing."

"I went to Sasha's birthday."

"That was in October." Maribel didn't even blink, just let the math do the work.

"It was very fun. The fun has lasted."

"Ade, it's January."

I picked up my wine glass and took a sip that was closer to a gulp. Maribel wasn't wrong. The gap between October and now was three months, and I couldn't point to a single thing in those three months that qualified as actually living rather than just maintaining. I'd been feeding myself, paying my bills, keeping the apartment at a survivable level of chaos, and sitting in front of a laptop accomplishing nothing. That wasn't a life. That was maintenance.

"When was the last time you did something that had nothing to do with writing or thinking about writing or feeling bad about not writing?"

I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it, because the honest answer was genuinely embarrassing. I couldn't remember. Not in a dramatic, I've-lost-all-sense-of-time way. More in a quiet, creeping way — the days had just started looking the same. Wake up, fail to write, scroll, fail to write some more, order food, watch something I'd already seen, go to bed too late, repeat. The apartment had become a holding pattern and I'd been circling in it for weeks without noticing that I'd stopped trying to land.

I looked out the window. Across the street, a woman was walking a dog that was clearly walking her — a big, dopey golden retriever that was towing her toward a fire hydrant with the determination of someone who'd been waiting for this moment all day. The woman was laughing, stumbling along behind it, not caring that she looked ridiculous. Just letting the day happen to her.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd let the day happen to me.

"Ade." Maribel's voice pulled me back. Not sharp — softer than her usual register, which was somehow more alarming. Maribel being soft meant she was genuinely concerned, and Maribel being genuinely concerned meant things were worse than I'd been admitting to myself.

"I'm fine," I said, turning back to her. "I was just watching a dog commit a crime against a fire hydrant. I'm fine."

She looked at me for a moment — really looked, the way she did when she was deciding whether to push or to let something sit. Then she reached into her bag.

What she pulled out was a brochure. Not a business card, not a printed email, not a contract — a glossy, tri-fold brochure with turquoise water on the cover and the kind of palm trees that only existed in places where people went to pretend their real lives weren't waiting for them back home.

She slid it across the table toward me.

I looked at it. Then I looked at her. Then I looked at it again.

"What the hell is this?"

"Pick it up."

"We were just having a serious conversation about my career and you're handing me a —" I picked it up, turned it over. Turquoise water. Palm trees. Italic script. "A vacation brochure? Are you firing me? Is this severance? A tropical island instead of two weeks' notice?"

"Just read it, Ade."

The Whispering Palms at Coral Key. Your Most Authentic Self.

"My most authentic self," I read aloud, in the tone of someone who had been personally insulted by a piece of marketing. "That's what they're going with? That's the tagline?"

I opened the brochure. Inside was more turquoise water — they were really committed to the turquoise — along with photos of sun-drenched bungalows, a beachfront bar with string lights, and a group of people who were laughing in the specific way that people only laughed in stock photos. Adults-only. LGBTQ+ focused. Private island accessible only by boat. The whole thing was dripping with the kind of curated paradise that existed specifically to look good on someone's Instagram story.

There was a quote on the inside flap from a previous guest: "I came for a week and left a different person." Underneath it, in smaller text: "— Sarah M., Portland." Sarah M. from Portland. Thank you, Sarah. Very helpful. Very specific. I was sure Sarah M. had a wonderful time becoming a different person on her tropical island, but some of us were already more than one person on a good day and didn't need a resort to complicate things further.

"It's a resort," I said.

"It's an experience."

"It's a resort that calls itself an experience, which is worse." I flipped the brochure over as if the back might contain a retraction.

Maribel turned her water glass a quarter turn, the way she did when she was about to say something she'd rehearsed. "I know the manager. Emmett Hale. We were at Columbia together — different programs, but we stayed in touch. He built this place from the ground up and he takes the community aspect seriously. It's not a theme park, Ade. It's genuinely a space where people go to be themselves."

