She felt heat rise to her face, but she didn’t take her eyes away from the figure in the doorway.

“You…came back” Melody’s voice caught in her throat. Eduardo said nothing, but slowly unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a tanned, well-muscled torso beneath.

“Come here,” she whispered. “I forgive you.”

Jane stopped the recording after the requisite end-of-chapter pause, pressed save, then closed the app. She bookmarked the place in the script displayed on a second screen on the desk, and sat back, stretching her neck to ease the ache that accrued from maintaining her mouth a uniform distance from the mic suspended over her computer.

Studies in Italian was the third Student of Love novel she had recorded for the romance imprint of one of the big publishing houses. Reviewers praised her narration “for capturing the innocence of youth discovering the joys of travel—and love!” Which was ironic as Jane was in her forties, divorced, and trapped by lack of funds in the unlovely Atlanta suburb where she grew up.

The house was free though—Jane’s inheritance from her mother. She had converted the spare bedroom into a recording studio with state-of-the-art equipment. The investment had wiped out the capital preserved when her fourteen-year marriage ended.

“Thank God you didn’t have kids,” said Tess, the high school friend she reconnected with after moving back to Atlanta. Jane thought bitterly that if she’d had children with Mark, at least she’d have been able to screw some support out of him. His career back in L.A. was now in the ascendant, another irony. For the years they’d been together they’d both struggled to find screen acting work, waiting tables or taking temp jobs to make the rent. But they’d been happy until Mark had attracted the attention of a female executive with a production company. 

“She’s grooming me for a part in a movie,” was how Mark explained the dinners out and all-night parties. The exec had groomed him right out of the marriage, and life in Los Angeles had become untenable for Jane.

Tess was a fount of advice. “You should get on a dating app.”

“No way. I’m done with men. I’m independent and in control of my life. I like audiobook narration, and I’m good at it. The money’s not great, but it’s enough.”

Tess had married young and was already a grandmother. “What about in ten years’ time? Or twenty? You don’t want to die alone.”

Jane laughed. “Actually, that sounds pretty cool. I’ll get a cat and eat what I want. No worries about putting on make-up and high heels.”

Tess gave her a long look over the top of her glasses thinking Jane had given up make-up and high heels already. Her daily uniform was jeans and tee-shirt. She was still beautiful though, tall and slim, with long honey-colored hair.

***

Celeste Delmarco called while Jane was making a sandwich for lunch. Celeste was the editor who had hired Jane for the Student of Love series. Their usual mode of communication was email, so Jane was surprised to see the name on her phone screen.

“I have a new project for you. The author asked for you by name, which normally we wouldn’t accommodate—can’t let the creatives think they run the business—but I’m told this is a special case.” Celeste’s tone indicated she wasn’t pleased.

“Who’s the writer?”

“You won’t have heard of her: Jordan Haven. A debut novel.”

This made the kid-glove handling more puzzling. First time authors were usually humbled by a score of prior rejections. They didn’t make demands.

Celeste lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think it’s a pen name for an established writer—or someone famous.”

“You mean like J.K. Rowling?” Jane suggested. “She tried to keep her name secret when she switched genres.”

“Exactly. We don’t have much time. Can you pause Studies in Italian and start on this?”

“I suppose…”

“Great! I’ll send you the contract and the .pdf right now. Deadline is the end of the month.”

Celeste disconnected before Jane could express any doubts.

Jane scanned the contract first. Standard stuff, except a clause requiring absolute secrecy until the book launched.

Then she opened the .pdf file on her computer. There was no cover image which might give a clue to the genre. The title page read You Never Knew Me. No dedication or epigram. All she could glean before plunging into Chapter One was that the book was 85,000 words long—about eleven listening hours.

The sandwich she’d been making when Celeste called sat uneaten on the kitchen countertop. At 7 p.m., conscious of the fading daylight, Jane got up to turn on lights, refill her water bottle, and pace around the sitting room. You Never Knew Me was a love story, but not a typical romance. The story was told from the alternating viewpoints of a man and a woman, and spanned their long relationship, sometimes in flashbacks, sometimes in urgent present tense. The language was direct, even spare, but conveyed the depth of emotion—both pain and joy—that Jane recognized as an authentic portrait of marriage.

