What transpired next was the worst thing that had ever happened to Madeline. On a night shortly after the breakup, Geoffrey went on a bender of tequila and cocaine, and he showed up at Madeline’s dorm room at three o’clock in the morning, when both Madeline and her roommate were fast asleep, and he carried Madeline out of the building. He loaded her into the back of a panel van he had stolen from the parking lot of the Coaster Saloon and bound her wrists and ankles with plastic zip ties. He gagged her with a bandanna and took her to a motel in Encanto, where he kept her for fifty-two hours, until he finally ran out of cocaine and passed out cold. Madeline was able to make enough noise banging her elbows against the flimsy hotel wall that a Hispanic cleaning lady heard her, opened the door, and called the police.

After Madeline testified and after Geoffrey was sent to jail, she wanted to get as far away from Southern California as she possibly could. With the help of her former San Diego State professor, Madeline found a bed for the summer in a “writer’s retreat” on Nantucket Island. The “writer’s retreat” ended up being a bunch of Chi O girls from the University of North Carolina who had majored in English and liked to host poetry slams. But the room was cheap, and Madeline found a job busing tables at 21 Federal, leaving her days free to write.

By the end of summer, she had finished her first piece of writing ever—a novel entitled The Easy Coast, about a young woman who is brutally kidnapped by her loser drug-dealing boyfriend.

With further help from her former San Diego State professor, Madeline sent The Easy Coast to three agents in New York, and within a week, all three had called saying they wanted to represent her. Madeline flew from Nantucket to New York to meet with these agents, and this was how she met Trevor.

He had been her pilot.

Trevor liked to describe the way Madeline looked when he first met her: she was a beautiful blond from Southern California on the day her greatest dream was about to come true.

That year, in Madeline’s memory, was a giant starburst, an explosion of heat and light. Her book found an agent—Redd Dreyfus—and shortly thereafter, a thirty-thousand-dollar advance from an up-and-coming editor named Angie Turner at the publishing house Final Word. And Madeline met Trevor Llewellyn, and the two of them fell in love. Nine months into the relationship, they were engaged. By that time, Madeline’s book had received two starred prepublication reviews, from the notoriously cranky Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly, both announcing the emergence of a startling new talent.

“Startling new talent.” Madeline turned that phrase over and over in her mind as she stared now at her blank legal pad.

The Easy Coast hadn’t been a huge commercial success—it sold around fifteen thousand copies in hardcover—but it did well enough that Angie offered her a contract for a second novel.

Madeline’s next book, Hotel Springford, had been about a girl growing up in a grand old storied and haunted hotel with her banquet-waitress mother. It hadn’t sold as well as The Easy Coast, but Madeline had written it when Brick was a baby and she was too consumed with changing diapers and pureeing squash to worry about book sales.

After Hotel Springford, Madeline was surprised to feel the urge to write subside, for the first time in her life, supplanted by the joys and exhaustion of motherhood. She decided to take a hiatus from writing and just enjoy being a mom for a while. She loved life with Brick; it made the bumps in the road—her three lost pregnancies, Big T’s illness and death—bearable.

When Brick entered middle school and Madeline’s hopes for another child were pretty much dashed, she got back to writing fiction on her own timetable. The result was Islandia, which earned her the six-figure, two-book deal and ultimately landed her in her current predicament.

It had seemed like so much money last year, but after Redd’s cut and taxes, what was left was enough to pay off their backed-up credit cards, invest the fifty thousand dollars with Eddie, who seemed to make money in his sleep… and rent the apartment.

Madeline stared at the blank page. Would scented candles help? It was quiet in the apartment, but Madeline could hear voices and passing traffic out on the street. Mozart or Brahms would block that out. Writing a novel on deadline was hard work, especially when she was so preoccupied.

She gazed out the window, down onto Centre Street. Back in the whaling days, Centre Street was known as Petticoat Row, because the men had all gone off on whaling expeditions, leaving behind the women to run the businesses.

Petticoat Row wasn’t a bad title, but Angie was allergic to historical novels. They didn’t sell unless your name was Philippa Gregory.

The streetscape wasn’t as inspiring as Madeline had hoped.

A favor as cherished as a diamond had been cashed in on her behalf. Redd Dreyfus was an old-fashioned New York literary agent. He was rotund, he drank Scotch, he smoked cigars and took editors to lunch at the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, where he ordered the sirloin bloody rare. For some reason, Angie owed him. Angie Turner was whippet thin; she wore pencil skirts and slingbacks. She drank chardonnay and picked at salads. Madeline wondered about the favor. She imagined it involved another author, someone deeply respected and badly behaved. She imagined it involved sex, drugs, or money, though more likely it had to do with foreign rights or a publicity gaffe.

She would have liked to have parsed the particulars of her emotions with Trevor, but Trevor would be in the air. People thought that being a pilot was hard, but once one knew how to fly, it was actually pretty much the same as driving a bus, but with more sex appeal. Because of the sunglasses, Madeline liked to say.