But it didn’t matter how homey the set looked. It was where, my roiling stomach was telling me, I was about to die.
Why, oh, why, had I let Rosie talk me into saying yes to this gig?
Will was standing in front of the chairs doing a not-terrible job of welcoming the almost five hundred people in the audience. I knew there were almost five hundred people because I’d seen a sign on the wall that said MAXIMUM ROOM CAPACITY: 500, and nearly every seat was full.
Obviously they were all there for Will. I could see Lauren and her friends smack-dab in the middle of the audience—close to the stage but not too close—gazing up at him, enraptured, as he thanked everyone for coming.
And who could blame them? He did make a very fine literary ambassador. Whoever was running the stage lighting from the back of the house was doing an excellent job of it, the spotlight bringing out the glossy highlights in Will’s dark hair and causing shadows to form just right on … other parts of him.
Whoa. What was I doing, looking at those parts? I was a celebrated children’s author of books that empowered little girls (even if I wrote about them through the voice of a feisty teenaged cat). The fact that I’d even noticed Will’s “parts” was so beneath me, especially when there were so many young women around. The Snappettes were milling about in their cute little matching shorts and shirts, helping with crowd control and passing out festival programs to anyone who hadn’t received one yet, and still trying to sell their baked goods.
Of course there’d been quite a few gasps of excitement and some scattered applause when Will announced why Molly wasn’t there—everyone in the audience seemed to be invested in the birth of her baby.
But there was no getting around it: Will Price was the real draw at this festival.
And that’s why when I got up onto that stage, I was going to be super, duper nice to him.
Not that I’d ever intended to be mean to him. Why should I? He’d apologized. The past was all water under the bridge. I was completely letting go of the whole New York Times thing and welcoming this new journey we were on together … whatever it was.
And I had to admit that The Moment was not the worst book I had ever read. The actions of its hero were morally questionable, and the heroine had no backbone whatsoever.
But the book was at least more entertaining than the Bible, the only other book in my hotel room, which I’d (spoiler alert) already read.
So I was going to be as sweet as pie to Will Price, whatever he said up there onstage, and as soon as Bernadette showed up—I had no idea where she was—I was going to tell her to do the same, no matter what infuriating thing he might end up saying as moderator. This was his town, and we were guests here. It was like in Kitty Katz #15, when Kitty and her best friend, Felicity Feline, were hired to puppy sit in the beach town of Dogsville. Did the two of them back down from that challenge?
No, because they were competent as well as gracious. Bernadette and I would be the same, because we were just as good a team.
Which was why it was a bit odd to me that Bernadette was taking so long with her phone call. We were almost five minutes into Will’s welcome speech (which was mostly a long list of thank-yous to various sponsors and donors) when she finally showed up, breathless and looking a little shaky.
“Jo.” She knelt in the aisle beside my seat.
“Bern,” I whispered. “Where have you been? We’re going on as soon as Will is done up there.”
Then I saw her expression. As nervous as I felt, she looked a thousand times worse.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered. “Was it the mango? Do you need some ginger ale or something? I think they have some in the green room. We could—”
She shook her head. “No, Jo. It’s worse.”
For Bernadette, there was only one problem worse than digestive issues. I knew without her having to tell me what it was:
Sophie, her eldest. It was always Sophie.
She waved to me to follow her. I did, the two of us creeping out a side exit into a hallway, letting the door to the auditorium close softly behind us so we wouldn’t interrupt Will’s speech.
“What’s happened?” I asked, my stomach in knots.
“Somehow Jen got it into her head that it would be a good idea to let Sophie have her friend Tasha sleep over last night.” There were tears in Bernadette’s eyes. “Don’t ask me why when Jen’s never supervised a playdate on her own before. So of course this morning when the girls woke up at the crack of dawn, they decided to play Horsies and were crawling all around on our not-yet-totally refinished wood floors, neighing. And now Sophie’s got a splinter in her knee.”
I was confused. A splinter? A splinter? “Can’t Jen take it out? She’s a doctor, for pity’s sake.”
“That’s just it. She tried. But this is no ordinary splinter. It’s huge—maybe an inch long—and it entered vertically, way too deep to reach with tweezers. Jen’s had to take Sophie to the ER.”
I bit my lip. It wasn’t at all funny.
But it was exactly the sort of thing that would happen to Sophie.
“Sophie’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“Yes, of course she’s going to be all right. It’s a splinter. Only they’re surgically removing it in exactly fifteen minutes. And Sophie wants me to be there with her via FaceTime while they do it. Jen swears Sophie can’t feel a thing—they’ve numbed the area thoroughly. But she’s already screaming bloody murder for me. I can’t not be there for her, Jo.”
“Of course you have to be there for her.” I took a deep breath. I knew what I had to do. “I can do our panel on my own. Don’t even worry about it.”
“Are you sure?” Bernadette looked as if she might break into tears. “I so hate to ask!”
I hadn’t even had a chance to break the news to her yet about Will being our moderator.
But I certainly couldn’t do it now. She was frazzled enough already.
Being a writer could be hard sometimes.
But being a parent, I knew, was the hardest job in the world. I was grateful sometimes for my easy—if sometimes slightly lonely—life with only the responsibilities of my sweet elderly Miss Kitty and accident-prone dad to worry about.
“Of course,” I said. “Go be with your daughter.”
Bernadette looked relieved. “I knew you’d understand,” she said, giving me a quick hug even as her cell phone chimed. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Of course you will.”
There was no way she would. An inch-long splinter, buried deep in her six-year-old daughter’s knee? I’d be lucky to see Bernadette again before lunch.
But I plastered Fake Jo’s smile across my face and turned back toward the auditorium doors, opening them just in time to hear Will Price say, “So please join me in giving a warm Little Bridge welcome to New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors Bernadette Zhang and Jo Wright!”
The audience applauded with—I liked to think—more than mere politeness as I trotted up the stairs along the side of the stage and over to the three chairs where we were to have our chat. Will was standing in front of the middle chair, still clutching his microphone. He smiled as he saw me approach, looking as ridiculously handsome as ever … but that smile wavered as he saw no one following me up the steps to the stage.