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.Of course, newspapers themselves were now among the afflicted.But who was he to deny someone else’s unexpected opportunity?It should be easy enough to confirm if the series were real—there would be a letter of offer or a contract—but then what? Everyone knew that long-distance relationships eventually fell apart.John had spent almost half his life with Amanda, and in many ways she defined it.The thought of being without her terrified him.The thought of her being surrounded by predatory males terrified him even more.She was beautiful, and so vulnerable right now, like a nerve scraped raw.John picked up the little spoon from the plate of caviar and examined it.It was mother-of-pearl.Amanda must have bought it for the occasion.He dug it into the glistening mound of caviar and put some in his mouth.It didn’t seem right to just swallow something so expensive and of which there was so little, so he held it in his mouth for a moment and then popped the eggs between his tongue and palate.The result was so exquisite he realized he must be doing it right.He took another little scoop.And then another.It couldn’t take too long to produce four episodes.She could be safely home in six months.Not that he wanted her to fail; she deserved success more than anyone else he knew.After graduating summa cum laude with an insightful thesis on the sociological consequences of the industrial revolution as reflected in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Amanda had spent almost the entire time between graduation and their move to Philadelphia writing catalog copy for an online outdoor-sports outfitter.She worked eight-hour days laboring to find new and inventive ways of describing mukluks and all-weather parkas (“top notes of Ugg with a soupçon of Piperlime, and guaranteed 100 percent cat-fur free!”).She joked that her situation could have been worse—her best friend, Gisele, who had graduated first in their class, had taken a job painting house exteriors and had recently married a man who taught sound healing to a group of raw-foodists—but John knew she was simply putting on a brave face.In her spare time, she worked on her first novel, although she was too shy to show it to John until it was complete.When she finally gave it to him, John flipped through the pages with a growing sense of unease.He hoped earnestly and with his soul that he was wrong—after all, his own guilty pleasures included Dan Brown and Michael Crichton—and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel was missing that crucial something.Her prose was beautiful and polished and swept him along, but by the time he reached the end she had not blown up a single thing.There was no car wreck, no murder, no secret brotherhood or international plague.It was psychological and literary and while John understood that there were people who enjoyed such books, he wasn’t one of them, which was exceedingly unfortunate given that his wife had just written one and wanted his opinion.When his silence finally grew conspicuous, he lied copiously and through his teeth.As the manuscript made its way around New York publishing houses, Amanda—his steady, strong, unsinkable Amanda—began to crack.She developed insomnia.She gnawed her cuticles until they bled.She cooked ever more complicated meals and ate virtually nothing.She developed headaches and, for the first time ever, complained about her job.(“What’s wrong with ‘tufts of skunk’? They wanted edgy, I gave them edgy.How was I supposed to know it really was skunk? And if it was, why all the secrecy?”)Four and a half months passed.A handful of rejections trickled in, followed by radio silence.And then, on Amanda’s thirty-fourth birthday, her agent called.A publisher had made an offer for The River Wars and Amanda’s as-yet-unwritten second book.Amanda’s was a modest advance, but it allowed her to give up copywriting.Chinese cat fur be damned! With the exception of being required to publish under a pseudonym, John had never seen Amanda so happy.(“Nobody is going to buy a novel by Amanda Thigpen,” her editor had explained.“Now Amanda LaRue, on the other hand …”) The night of the book sale was the first appearance of Osetra in their household, and for that one night everything felt possible—bestseller lists, foreign editions, movie deals.John had never been so happy to be wrong.If the lead-up to the release of The River Wars was a frenzy of excitement and anxiety, the weeks that followed were devastating.There was no launch party.In retrospect, John realized that he was probably supposed to have arranged one.There were no reviews, because it had been published in paperback rather than as a hardcover, a prejudice John and Amanda didn’t understand but felt someone should have explained.Her “tour” consisted of three local signings.John drove Amanda to the first because she was too terrified to be counted on to steer, and when he reached across the gearbox for her hand she clung so tightly that his palm was pitted with nail marks.She practiced deep breathing in the parking lot before going in, and her hands trembled so violently that she expressed doubts about her ability to sign her name.The bookstore had a small table set up with a semicircle of folding chairs in front of it.Amanda’s books were piled beside two Sharpies, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, and a bottle of water.Amanda took her seat behind the table and waited.Halfway through her allotted hour, a man wandered to the middle of the semicircle and settled into a chair
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