🌁 chapter one: the ghost [let me be your ghost]

"there are no ghosts in the world, save for the ones we make for ourselves.”

“There are no ghosts in the world, save for the ones we make for ourselves.”

-Sherlock Holmes

I hated deserts, but I hated the man standing in front of me more.

Behind him the Arizona sun was bleeding out over the golf course—a violent, gorgeous wash of color above eighteen holes of impossible green that had no business existing out here, sucking a fortune in water out of the dirt just so men like Brett Wolf could swing a club in paradise.

And swing he did. His wolfish grin caught the flash of the camera, the same grin that let him bed the cart girls and the wives of his competitors right under the nose of his valium-addled wife.

“So strong, Brett! Now swing it like a winning shot,” the photographer goaded.

I watched from the shade of the country club awning, water bottle sweating in my hand. Men like him don’t need encouragement. But when he glanced over, I gave him the same demure smile I’d worn the entire time I’d worked for him, and he beamed back, muscles straining against his golf shirt.

“Stay focused Lola,” a voice buzzed in my earpiece.

Scratch that. I hated the two-timing golfer cheesing for the camera, but I hated the voice in my ear more.

I faked a cough and turned away to feign a sip of water while I talked into my earpiece. “Shut up, unless you’d like to come out here and take my place.”

The male voice chuckled. “I don’t think I’d appreciate the view as much.”

Rage bubbled up like magma under my put-together surface. My hands tightened around my leather notebook and my Pilot G-2 until I thought I’d snap them both.

“Okay, that’s a wrap! Great work, Brett,” the photographer said, going in for a high five. “This is going to be an epic cover.”

I smoothed my face, severing the connection between my soul and my body. Finish this job and then you’ll be free, I reminded myself. At the reminder of what lay on the other side of this assignment, I felt a flip of my stomach. I shoved the emotions down. Focus, Lola.

Brett sauntered over to me. “Sport Standard magazine cover—not bad, eh? We’ve come a long way since you started writing my book, don’t you think?”

“I can’t believe the journey is almost over. By the way, the publisher is doing their final review of the book and I need to go over some details with you. Can we chat for a bit?”

Brett nodded, and I felt his gaze dip from my eyes to my body. As a writer on the cusp of entering my thirties, I knew where men’s eyes wandered, and I took advantage of it. I’d learned to dress my wildness down: a black flared skirt, oxford shoes, a white blouse unbuttoned just so. Hair the flat black of my mother’s side pinned back into something tidy and forgettable, though strands of it always worked loose by the end of a job, like it knew better than I did. I was built willowy, all length and no softness, and there was a feral quality to me I’d never quite ironed out—something that vibrated just under the surface, that made people lean back before they understood why. So I covered it up. Wore thick black-rimmed reading glasses I didn't strictly need, perched low like punctuation. A notebook held to my chest, a pen clicked open and ready—the harmless costume of a woman who lived in other people’s sentences. Dark eyes I kept wide and patient instead of hungry. And a smile I drained all the rage from, so I could appear interested, not bloodthirsty.

Because I was bloodthirsty.

But so was Brett. And I needed to be careful as I finished this job, as he couldn’t sink his teeth into me before I went in for the kill first.

“Here, let’s go somewhere quiet,” Brett said, and placed his hand on my lower back, leading me back into the quiet clubhouse and through some back staircases, into VIP areas that he navigated with an ease that made me queasy. How many women had he led back into places like this? Somewhere quiet where he could exert his power? But he was more than just a womanizer. Something more dangerous, and I needed him to show his monstrous side to me. Just for a moment.

Brett led me into a wood paneled room with a bar cart. He motioned to a small loveseat facing floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the golf course.

“Y’know Lola, when my agent told me I should work with a ghostwriter on my book, at first I was offended. I know I may seem like some big dumb athlete, but I thought I could actually write this thing myself,” he said as he poured an amber liquid into glasses from a crystal decanter.

