“Shit,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
Honestly, I would have been perfectly fine if they had canceled my publishing contract and let me off the hook. I would have been happy to put my computer in a closet and never write another word. I’d just go back to teaching high school English like I had before the first book hit.
But letting me off the hook also meant I’d have to return the ninety-thousand-dollar advance, and that was pretty much all I had left in the bank.
I’d made a shit-ton of money over the last few years, but most of it had been spent or thrown on away on bad investments.
I’d spent it on frivolous things like the mortgage on the house that was too big for just me and my daughter. And the vacations to exotic places I cared nothing about. And lease payment on the Mercedes SL convertible that was the twin of the one my wife, Bethany, was driving on the night she died.
I’d spent almost four hundred thousand dollars on doctors and specialists and hospital stays to keep my daughter alive the first six months of her life.
If I had to return the advance, I’d literally be as broken financially as I felt mentally.
Rosetta read the expression on my face. Her tone softened. She asked, “How is Lizzie?”
“Lizzie is great,” I said with a smile, happy for the momentary change of subject. I tugged my phone from inside my jacket. I called up a photo of the gorgeous little girl with blond curls and set the phone on the desk.
Rosetta leaned over and cooed. “She looks like you.”
“She looks just like her mom,” I said, picking up the phone and stuffing it back inside my jacket. I couldn’t keep the anger from my tone, even after all this time. “Hopefully she got her mom’s looks and everything else from me.”
Rosetta nodded. She understood. She knew well the story of how my wife had been killed in a horrific car accident because she and her lover had been arguing and she lost control of the car.
Her neck snapped like a twig when the car hit the tree.
Her lover was in the passenger seat.
He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
He went through the windshield and hit the tree head-first.
He was my best friend and lawyer, Ernie Wilson.
There were lots of eyewitness accounts.
They saw a woman driving the red Mercedes at a high rate of speed in the pouring rain.
She was yelling at the man in the passenger seat.
The man reached for the wheel.
She jerked the wheel hard to the left and lost control.
The Mercedes careened across the median and barely missed two lanes of oncoming traffic as it flew off the road and hit a tree.
The paramedics used the jaws of life to cut open the car and pull my wife’s limp body out.
Ernie? Well, they scooped him up off the side of the road like the piece of trash he was.
The paramedics saw that the driver was pregnant, and she was taken by med-flight to Rosewood General.
By some miracle of God, the tiny baby growing in her uterus survived, but her mother did not.
They cut my wife open and pulled my daughter out to save her life.
She was born two months prematurely.
She took her first breath just as her mother was taking her last.
Rosetta gave me a moment of silence and let her eyes go around my face. I was sure I looked a mess.
My hair was disheveled.
I hadn’t shaved in a while.
I hadn’t slept.
There were dark circles under my eyes.
I certainly didn’t look like the handsome man in the photo on the back of my book jackets.
It was no wonder she asked, “Are you drinking again?”
The question made me smile. I wished I was drinking again. Being shitfaced drunk would have made life so much easier to take. I shook my head at her.
“I haven’t had a drop since Lizzie was born. I won’t let my daughter grow up with a drunk for a father like I did.”
She smiled. “That’s good to know.”
I gave her a nod and directed her back to the reason I was there. “Okay, so how much more time can you buy me? Really?”
She blew out her thin cheeks and pushed her eyebrows up. “I’m not sure at this point, Jackson. They are pretty upset with you, but they are not without a certain amount of understanding, given your situation.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. I was a bestselling author with a modicum of fame. My wife’s tragic death, and the fact that she had been fucking my best friend when she was seven months pregnant, had been tabloid fodder for months. Apparently, that garnered some sympathy from my publisher.
I asked, “What exactly does that mean?”
Rosetta chewed at the inside of her lip and tapped her nails on the desk for a moment. She finally said, “I can probably get you the extra time you need for the first draft if you can get them a complete outline within two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if that’s possible. I mean, Lizzie is two now and starting to walk. She takes up a lot of my time.”