The Accident by Chris Pavone Read Free Book Online Page A

but it’s a repose that’s rarely allowed to show itself in public, beaten out like left-handedness in a midcentury Catholic school, so the world sees only the forced smile, the dimples, the ingratiating lie of limitless positivity.
    “Who’s that?” Jeffrey asks.
    “You don’t know her?”
    He shakes his head.
    “She’s no one.” Isabel sure as hell isn’t going to be the one to tell him. “Some junior something or other, in my office.”
    “Looks familiar.”
    “You mean she looks hot?”
    “Well …” He tries to fight off a smile, unsuccessfully. “But that’s not why I asked.”
    “Uh-huh,” she says, throwing some scorn at him. He blushes, as he always does when any remotely carnal subject arises, usually brought up by Isabel. Under oath and the penalty of death, she’d have to admit thatshe does this purposefully, as a test, double-checking that Jeffrey still carries his long-lit torch for her, a perpetual crush that serves as her sexual security blanket. There have been moments in her life when she could’ve returned the sentiment, and not just those two nights, separated by a decade, when they kissed. But there had always been some barrier in the way: her marriage, or his, or other lesser but still important relationships.
    Today, though, they’re both single. And today, after all she learned last night, she feels an additional tenderness toward him, a gratitude for his constancy, his honesty. Jeffrey has loved her for twenty years, and everyone knows it; there are times when that means the world to her. There are times when she loves him.
    Jeffrey is one of those men who seem to get better-looking with age—the salt-and-pepper hair, the crinkly eyes, the laugh lines, all make him more appealing every year. This doesn’t really happen for women, Isabel thinks.
    “I’ll be right back with your coffees.”
    Isabel watches the waitress leave, her youthfully skinny little ass retreating across the room in a pencil-thin black skirt and a prim white apron. Isabel turns to Jeffrey, who has noticed the same thing, but probably with a sentiment that’s not bitterness. He has always had a wandering eye, frequently met, a good-looking charming man in an industry predominantly populated by women.
    She sees him glance down at the title page to read The Accident , by Anonymous. Lower on the page, there’s the shadow of disappeared content where Isabel taped over the author’s e-mail address and hand-wrote her own contact information, before she handed the stack of paper to the scrawny pallid clerk at the twenty-four-hour copy-shop/postal-center, around the corner from her apartment. There’s a lot you can accomplish in New York City, at all hours, in stuffy fluorescent-lit rooms manned by disaffected overeducated underemployed young adults, rooms that almost always have security cameras mounted where they can film the entire room, as much to monitor the clerks as any potential crooks.
    “So.” Jeffrey taps the stack of paper with the fountain pen he’s always carrying around. “What is it?”
    She pauses before answering, “The biggest bombshell you’ll ever read.”
    Jeffrey nods, waiting for more, seemingly not getting it. “You’re not going to explain?”
    “You want a pitch?”
    “I guess so.”
    This is how it’s normally done: the agent pitches a project to the editor; the editor reads the material—a proposal, or sample chapters, or a whole manuscript; then the editor either makes an offer for publication, or declines to.
    But apparently that’s not exactly how it’s going to work this time. Isabel shakes her head.
    “ Any thing?”
    “I’ll let the content speak for itself. Everything else is hearsay. Bullshit.”
    He grins at this.
    “But I will tell you this, Darling: the project is yours, exclusively.” Isabel sports her own little smile, a purposefully disingenuous-looking one. Pretending to be an agent who’s pretending to be hard-selling. “For forty-eight