"You keep saying that like it's a selling point. 'Be yourself.' 'Your most authentic self.' What does that even mean? I am myself. I'm myself right now. I'm sitting here being deeply, authentically resistant to this idea and I feel very genuine about it."

"People can be themselves anywhere, sure. In theory." Maribel tilted her head, and the question that followed wasn't rhetorical. "But can you? Because from where I'm sitting, you've been locked in your apartment for six weeks being no one at all."

That was mean. That was accurate, but it was mean.

"I've been working," I said, unconvincingly.

"You've been hiding. And the work is suffering because you've forgotten what it feels like to be around actual humans who aren't on a screen saying something you're trying not to read."

I looked at the brochure again. A woman in a sundress was drinking something with an umbrella in it, smiling at someone off-camera with the relaxed ease of a person who had never once in her life stared at a blinking cursor for three weeks straight. Good for her. Good for her and her umbrella drink and her off-camera friend and her complete lack of existential professional dread.

"Coral Key," I said. "Where even is that?"

"Off the Gulf Coast. Small island. You take a boat from the mainland."

"A boat." I said it the way someone might say a root canal.

"A short boat."

"I don't do boats."

Maribel reached for her water, perfectly calm, perfectly aware she'd just drawn blood. "You don't do anything right now. That's the problem."

I put the brochure down. "Maribel, I appreciate the thought. I do. But I'm not going to fix my writer's block by sitting on a beach drinking out of a coconut. That's not how creativity works."

"How does it work?"

"I don't know. If I knew, I'd be doing it."

"Exactly." She leaned back slightly — a rare concession to casualness from a woman who usually sat like she was being painted. "You don't know. You've tried everything you can think of from inside your apartment and none of it has worked. So maybe the answer isn't inside your apartment."

"Maybe the answer is more time. Maybe the answer is patience. Maybe the answer is accepting that the muse works on her own schedule and I can't rush —"

"If you say 'muse' I'm going to —"

"Fine. No muse. But a tropical island, Maribel? What am I going to do there? Sit on a beach and hope the ocean tells me a story? Write erotica inspired by a palm tree?"

"You're going to be around people. Real, actual people who aren't on a screen. You're going to have conversations that have nothing to do with your word count. You're going to eat food you didn't order from the same three delivery apps. And maybe — maybe — you'll remember what it feels like to be a person first and a writer second."

"I don't know how to be a person first and a writer second. I've never done it in that order."

"I know. That might be the whole problem."

I pushed a piece of rigatoni around my plate. "Or maybe the answer is that I'm a one-hit wonder who peaked at twenty-eight and should start looking into careers that don't require creative inspiration. Data entry. Accounting. Something where the blank page doesn't fight back."

"You're not a one-hit wonder."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that." There was no hesitation in it. No performance, no flattery, no professional obligation. Just Maribel saying something she believed with the same certainty she brought to everything else. "I read your first three books before I agreed to work with you, Ade. And I didn't take you on because I thought one of them might go viral. I took you on because you write like someone who understands what people are afraid to want. That's a rare thing. It doesn't disappear because you're having a rough stretch."

The words settled over the table between us. I wanted to make a joke — something sharp and deflective that would let us both pretend the moment wasn't happening. But I couldn't find one. Or maybe I didn't want to find one. Maribel had just said something genuinely kind, in her direct, undecorated way, and undercutting it would have been worse than sitting with it.

So I sat with it.

"You don't have to go," she said, after a moment. "I'm not going to force a vacation on you. But I think getting out of your own head — physically, not just creatively — might remind you what it feels like to actually experience something instead of just sitting in your apartment trying to write about experiencing things." She paused. "And who knows. Maybe something out there sparks something in here." She tapped her temple. "Stranger things have happened to worse writers."

"That's a very diplomatic way of saying I've become a hermit."

"You've become a hermit, Ade."

I picked up my wine glass, took a slow sip, and looked at the brochure sitting on the table between Maribel's sparkling water and the remains of my rigatoni.

Your Most Authentic Self. What a load of shit. What a gorgeous, turquoise, palm-tree-lined load of shit.

