Page 40 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
No. No, it doesn’t.
I force my attention forward again, zero in on my doughnut.
We eat in silence for a minute. But there’s nothing quiet about it—my head’s running a million miles an hour trying to wrap around my situation. This is not the woman I knew when the lights were on. And yet, I feel like I’m just starting to see her for the first time. Unguarded. Just a girl with a doughnut.
“Can I ask you something?”
She turns the long john, attacking it from a different angle. “That depends on what it is.”
“The hair.”
She goes still.
“At the gala you looked…different. The dark hair. The black dress. It was all very…” I search for the word.
“Very E.J. Hartley,” she says.
“Right. And now—” I gesture at the red curls, piled high on the top of her head. They look like copper coils, intricate, each strand a unique facet of her. My gaze snaps back to hers. They’re watching me with interest. “—back to the curls.”
“Your point, Benson?”
“What’s with the wig?”
She takes a breath. Sets down the doughnut. Adjusts her glasses. I’ve seen that gesture before. I used to find it exacting, as though she was gearing up to use that big brain of hers to cut me down…but now, I wonder if that’s just the way she processes.
“When I sold my first thriller to Stratton,” she says, “I was twenty-three. I’d just finished grad school. I weighed about fifty pounds more than I do now, and I had this”—she gestures at her hair—“situation. Red. Wild. Not exactly the image you’d associate with a dark-thriller author who writes about serial killers.” I sip my coffee, watching him try to keep up. “I’d already published a few books under my real name—Everly Hart. Too Cold for Love. When the Stars Align. The Last Summer. Sweet little romances that nobody read except my mom and three women in Iowa. Then I wrote Cold Chill, my debut thriller, and Stratton wanted to launch me as something new. Different name, different photo, different vibe. So Everly Hart got shelved, and E.J. Hartley got the marketing budget.”
“I don’t know what image I associate with that.”
“Think dark, sleek, dangerous women who look like they could murder you with a fountain pen.” She picks at the doughnut’s glaze. “My editorial assistant at Stratton—Bree—she didn’t exactly tell me to change how I look. What she told me was to consider my brand. Which is the publishing industry’s version of saying ‘Change how you look’ but with plausible deniability.”
“So you got a wig.”
“A wig. And contacts.”
She doesn’t mention the lost fifty pounds.
“And a wardrobe full of dark, moody colors. You have no idea how many shades of wine or burgundy I’ve got in my closet right now. Red lipstick. Dark eyeshadow. The whole look.” She takes a sip of water from the paper cups she filled for us behind the counter. “And the brand worked. E.J. Hartley is on bestseller lists. She has a following. She’s…” Everly pauses. “She’s famous. But she’s not me.”
“What about the books, the stories. Is that you?”
The question seems to take her off guard, her eyes finding mine in the dim reflection of the flashlights against the window.
“You know what’s strange?” she says, pulling her gaze away.
“Everything about tonight.”
“Fair point. But in a way, she is me. I mean, when I’m writing as E.J., I feel just as alive as I do when I write?—”
She stops, her eyes widening.
I raise an eyebrow. “When you write…?”
“Um, my author’s notes. You know, just as me.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Probably not. But I’m not sure what that means.” She takes a bite of the doughnut. Chews. Swallows.