I opened my notebook, running my hands across blank pages to calm myself. “Everyone can write a book, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best use of time. It’s the same way that everyone can build their own house, but doesn’t mean they should. A memoir ghostwriter is like a good architect. We make sure everything’s constructed correctly.” The practiced words leave my lips. My script running as planned.

Brett picked up the two glasses, walking over to the loveseat beside me. He sat down closer than I expected, his knee touching my bare one, and I summoned everything within me not to reflexively jerk away.

“Yeah yeah, I know you have to say that,” he said with a grin, handing me my drink. “Cheers.”

I put on my professional smile, clinking my glass to his and then faking a sip. I set the glass down on the mirrored side table before us, and unclicked my pen, reminding him of the business I was here to attend to. “As I mentioned earlier, the publisher needs me to confirm some details before the book goes to print.”

“Shoot,” he said over another sip of his drink, his eyes shining in a way that made me want to retreat.

Here we go. “On June 2nd of your first year going pro, you mentioned vacationing with your first wife in Greece. But I think we got that date wrong, didn’t we? You went to Athens with her closer to the fall because you hate how hot European cities get that time of year. Isn’t that right?”

He frowned, his eyes assessing me. “That could be right.”

“I think it must be right, because when I went back through our project files I found this email with the plane tickets your assistant bought for June 2nd. But they weren’t for you and your wife. Tickets for you—and your lawyer—to the Cayman Islands.” I flipped to a back page of my notebook where folded pieces of paper and unfolded them, handing them to him. “Do you remember now?”

Brett gripped his glass tighter, and I wondered how much pressure it would take for it to shatter. “What does this have to do with the book?”

“Go in for the kill, Lola,” that tinny male voice buzzed in my ear.

“You weren’t going for a vacation though, were you? You were going to open an account. An offshore account that you would then pay one Ricky Sumner from. Ricky, of course, is the hitman who you hired to kill the husband of your soon-to-be second wife. A California senator, actually, so quite a high-profile hit to make in the name of love. Do I have that right?”

There was a weird twinkle in Brett’s eye. He stared me down before knocking back the rest of his liquor. Then he set the glass on the table. “No one does anything for love, Lola. Maybe you’ll learn that one day.”

“If it wasn’t for love, what was it for?”

His wolfish grin spread across his face, and he reached over to brush a strand of my ink black hair out of my face. “It was for the money.”

“Get him to admit who it was,” the voice urged in my ear.

“So someone paid you?”

“You’d love to know who, wouldn’t you?” he said, his smile twisting. “Didn’t you ever learn the price of curiosity, Lola?”

Suddenly, he lunged at me. I tried to duck away but he was too fast, his athlete reflexes and strong hands pressing me back on the couch as he straddled me.

“What a waste,” he growled, and his hands went for my throat, closing around my windpipe.

I thrashed against him as he shook his head, his expression too calm as he choked me. As if he had done this before. “You have the cute writer thing going for you. You and I could have had some fun together. But you just asked too many fucking questions.”

I slapped at him, scratched at him, but spots started appearing in my vision as his fingers dug deeper into the flesh of my neck. His monster finally unleashed, finally visible for all to see.

The edges of my vision were starting to darken, and I felt a flash of panic—where the fuck were they?—when I heard it.

A crash as the door flung open, the heaviness of boots as people swarmed into the room.

“FBI, HANDS UP!”

Suddenly, the pressure was released from my neck, and Brett rolled off of me.

I fell to the ground next to the couch as the FBI agents in their black jackets emblazoned with yellow lettering surrounded Brett and the couch. I gasped for air, crawling away from him.

A pair of boots stopped in front of me, and as activity continued to swarm in the room and I heard the clicking of cuffs and reading of rights, a man’s face appeared in front of me.

“Are you okay, Lola?” a boyish looking agent asked.

“Get me out of here, Matthew,” I wheezed before my world went dark.

My job was done.

***

I awoke on a different couch, A/C blasting.

