With sincere thanks to every reader (and my precious reviewers) who has taken the time to start journeying with me on this story – particularly the Anne-girls who have followed me across.
Love
MrsVonTrapp x
Chapter Two
Whatever You Do Is What Shall Be
TORONTO
PRESENT DAY
Andrew
His book tour wasn't meant to spend an additional day in Toronto.
He knew how these things worked; he had helped organize enough of them, back in the day, back in New York. They were whistle-stop conveyor belts of large chains and small independents; signings, readings and photo opportunities, and the ways in which assistants, as he had once been, helped to justify their existence.
On the back of the money they made off you, the publicity departments of the publishing houses – even his own – wished to expend very little on you, particularly a new, untested author - and that included both transport and accommodation. His city hotel was perfectly reasonable, but he was used to both the luxurious creature comforts of home and, conversely, the homely limitations of his shoebox, as she had called it, complete with its décor of yellowing Penguin classics. She had been right about that, he had thought at the time with a chagrined grimace. She had been right about many things, but regretfully wrong about the essential things… but, irrefutably, so had he. Knowing things about her - a great many things, as it turned out - had not equated to a knowledge of her.
That had come not as a blinding flash during their brief time in Sitka but as a gradual awakening, building to an incredible, undeniable - and previously unthinkable - realization... he loved Margaret Tate.
But as slow as he was to realize this, to formulate the actual thoughts, he was slower in his attempts to formulate the words to tell her, as his brain chased to catch up to his heart. And then… too slow became too late. And he was left clutching his regrets and shouting into the void as her plane launched itself into the sky, bound for the city that would be her home no longer, and would no longer feel like his without her.
Margaret
Toronto wasn't so bad, Margaret had long rationalized.
It was cosmopolitan and colorful but also, after New York, strangely calming. She no longer exercised in her apartment in front of a digital screen of woods and trails, but out in actual nature itself. Instead of terrorizing her junior staff into fetching her unsweetened cinnamon lite soy lattes she instead frightened the Starbucks staff when she occasionally went in to order her own. Her designated year of purgatory had already stretched to eighteen months, as long and straight and unchanging as the horizon used to be to her. There had been one horizon, long ago now, that she had contemplated that morning in Sitka, the morning of her non-wedding. When she had gone, after a sleepless night, to see the sweep of sea and sky from her bedroom window and how the vastness took her breath away, and how she had known, with a painful certainty, that she both loved Andrew Paxton and that she could never, ever marry him.
It was therefore typical that after leaving the country – well, to be technical, being ejected from it - putting some 367 miles and a border between them, that she should begin to see him everywhere. In the press releases she was bombarded with daily; in print and online advertisements; on the proud placard of her beloved little local bookstore of Upcoming Reads; and trumpeted on the website of her former employer, where she had brokered his generous publishing deal as her last bit of business as editor-in-chief at Colden Books.
Her new, homegrown employer was a small, boutique publishing company and a world away from that monolithic New York office; a poor cousin compared to a rich maiden aunt. Here she had been safe and sequestered, and inherently solitary, as if that Alaskan interlude had been a mere fever dream, and the call of connection, of family, only a barely remembered echo of another kind of life.
She normally sent an obliging underling to these Meet the Author events, tiresome as they could be, and especially tiresome when you could no longer compete with the big boys. She had done that with his event the previous evening, invited by her old firm as a professional courtesy, considering she had theoretically discovered and had signed the author the public were meeting… and instead deliberately staying in, drinking too much wine and trying not to watch the clock. A braver person, or perhaps, more accurately, a more brazen one – herself before Sitka – may have gone anyway and be damned, and if he wanted to confront her with his embarrassment and disappointment; if he wanted to show how his life was so much better when no longer at her beck and call; if he wanted to inform her he had gratefully run straight back into the arms of ex-girlfriend Gertrude, so be it.
But tonight the underling had a prior commitment, and strangely the ability to order staff about had become increasingly diluted up in this bracing Canadian air. So she would do a quick check in at this other event tonight herself. Strictly half an hour; one drink, no canapes; circulate the room; save your conversation for the three most important people; and out again. It was her tried and tested rule, passed down to him, ensconced as he would inevitably be by now in his seat on his flight out of Toronto and out of her life forever.
It should have been a more comforting thought than it was.
Andrew
He wasn't meant to spend an additional day in Toronto.
When the PA had quakingly informed his publicist of the booking error; that his flight was infact not for another twenty four hours and all other arrangements had been linked to this later departure, his mind had begun a strange sort of freefall. He had been inadvertently looking for her; at the airport; at the hotel; at the various bookstore signings; at the Meet and Greet event last night. It was if he could sense her, just on his periphery, but frustratingly out of reach.
It was madness, that was for sure. Nothing said I never want to see you again like never actually trying to see you again… She had dissolved into thin air, just as she had dissolved their business deal and absolved him of all of the obligations she had cornered him into. She had wished him an amazing life without ever actually considering she had already played a part in making it so, and without him realizing it until he had stood over the bed they had fleetingly and fraternally shared, holding her parting note in his hand and seeing his ticket to freedom in the manuscript she herself had partly inspired.
But he was now in the city she had reluctantly made her new home, with one additional day (and night) up his sleeve, and an assistant he could have work for him in the way he had once worked… How many Margaret Tates in publishing did it take to scare a too-inquisitive PA?
He only needed the one.
Notes
Our chapter title is from the new-age wit and wisdom of Gammy.