An email from Celeste reminded her she needed to return the signed contract. She took care of that before returning to complete her first read of the novel. That night, Jane couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts revisited episodes from the book, considering how she could best narrate the complex mosaic the entirety presented. It was rare to find an author who could so accurately express both male and female voices. Would she be able to do justice to both points of view?

The next morning, she began her preparation, underlining words to emphasize and highlighting others to verify pronunciation or meaning. Much of this technical work was mindless routine, but Jane found herself distracted by the narrative, marveling at how the story reflected her own experience. And Mark’s? If her husband had been as open and honest as Paul, the male character in the novel, would she have left him? But he had lied about the affair and lost her trust. And yet Paul and the female character Marie separate too—an inevitable ending, if a sad one. Perhaps the divorce was not all Mark’s fault. He had encouraged her to come with him to those Hollywood parties, but she was too proud to be a plus-one, hovering at the edge of the room while he was fêted. She saw now that he might have been nervous, needing her support. She’d been jealous of his impending success. Hadn’t she worked just as hard as he had at honing her acting skills? It was different for men. A woman approaching forty who hadn’t made it was a failure, while Mark just improved with maturity. In truth, he was always more talented. The bitterness at the end was all on her side. He’d offered to continue to pay for the rental apartment. She’d rejected the offer and stormed off to Georgia. Pride again.

After rereading the story and finishing the prep, Jane called Celeste. “I need to talk to Jordan Haven.”

Celeste blew out a dismissive puff of air. “That’s not happening. Didn’t you read the contract? This project is under wraps—absolute secrecy. No one gets to talk to the author.”

“I don’t think I can do it without talking to her.”

“Don’t go prima donna on me! We’re running out of time!” Celeste pleaded.

Jane realized she held some power in this transaction. “Look, I can do the woman character’s chapters. I just can’t find an authentic voice for the man. Either we find a male narrator to do the man’s chapters, or I have a conversation with Jordan Haven. She can explain her intentions with the male POV.”

“I’ll ask, but there’s no way they’ll say yes.”

The answer came back in four days. In the interim, Jane recorded the chapters told from the woman’s point of view. The voice came easily to her, partly because of the language—none of the piled-up adjectives and awkward sentence constructions of some “literary” novels she’d narrated—but also because she could identify so closely with the character’s feelings as love seemed to fade away.

“Jordan Haven is in California.”

“Okay, what’s her number?”

“Jordan’s off the grid, no cell service. A writing cabin somewhere in the Sierra Nevada.”

“But she agreed to speak to me?” A pause.

“Yes, but you’ll have to go there. Jordan’s leg is in a cast.”

Jane waited. Was she expected to pay for an airline ticket?

Celeste sighed. “I’m sending you the address of the cabin and a round-trip ticket to Sacramento. A rental car has been reserved on our account at the airport. You have until Sunday. Your reputation’s on the line, as well as mine.”

***

Jane took 16 East from Sacramento, then 49 South. After Sonora, the road narrowed as it climbed into Stanislaus National Park. Some of the place names were familiar from camping trips she’d taken with Mark during their marriage. She turned the A/C off and opened the window to breathe in the pine-scented air. She missed California. Not L.A.’s traffic and sprawl which Atlanta matched, but the Sierras and the Central Coast, places they’d escaped to when they had the chance. She drove on through the dusk, thinking of the past, wondering again whether she’d walked out on Mark too soon.

Jane almost missed the sign pointing up a gravel forest service road under overhanging conifers. Reducing her speed to a crawl, she felt suddenly nervous about the impending meeting. She had felt such an affinity with Jordan Haven while working on the book, convinced that she and the author would connect effortlessly.

Jane rehearsed her approach. She didn’t want to come across as too familiar despite the intimacy she’d felt. Nor did she want to seem overly reverential. She had purchased a bottle of wine from a foothills general store, as well as some local artisan cheese and a carton of figs. If, as she hoped, Jordan invited her to spend the night at the cabin, this could be a hostess gift. If she had to retrace her steps to the motel she’d spotted in Twain Harte, it was her picnic supper, another echo of those camping trips.