“She’s awake,” a female voice said, and I opened my eyes to see a paramedic with rubber gloves reaching over with two fingers to stretch my eyes open, blinding me with a flashlight. “She looks good.”

I swatted her hands away. “Good?” I croaked out. “He choked me. I almost died.”

I pushed myself up to sitting as the paramedic handed me a miniature water bottle, uncapping it for me.

“That’s what the hazard pay is for,” FBI Special Agent Matthew said, sitting behind his desk. The walls were lined with bookshelves, with big posters on the wall featuring books and bestselling accolades, all emblazoned with the Red Fox Publishing House logo.

“You couldn’t even bring me to a real hospital? You had to bring me back to your fake offices?” I said, rubbing my sore neck as the paramedic packed up her things, snapping off her rubber gloves and tossing them in the wastebasket.

“Which is why I called Hannah,” Matthew nodded at the paramedic who nodded and ducked out of the office, leaving me alone with Matthew. “You know we’ve got to keep your cover intact.”

“I’d like a raise,” I muttered. Then, everything came rushing back to me. “Wait—that was it. That was my third book. I’m done,” I said, emotions hitting me as I jumped to my feet, realizing that my obligations were completed—and then freezing as I caught Matthew’s stony expression.

“You should know that I fought for you,” he said softly. “You got Wolfe, dead to rights, but the last one—the last one didn’t hold up in court. I told the Bureau it wasn’t on your performance. That he got off on a technicality, not on something you didn’t lock down. But they said you didn’t get enough admissible evidence, so you still are under contract for one more book with us.”

My legs gave out underneath me, and I fell back to the couch. “That was supposed to be my last assignment. You promised,” I whispered, feeling like a child.

“Lola. I’m sorry. I know these books have been hard on you these past few years. But I mean it when I say that the next one will be your last. One more book ghostwriting job with a new target, one more successful sentencing. Then you’ll have your freedom, a fresh start with nothing hanging over you. Can you do that for me?”

For him? Fuck him, I thought, the underground spring of my anger bubbling up again. Matthew believed I saw him as a lifeline. That I was doing this for him, my handler. But I wasn’t. I was doing this for myself, for my freedom. Freedom he dangled above me like a dog with a bone.

“I need a ride,” I said.

Matthew nodded. “I can get Abby to drive you home.”

“Not home,” I said.

***

I needed the bookstore the way some people need church.

I had Matthew’s fake secretary Abby help me hide the blossoming bruises on my neck with her concealer and then drop me in the parking lot of The Cracked Spine, where my car was parked. I had left it here because it was my second home—and because I never drove myself to operations if I could help it. Driving gave me anxiety.

Abby drove away as I opened the trunk of my Jeep, reaching in and grabbing a canvas bag full of rejects—a book on existential philosophy and romantic love, a slightly racist collection of travel essays by Ian Fleming as he slept his way across Asia, and a recipe book I had never gotten around to actually cooking anything from. The top room in my desert loft was filled wall-to-wall with books, and to make room for new reads I had to cull my collection, which proved to be a sometimes emotional experience. Patience was not a virtue I possessed, and recipe books had a way of making me accidentally-or-not-so-accidentally light things on fire when my frustration boiled over.

I breathed in the warm desert night as I brought my bundle to the bookstore squished between a Hobby Lobby and a Goodwill.

As I walked, I noticed a nice black sports car in the parking lot, which was very out of place for this area of town. I felt the urge to drag my keys across its shiny lacquered paint—what were rich people doing shopping at a used bookstore?—but decided against it. They might be dropping off valuable books.

I pushed through the double doors and dropped my stack on the counter. A small cloud of dust rose from my pile.

On the other side appeared Tabur, popping up from underneath the counter, built like a cowboy with rugged handsomeness and a well-trimmed beard.

“Back again, she is,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Bit late even for you.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to make some sacrifices to the book gods so I can sleep, so I’m glad you’re open late,” I said. The Brett Wolf job still sat behind my sternum like a stone I couldn’t dislodge, and I was searching for a feeling of familiarity. I hoped Wolf was enjoying rotting in a prison cell tonight. “How was your weekend? Make it up to the res?”