I picked it up. Folded it. Slid it into my bag.

Maribel's mouth did the thing again — the tightening at the corners. This time it was definitely closer to a smile.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're being smug. I can hear you being smug. You're sitting there in your cobalt blouse being silently smug and I want you to know that I see it."

"I'm not being smug. I'm being hopeful. There's a difference."

"There really isn't."

"Are you going to think about it?"

I looked at her across the table. Maribel Grant, who had believed in my writing before anyone else had, who had read my first messy manuscript and seen something worth investing in, who was currently sitting across from me with her perfect posture and her half-finished sparkling water and her quiet, stubborn refusal to let me give up on myself.

"I'll think about it," I said. "That's all. I'll think about it."

"That's all I'm asking."

It was not all she was asking. We both knew it. But we let it sit there, the polite fiction that I was still making up my mind, and Maribel signaled for the check with the same decisive gesture she used for everything — one small movement, maximum result.

She paid. She always paid. I'd tried to argue about it once, early in our working relationship, and she'd looked at me with the expression of someone who had been briefly entertained by a puppy trying to open a door. I hadn't argued since.

We stood, gathered our things, and walked out of Sorrentino's into the afternoon sun. The street was busy with the usual Tuesday traffic — people going places, doing things, living lives that presumably involved fewer blinking cursors and existential crises over Italian food.

Maribel stopped on the sidewalk and turned to face me. In the daylight, outside the restaurant's flattering lighting, she looked a little tired herself — a detail I might not have noticed if I hadn't been looking for it. Even Maribel Grant, the most composed woman in publishing, had her own version of a long week. She just wore it better than I did.

"Take care of yourself," she said, and it sounded like she meant it in at least three different ways.

"I always do."

"You never do. But I admire the consistency of the lie."

She gave me a look — warm and pointed and impossible to argue with — and then she turned and walked toward her car with the purposeful stride of a woman who had accomplished what she'd come to accomplish and was already thinking about the next thing on her list.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, watching her go. Then I reached into my bag and pulled out the brochure.

Turquoise water. Palm trees. Bungalows with white linens. A beachfront bar. A group of suspiciously happy people laughing in the sun.

Your Most Authentic Self.

"Bullshit," I muttered, and started walking.

The walk home took about twenty minutes, which was twenty minutes of me holding a brochure I had no intention of acting on while my brain did the thing it always did after a conversation with Maribel — replayed every moment, assessed every exchange, and reluctantly admitted that she'd been right about at least seventy percent of it. Maybe eighty. I wasn't going to give her ninety even in the privacy of my own thoughts.

The part I kept circling back to wasn't the resort pitch. It was the other thing she'd said — the part about why she'd taken me on in the first place. You write like someone who understands what people are afraid to want. I'd sat with that at the table and I was still sitting with it now, turning it over, trying to decide whether it made me feel better or worse. Better, because Maribel believed it. Worse, because if it was true, then the block wasn't about skill or ideas or timing. It was about the fact that I'd stopped being willing to go to those places in my own head. The places where the good writing lived. The scary, honest, vulnerable places that made chapter fourteen the kind of scene people had to put their phone down and stare at a wall after reading.

Somewhere along the way I'd decided that those places were too expensive to visit, and I'd been circling the parking lot ever since.

I stopped at a crosswalk and opened the brochure again. The turquoise water glinted up at me from the glossy paper. Sarah M. from Portland grinned at me from her testimonial with the serene confidence of someone who had never composed a furious mental response to an Instagram comment.

An adults-only LGBTQ+ sanctuary where connection, creativity, and self-discovery meet the shore.

Who wrote this copy? Who sat down and typed "self-discovery meets the shore" and thought, yes, that's the one? Someone got paid for that sentence. Someone got paid and I couldn't even write one for free.

I closed the brochure. Opened it again. Read the part about the private bungalows and the beachfront activities and the "curated social experiences designed to foster meaningful connection." Closed it again.

Fuck.

I read it twice before I got home.