The Accident Read Online Free PDF Page B

commercial or talent or something, or, y’know, accounting. Whatever.”
    “Was there anything to give any idea who it came from? Or where?”
    “Like, um, what?”
    “ I don’t know,” Isabel says, exasperation rising in her voice. Isabel sounds too frustrated, for this line of questioning, this early in the morning. “Like a post mark? A postage meter’s stamp? Anything written on the package?”
    “No, not that I remember. Sorry.”
    “And there’s no other contact info for the author? No note, or letter, or anything?”
    “Just that e-mail address, on the cover page. Have you tried that?”
    “Yeah. All I get is an error bounce-back.”
    “Weird.”
    “Isn’t it? So … You read it over the weekend? All of it?”
    “Yes.” It sort of ruined Alexis’s weekend. And Courtney gave her so much shit about her weekend geek-out that Alexis caved, agreeing to a Monday-night revelry that runs utterly counter to her work ethic. Which is how she ended up at a book-launch party, with Courtney andher friends from the Columbia publishing course, huddled together in their chunky eyeglasses and liberal-arts degrees, inhaling pinot grigio and cubes of dried-out Manchego.
    Courtney is only two years older than Alexis, but she has her own office—a tiny little windowless cube, with glass walls that face the door to the book-storage room across the corridor, but still: a door. And her own clients, at least some of them. And her own business cards.
    Meanwhile Alexis has been entry-level for two years, nothing but incremental cost-of-living pay increases and no additional vacation time. Two years of answering someone else’s phone, wearing the headset nine or ten hours a day—wearing that damn headset in the halls, at her desk, in the bathroom . Two years of filing someone else’s contracts, mailing someone else’s bound galleys, reading someone else’s submissions. Assisting someone else’s life, instead of living her own. And taking someone else’s calls, at seven fucking o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Even if that someone is the famous—or once famous—Isabel Reed.
    “Isabel?” she asks. “What’s this all about? Did you actually read it?”
    “Oh, yes. It’s incredible.”
    “ Right? I had no idea how Wolfe Media got started. And all that business in Europe with the CIA? And that accident? Unbelievable.”
    “That may be exactly the right word. Do you believe it?”
    “You don’t?”
    “It’s hard to say. There’s so much …  negative , isn’t there? Maybe too negative to be credible?”
    Alexis wonders if Isabel might be right. Or if Isabel’s judgment is clouded. “You know him, don’t you?”
    “Charlie Wolfe?”
    “Yeah.”
    “No,” Isabel says. “Not really. We met a handful of times, long ago.” For a few seconds the phone line is filled with nothing but breathing. Then, “Alexis, have you told anybody about the manuscript?”
    Alexis is seized with panic. “Like who?”
    “Like any one?”
    “No, no,” she instinctively lies. But there was of course Courtney. And their friend James from ICM. And then—oh God—that British woman, the subsidiary-rights director at McNally & Sons, maybe named Camille, something-or-other …
    What the hell was she thinking? She was thinking that this is what you’re supposed to do, with a hot new property: talk about it. Make people want it, expect it. Try to create an air of inevitability about it.
    But she can see now that she’d been too eager. Too early. She’d wanted to feel like a grown-up, like she had grown-up responsibilities, even though she wasn’t, and didn’t. She wanted her job to catch up to her ambition.
    And—fuck!—there was that tweet of hers, @LitGirl, late Sunday night: Can’t stop reading #AccidentByAnonymous! My new favorite author. But who ARE you, Anonymous?
    “Good,” Isabel says. “And the report—did you write it at work?”
    “Um, yeah?”
    And of course her Facebook status over the weekend, LOVING