“It was good to see family,” Tabur said, and then quickly changed the subject, flinching at some recent memory I could feel but didn’t push on. Tabur was of Native American descent, and I knew his family on the reservation was a complicated, sore subject. My nosiness was not rewarded outside of the memoirs I ghostwrote, so I held my tongue.

“How’s the book?” Tabur asked, his eyes scanning me.

“Oh, y’know. Perpetually unwritten,” I said. The lie came easy—easier than breathing, sometimes. The reality of what I actually did for a living wasn’t something that would bring me closer to the people I interacted with on a daily basis. So I kept the fiction alive, that I was a writer who never really wrote, books dying slow deaths on a hard drive that never saw the light of day.

A lie that was maybe just slightly less lonely and sad than my indentured servitude to the FBI, perhaps.

Tabur scanned the last of the books and printed a receipt, circling my total store credit. “Here’s what you’re working with. I hope you find some inspiration in the stacks,” he said with a smile that reached his warm maple eyes. “We got some good new reads in. Including some books on Russian gulags—weren’t you curious about that?”

“Shh, don’t speak too loudly or the Russian spies will know I’m on to them,” I said, stuffing the receipt into the faded jeans I had changed into before leaving Matthew’s fake publishing offices.

“Aye aye, cap’n,” Tabur said with a salute.

I turned to the endless maze of old wood shelves in front of me, tote bag tucked under my arm. I liked old bookstores because they played dead—slain trees offering ink-stained wisdom from authors either six feet underground or drinking their way there. After the day I’d had, the quiet felt like medicine.

I passed books stolen or donated from libraries, books with weird stains, books with curling, yellowing pages.

And then I ended up in my section. Memoirs. A one-stop shop for one-sided stories, embittered and empowered perspectives. Books with vulnerability and books with vanity. Human memory was so fragile that many of these books were nearly fiction, even if the author believed every word. I understood that more than most.

I crouched down to the lower shelves and ran my fingers across the spines, smiling as I noticed a few of my own books cozying up to one another—entire chapters of my life wrapped up in other people’s stories. Stories that had put them behind bars, my tiger stripes earned with every good deed I’d done to put monsters where they belonged. After everything, I needed the reminder that it had been worth something. That I had produced something real, even if no one would ever know it was me.

But as I was practicing my ceremony of remembering to forget, a figure approached.

“Finding some good books?” a voice asked. Low and magnetic.

It sent a shiver down my spine as I stood and turned toward it.

Toward him.

He looked like he’d stepped off a Florence side street and into the wrong century. Tall enough that I had to lift my chin to meet him, and he wore the height the way he wore everything else—loosely, like it cost him nothing. Sun-warmed skin, linen pants, a linen shirt buttoned to the throat and rolled at the sleeves, as if he’d just set down a basket of olives or abandoned an espresso going cold on some sunlit corner. His mouth tilted—not a smirk, something quieter and more amused, like he’d already decided I was worth the trouble of finding out. Then his eyes found mine, green and unhurried, and the amusement sharpened into something closer to attention. It was the kind of gaze that took inventory. The bookstore lights caught the gleam his watch, and the watch told me what the linen tried to soften: money, and a great deal of it. I knew what money made people capable of—I’d built a whole life on knowing it.

One thing was for sure. This man was not of the desert.

“Lola Whitman, are you not?” he asked, his accent American with just the barest undercurrent of something European tinging his words.

Oh, shit. The FBI had me basically under witness protection in-between jobs. How did he know who I was?

“Who’s asking?” I shot back, kicking myself immediately for confirming I was exactly who he was looking for.

“A fan,” he said, a smug smile creeping across his lips. What about this man had me off my game?

I turned and walked down the row. “I don’t know what those are. We survive off of A/C here.”

