The Accident Read Online Free PDF

lipstick and a tin of mints and a compact, business cards from young editors and discount shoe stores and that British woman she met at the party and the MBA-ish guys she met after the party, at the bar, where she has to admit she was flirting like a madwoman, more so as the night wore on, as drink number three turned into numbers four and five, and finally Courtney said, “We really have to get out of here, or you’ll end up going home with a stranger and seriously regretting it. Like, seriously.”
    The caller-ID announces that it’s Isabel calling. Her boss. At 6:51 a.m.
    “Hello?” she whispers. “Isabel?”
    “Hi Alexis. Sorry to wake you.”
    “Oh, that’s all right,” she says, slipping out of bed, trying not to disturb Spencer. Before she got into the taxi at 2:00 a.m., she drunk-dialed, standing there in the teeming tenement-filled street on the Lower East Side, teetering on her high heels, watching as a giant black SUV nearly ran down a gaggle of too-drunk-to-pay-attention girls—not terribly dissimilar to herself—and she gasped and dropped her phone midsentence. A degrading denouement. “I was awake.”
    She tiptoes to the kitchen, shuts the door, takes a seat at the Ikea drop-leafdining-table/desk/dressing-table/everything-table, an ungodly mess of jewelry and makeup and napkins and pens and a pepper mill, a small leather-bound notebook, and not one but two power strips filled with chargers—Kindle and Nook and Sony e-reader, iPad and iPhone, plus a plain old laptop computer—as well as a cellophane-wrapped brick of ramen that she intended to eat Sunday night but didn’t, too busy finishing the manuscript to do anything that resembled cooking beyond tearing open a bag of pretzels to dip in Greek yogurt. And of course the thick stack of paper, for the very unusual submission, delivered very unusually: on paper.
    “Everything okay?”
    Of the 500 queries, book proposals, and full manuscripts that arrive every year to the attention of Isabel Reed, 490 of them are digital, and at least 9 of the others are garbage. There seems to be a high correlation between paper submissions and unpublishable drivel.
    “Yeah,” Isabel says, unconvincingly. “Listen: that manuscript you gave me yesterday? Tell me again how it came to us.”
    This is what she wants to talk about? At dawn? That’s not Isabel’s style. As a rule, Isabel is an eminently reasonable boss, a valuable mentor, maybe even a genuine friend, not one of those psychopath caricatures. Which there are plenty of, in the competitive corridors of Atlantic Talent Management, and clearly elsewhere in the book business. Alexis has come to recognize that she had been damn lucky to have landed at her particular cubicle.
    “Right.” She closes her eyes and rubs them, trying to gather lucidity. “Friday. The package was dropped off during the middle of lunch—maybe one o’clock? You were definitely not in the building.”
    “In an envelope? In a cardboard box?”
    “A Jiffy bag.”
    “Who delivered it?”
    “Dunno.”
    “Well, was it Lucas? Or one of the other mailroom guys?”
    “Um, no. It was some guy I don’t know.”
    “As in, you don’t know his name? Or you’ve never seen him before?”
    “Never seen him before, I don’t think. The truth is I didn’t get a good look at him—really, I didn’t get any look at him—I was on a very, very long call with Steph Bernstein, who was having a massive meltdown about all the negative reader reviews on Goodreads, which have been sort of vicious, on top of that brutal daily Times review. Did you ever call her back, by the way? She’s pretty anxious to hear the feedback about her new proposal.”
    “Oh God. I really don’t want to.” That promised to be one of those bad-news conversations with a disappointed client that is the bane of an agent’s life.
    “So, anyway, I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the guy who delivered it. I sort of assumed he was from another department, like