“Cabin” did not accurately describe the two-story stone house with a wrap-around porch. Light glowed from a downstairs window, and, once she had killed the engine, Jane could hear a familiar song—John Prine?—sifting out into the evening. Leaving her bag and goodies in the car, she approached the front door. It swung open as soon as she put up a fist to knock.

“Hello? Ms. Haven? It’s Jane Paget. May I come in?”

“What the hell—! Where’s Jordan Haven?” Jane had not seen Mark at first when she looked around the room lit by firelight and table lamps. Then she noticed the bright white plaster cast stretched along a sofa in the shadows, and above it the torso and face of her former husband. After the shock came a burst of rage. “What have you done? This is my job, my livelihood! How dare you interfere—”

“Jane, I’ve been longing to see you. This seemed the best—”

“No! Don’t you understand? I’m here to see an author. It’s important!”

“I’m Jordan Haven. I wrote the book.”

She stared at him, her mouth open, her brain struggling to understand his words. “You’re lying. You couldn’t have…Jordan Haven’s a woman…”

“Look, why don’t you sit down. There’s drinks over there. It’s a long drive and you must be tired. Perhaps you’d like to freshen up?” Mark sounded nervous, his words rushed.

Jane didn’t move, other than to shake her head, not declining the offer of a drink, but trying to make sense of the situation. “When did you write it? You never wrote before…” But then she thought about the scripts he’d thrown together for their little theater troupe in L.A.—collaborations with other cast members that never survived more than a few performances; the ghost stories he’d made up around the campfire on their camping trips; even the romantic poems he’d sent to her in the earliest days of their relationship.

“I began two years ago. For the first time in my life, I had enough money from acting to write. And I had an idea. I wanted to work out through this story what went wrong…with us.” He paused looking for her to say something, but she was still too confused. “Please sit down, Jane. You’re making my neck hurt.”

She sat on the sofa on the opposite side of the fireplace. “You know what went wrong. You and that woman. She promised you exposure, parts in her studio’s productions. I couldn’t compete—”

“You were never competing with her!” He interrupted. “I wasn’t having an affair! Yes, she got me a start with the studio, introductions to casting directors, but I never slept with her!”

“You were never home, always with her at some party or fancy restaurant. What was I to think?”

“I told you I wasn’t sleeping with her!”

But Jane hadn’t believed him. By then they weren’t talking much, and his belated denials sounded false. Sick of rejection, Jane had stopped going to auditions and dropped out of their circle of aspiring actor friends. She hadn’t wanted to hear about some role Mark was up for in a Spielberg biopic.

She sighed, tiredness hitting her. They sat in silence.

“What’s up with that?” she asked eventually, gesturing at his elevated leg in the cast.

“Second day of filming, I fell off a horse and broke my leg. Small part—they weren’t going to change the schedule for me. A friend lent me this place to recover.”

“But otherwise, it’s going well for you?” Jane asked. “I haven’t been keeping up with the Hollywood news.”

Mark shrugged. “Okay, I guess. A couple of TV things, a movie part, nothing big. I prefer writing. I’m good at it.”

He was, she had to admit. The firelight flickered over his familiar features. There was a new gravity to his good looks.  She wondered how she appeared to him.

As if reading her mind, he whispered, “You’re still so beautiful.”

“I’m not Marie.”

“No, and I’m not Paul. It’s just a story.”

“With a sad ending.”

“We can rewrite the ending—of our story, I mean. Come here.”

His voice was compelling. She went over and knelt beside him. He traced her cheek with a finger. Yielding to his touch, she leaned her face into his hand. “I’m not coming back to L.A.”

“Neither am I.”

“I like what I do—the audiobook narration.”

He smiled and nodded. “I’d like to try that too. Perhaps you could teach me the ropes?”

***

“Audio Recordings presents “You Never Knew Me,” narrated by Jane Paget and the author, Jordan Haven.”