He followed me in an easy, casual way. Like a lion who knew his prey couldn’t outrun him, so he took his time.

“I’m looking for a book,” he said, his fingers caressing the spines like they were the bare backs of cherished lovers.

“Good for you,” I shot over my shoulder.

“It’s the one you’ll write for me.”

I spotted something on a shelf and yanked it out. “Are you sure it’s not this one?” I tossed him Writing for Dummies.

“Maybe in another life,” he said, unfazed, setting the book down on a shelf with a lazy flip of his wrist.

“I don’t know, it might suit you in this one,” I replied.

“It took me a while to realize you were the one who wrote the best of these,” he said, waving at the memoir section. “But I don’t understand why you didn’t get more attention for this one.”

He stepped across the aisle to another section, pulling out a small book. Before he could withdraw it, I put my hand on the spine, forcing it back into the shelf. I wasn’t emotionally ready to face that book. Not after the day I’d had. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you’re the best in the world,” he said, a glint in his eye. “And I know you haven’t written under your own name in nearly a decade. Instead, you’ve been lending your pen to others.”

“I’m not for sale.”

“That’s not what I asked,” he said.

“You didn’t ask me anything,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, trying to keep a strong front.

“I asked for your name.”

“Which you already knew,” I pointed out.

“That’s true,” he said with a playful smile. “Normally, my team would just talk to your book agent about all this, but he’s ended up being fairly… elusive the past twenty-four hours since we reached out. Which means you should fire him, as book agents are supposed to get you jobs, not avoid them. Isn’t that right?”

My stomach dropped. This man knew too much. Which meant he was endangering my secrecy. How much did he know about me?

“I’ll cut to the chase,” he continued in that too-casual, too-warm late-night radio DJ voice. “I’d like for you to ghostwrite my memoir. How much would it cost to have you write my book for me?”

“More than you have,” I said.

“I don’t know anyone with more than I have.”

“Didn’t anyone teach you that wealth is more than a number?”

He smiled, seemingly enjoying this. “They tried. And failed. So what is it?”

“What?”

“Your number. Everyone has one,” he said.

“I threw away my cell phone. It’s a distraction from slowly drinking myself to death in the 112-degree heat.”

“Oh really?” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a square next-gen phone I didn’t even recognize. He pressed a button and lifted his gaze back to me, his bright green eyes steady.

I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket.

No.

I turned and walked quickly down another aisle. And another—only to find him at the end of it, strolling casually toward me. Unbothered. Like this was a game, and he had all night to play with me.

The exhaustion of the day rose up in me then—Brett’s hands around my throat, Matthew’s face behind his desk, the words one more book ringing in my ears—and I felt the last of my patience dissolve.

“Who are you?” I demanded, sick of playing games with men who thought their priorities outranked mine.

He held out his hand. “Ezekiel Crane. Nice to meet you.”

The pieces came together instantly. News headlines flashing before my eyes. Ezekiel was the world’s youngest billionaire—and an infamous playboy, spending summers getting caught by the paparazzi on Capri with some rising starlet or another. His father, founder of Crane Industries, had been found dead of a heart attack at some international security conference overseas after demoing a new surveillance software. A company built on the data of vast networks of cameras in public and not-so-public areas. A company that had been handed to the heir of the digital throne, Ezekiel himself.

Standing in front of me in this used bookstore was Silicon Valley royalty. Not a man—a prince of surveillance capitalism, inheriting the throne of his fallen father.

Dangerous. So very dangerous.

But I couldn’t find it in my body to run away. To slap away his outstretched hand. Something deeper in me was unfurling—that morbid curiosity that made me so good at getting strangers to spill their guts. The same thing that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.

God. Damn. It.

I shook his hand. “Lola. But you knew that already.”

“I did. And my people will call yours,” he said. “Maybe they’ll answer this time.”

“I didn’t agree to anything. I’m not writing your book.”

He tightened his grip on my hand, that half-smile lighting up his eyes. “You will.”'