She clutched the rosary in her pocket so tight that her hand turned white, and looked around.
The church was packed with hordes of people in black couture, clutching their quilted patent-leather bags and sniffling into monogrammed handkerchiefs. Were they all really Eris’s friends? They couldn’t have known her as intimately as Mariel had. Certainly they didn’t miss Eris the way she did, with a howling grief that roared up from inside her, threatened to drown her. Every morning for the past three days, Mariel had woken up and thought of something she wanted to tell Eris—only to remember. And then the grief would hit her all over again.
Mingled with the grief was a terrible gnawing guilt, about the cruel things she’d said the night Eris died. She hadn’t meant any of them; she’d just been upset in the moment, afraid that once Eris moved upTower, Mariel would lose her to that world. When Eris went to the party alone, Mariel had been nearly frantic.
She knew she loved Eris more than Eris loved her—that Eris might not even love her at all. That knowledge terrified her.
She’d loved Eris from the beginning, almost. She couldn’t say why, but she’d felt inexorably pulled in from the very first moment. Eris was bright and careless, sure; but she was also luminous and magnetic, with an energy that made Mariel feel suddenly alive. She’d tried to fight it, for a while, but in the end Mariel had never really had a choice. She couldn’t help loving Eris.
When Eris called her that night from the party, Mariel was overcome with relief. They were going to make up. Eris said she would be there soon. Mariel had stayed up all night and half the morning waiting, but Eris never came.
In the end, she lost Eris to this upper-floor world after all.
Mariel’s gaze traveled to the casket at the front of the church. She couldn’t believe that Eris was really in that thing. It wasn’t big enough to hold her, with her deep, rich laugh and her exaggerated gestures and her larger-than-life emotions. This entire church—no, this entire Tower—wasn’t big enough to hold her. Eris was more than all of it.
As the priest droned on, Mariel kept thinking about the way Eris had died. They said she’d followed her stupid friends up a ladder, onto part of the Tower’s roof that should have been closed off. That she’d had too much to drink, and slipped and fell—a terrible, tragic, avoidable accident.
Mariel knew it wasn’t true. Eris had told her she wasn’t drinking. And then she’d sent that strange text, about how she needed to do something for a friend first. What was it that Eris had needed to do? What kind of friend would send Eris up onto the roof? Something didn’t add up, and it was tormenting Mariel.
These highliers thought they were immune to real-life problems, that they were safe up here, ensconced miles above the ground with their money and their connections. But they were wrong. Mariel was going to find out the truth about Eris’s death. If anyone was responsible—if anyone had anything to hide—she would make them pay.
She stayed in the back of the church for the rest of the funeral service, uninvited and ignored. But anyone who looked would have noticed the candelabra casting shadows on her dramatic cheekbones, illuminating the tears that streamed down her face.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRITING A NOVEL has always been my dream, and yet at times it felt like a near impossible task. I’m grateful to have had an incredible amount of support and assistance throughout this process.
First of all, huge thanks to the entire team at Alloy Entertainment. Joelle Hobeika, my intrepid, tireless, fearless editor: thank you for being my partner in crime from the very beginning. This book has benefitted from your encouragement and ideas in more ways than I could ever count. Josh Bank, the first person to hear my pitch on The Thousandth Floor: thank you for falling in love with it the way I did, and the countless hours you spent hammering out story beats with me. Sara Shandler, thank you for your energy, your encouragement, and your editorial insights. Les Morgenstein, Gina Girolamo, Maggie Cahill, and everyone else at the Alloy LA office, thanks for all your constant and enthusiastic support of The Thousandth Floor. Thanks also to Theo Guliadis, for your social media genius; Elaine Damasco, for your incredible vision and design work; Liz Dresner, for all your design talents; Romy Golan, for keeping us on schedule; Stephanie Abrams and Matt Bloomgarden, for managing more financial and deal spreadsheets than there are pages in this book; and Heather David, for somehow making the whole operation run smoothly despite all our efforts to the contrary.
I am so grateful to the wonderful team at HarperCollins, without whom this book would never have been possible. Emilia Rhodes: we’ve come a long way from the days when you and I edited vampire novels together. There is no one I would rather work on this project with. Thank you for believing in it, and in me. Jen Klonsky: thank you, thank you, thank you for your boundless enthusiasm and support throughout this process. Alice Jerman: I know firsthand what a difficult job it is assisting the editorial process, and I am so appreciative of all your help (especially all the last-minute edits you so patiently entered for me by hand!). Jenna Stempel: thank you for this lush, gorgeous, utterly perfect cover. Sarah Kaufman, Alison Klapthor, Alison Donalty, and the rest of the Harper design team: thank you for making this book look as beautiful as it does. Huge thanks as well to Elizabeth Ward and the rest of the Harper marketing team, and to Gina Rizzo and the publicity team, for your tireless and insanely creative efforts getting the word out about The Thousandth Floor.
To everyone at Rights People—Alexandra Devlin, Allison Hellegers, Caroline Hill-Trevor, Rachel Richardson, Alex Webb, Harim Yim, and Charles Nettleton—thank you for bringing The Thousandth Floor to so many places in the world. I couldn’t ask for a more generous, gracious, and truly wonderful team of foreign rights agents. I am lucky to have you, and don’t I know it!
To my friends and family, thank you all for your contributions to this work, and for putting up with me during its creation. Mom and Dad—I would never have gotten here without your unwavering support and confidence in me. John Ed and Lizzy, you have always been my inspiration, my cheerleaders, and my earliest fans. Thank you to my grandparents, especially Snake, for teaching me to read many years ago. You are dearly missed, and always will be.
Thanks also to the Field family, for housing me during more than one long writing weekend, with a special shout-out to Kiki, for driving me eight hours home from a wedding while I wrote the whole way in your front seat. And finally, of course, to Alex: thank you for your patience, your guacamole incentives, for talking about fictional teenagers far more than you ever bargained on, and for reading this novel every step of the way.