Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [30]
Claire furrowed her brows. “The characters? I thought it was a serious work of nonfiction.”
“Well,” Miranda hedged, “the book they want isn’t exactly what I was intending to write when I first submitted the proposal to them. But it’ll still be nonfiction; I meant ‘characters’ in the sense of how over-the-top and wacky some of those cooks are.”
“What do you mean, the book isn’t what you intended?”
In typical editorial fashion, Claire immediately zeroed in on the weakest part of Miranda’s story. Miranda tried not to be annoyed at having her happy moment picked apart, thread by thread.
“I’ve just had to adapt my original idea, that’s all. No big deal.” It came out a little sharper than she meant it to. Claire tilted her head down and gazed at Miranda over the tops of the wire-rim glasses she wore for reading.
“This new idea,” she pressed, “what makes it different?”
Miranda camouflaged the urge to squirm by taking the seat Claire had offered earlier. “It’s . . . a bit less serious,” she admitted. “Less of an examination of restaurant culture, more of an exposé. Kind of a gossipy tell-all book, about what it’s really like behind the scenes at a major restaurant.”
“I see,” Claire said. It was uninflected and her expression didn’t change, but somehow Miranda felt a wave of disapproval wash over her. She slumped a little in her chair.
She felt a pang when she thought of the proposal she’d sweated over for so long, the one that would’ve studied the way people related to food and chefs, the one she would’ve written so brilliantly that she would’ve become an internationally renowned expert on gastronomy.
That was a fantasy. It was time to grow up and face the real world.
“I know,” she said, raising her hands. “But this is what they’re willing to pay me for! I need the money for Jess’s tuition, and I need it fast—I won’t let him work his way through college the way I did. He shouldn’t have to do that.”
“Miranda,” Claire started, then stopped as if she weren’t certain of what she wanted to say. When she continued, it was in the gentlest voice Miranda had ever heard from her brisk, no-nonsense friend. “You shouldn’t have to do something you won’t be proud of. Jess wouldn’t expect it of you, I’m certain, and neither would your parents.”
The kindness in Claire’s usually stern face nearly broke Miranda. She swallowed hard around the painful lump in her throat.
“Don’t worry. Adam Temple is such an arrogant bastard, I’m actually looking forward to writing it. He’s not going to know what hit him.” She tried to smile, and found that after the first few seconds, it didn’t even feel strained.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said before Claire could respond. “I know I’m supposed to be clearing my desk in preparation for being out of the office for a whole month, but right now I’m taking my lunch break.”
“Where are you going to eat? Perhaps I’ll come with you.”
“Someplace I’ve never gone, even though I’ve lived in the city for a year. The Union Square farmers’ market.”
“Ah. More in-depth research?”
Miranda stood up. “This may not be the book I’ve always dreamed of writing, but I intend to make it the best damned gossipy tell-all exposé it can be.” She turned on her heel, ignoring Claire’s indelicate snort as she left.
While it was an accepted fact that no one in the history of ever had moved to New York City for the weather—winter was long, cold, and full of snow that turned to icy sludge as soon as it hit the sidewalk, and summer was long, sweltering, and tended to make the whole city smell like ripe garbage—there were two or three months that made up for everything.
May was one of them. Adam could never understand why tourists clogged the streets from July to August, or why they flocked to Manhattan at Christmas, when the glories of late May in New York outshone any holiday or vacation he’d ever experienced.
It had rained the night before and the city looked washed clean, sparkling late-spring sunlight glinting