I Read You First

Chapter 1: The Unsolicited Manuscript

The manuscript arrived on a Tuesday in March, which Emilia would later consider a kind of cosmic joke, because Tuesdays were the days she reserved for saying no.

She said no to memoirs about spiritual awakenings in Bali. She said no to thrillers where the detective's dead wife turned out to be alive. She said no to poetry collections, always, because poetry didn't sell and because poetry made her feel things she had long ago decided were not useful in a professional context. Tuesday was the day she cleared her inbox of the hopeful, the derivative, and the delusional, and by five o'clock she usually felt lighter, leaner, armored in the efficiency that had made her one of Chicago's most respected literary agents before she turned thirty-three.

Her assistant, Priya, had left the stack on the corner of her desk with a Post-it note that read: "Slush pile. Sorry. Three look semi-literate." Priya had opinions. It was one of the reasons Emilia had hired her.

Emilia worked through the first two quickly. A family saga set during Prohibition that opened with a weather report. A young-adult fantasy where the heroine discovered she was secretly a dragon on page three. She wrote polite rejections for both, then picked up the third.

The cover page was plain. No embossed letterhead, no MFA credentials listed beneath the author's name. Just a title—*The Lark and the Lantern*—and beneath it, in twelve-point Times New Roman:

*Leo Knight*

Emilia's hand stilled on the page.

She hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in years, though she'd seen it occasionally, the way you catch a stranger wearing a perfume that once belonged to someone you loved. A byline in a literary journal she happened to pick up at a dentist's office. A mention in an alumni newsletter she should have unsubscribed from. Small, distant signals that Leo Knight existed somewhere in the world, writing, probably teaching, living a life she had surgically removed herself from a decade ago.

She should have set the manuscript down. She should have written the same polite rejection she'd written for the dragon book and the Prohibition saga and gone home to her apartment on the fourteenth floor, where the lake was visible if you leaned far enough off the balcony and where no one's prose could ambush her.

Instead, she read the first line.

*She kept her secrets in the margins, where no one thought to look.*

Emilia read the second line. Then the third. Then she forgot about the time, the lake, the fourteen floors, and the decade.

---

She finished the manuscript at eleven-forty that night, sitting on the floor of her office because at some point she had slid off her chair without noticing. The takeout she'd ordered at seven sat untouched on her desk, the pad thai congealing into something geological. Her shoes were off. Her eyes burned.

*The Lark and the Lantern* was the story of two people—a woman named Lena and a man named Hartley—who met in a university writing workshop in a small midwestern town. They fell in love through language, through the dangerous intimacy of reading each other's work, through long nights spent arguing about whether Chekhov was a romantic or a nihilist. And then the woman left, suddenly and completely, and the man spent the rest of the novel trying to understand why.

It was, without qualification, the best debut novel Emilia had read in five years.

It was also, without any ambiguity at all, about her.

The details were altered just enough to be deniable. Lena was a painter, not a writer. Hartley taught music theory, not poetry. The town was in Minnesota, not Iowa. But the bones of it—the specific, granular truth of how two people had circled each other, caught fire, and then destroyed the thing between them—that was real. That was hers and Leo's, taken apart and reassembled with the care of someone who had memorized every joint and seam.

She recognized the night Lena showed Hartley her paintings for the first time, because it was the night Emilia had shown Leo her real poems, the ones she didn't submit to workshop, the ones that were too raw and too honest and too much. She recognized the argument about vulnerability that happened in chapter seven, because she had lived it in the kitchen of Leo's off-campus apartment, standing barefoot on linoleum, furious and terrified in equal measure. She recognized the scene where Hartley traced the scar on Lena's wrist and asked her to tell him something true, because Leo had done exactly that, and Emilia had told him something true, and it had been the beginning of the end.

The novel ended with Lena walking away. No explanation. No goodbye. Just an empty room and Hartley standing in it, holding a letter he would never send.

Emilia sat on the floor of her office and pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw sparks.

Then she picked up her phone and called Priya.

"It's almost midnight," Priya said, by way of greeting.

"I'm going to represent the Leo Knight manuscript."

A pause. "The one from the slush pile? You read it already?"

"Set up a meeting. This week if possible."

"Emilia, are you okay? You sound like you've been crying."

"I haven't been crying. I've been reading. Schedule the meeting."

She hung up before Priya could ask anything else. Then she looked down at the manuscript in her lap, at the last page, at the final image of Hartley alone in that room, and she thought: *You bastard. You wrote me into a novel and you didn't even let me stay.*

---

The meeting was set for Thursday.

Emilia spent Wednesday in a state of controlled panic that she disguised as productivity. She reorganized her client files. She responded to fourteen emails she'd been ignoring. She had lunch with a publicist from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and managed to discuss spring lists and cover design without once mentioning that she was about to see the only man who had ever made her feel fully, catastrophically known.

She went home that evening and stood in front of her closet for twenty minutes, which was nineteen minutes longer than she usually spent. She chose a charcoal blazer and a white silk blouse, then changed into a navy dress, then went back to the blazer. She told herself it didn't matter. She told herself this was business.

She believed approximately twelve percent of that.

At nine-fifteen on Thursday morning, Priya buzzed her office.

"Leo Knight is here."

"Send him in."

Emilia stood behind her desk. She'd positioned herself carefully—the window behind her, the morning light doing favorable things to the room, the manuscript centered on the desk like evidence. She had rehearsed three different opening lines, all of them professional, all of them designed to establish that she was in control of this situation.

The door opened, and Leo walked in, and every rehearsed line evaporated.

He was taller than she remembered, or maybe she had shrunk. His hair was shorter, no longer the unruly dark mess that had perpetually fallen across his forehead in college. He wore a gray henley and dark jeans, and he looked like someone who spent time outdoors, which was different from the Leo she'd known, the one who had been pale and ink-stained and allergic to sunlight. There were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before. They suited him.

He stopped a few feet from her desk and looked at her, and the look was so steady, so entirely without pretense, that Emilia felt the ground shift beneath her very expensive shoes.

"Hello, Emilia," he said.

His voice was the same. Lower, maybe, but the same cadence, the same warmth buried under a careful surface. It was the voice that had read Yeats to her in a dorm room at two in the morning, the voice that had said *I think you're the most terrifying person I've ever met* and meant it as a compliment.

"Leo." She gestured to the chair across from her desk. "Please, sit."

He sat. He didn't look around the office the way most first-time visitors did, cataloging the shelves of published novels, the framed covers, the small tasteful awards. He looked at her.

"You read it," he said. Not a question.

"I did."

"And?"

"It's extraordinary." She meant it. She hated that she meant it. "The prose is some of the best I've seen in contemporary fiction. The emotional architecture is—" She stopped herself. She was using her agent voice, the one she deployed at book fairs and pitch meetings, and it felt obscene in this context. "It's beautiful, Leo. It broke my heart."

Something moved behind his eyes. "That wasn't the intention."

"Wasn't it?"

A beat of silence. Outside, the city hummed its indifferent hum.

"I want you to represent it," he said. "I know that's—I know this is unusual. But I've followed your career. You understand this kind of book. You understand—" He stopped, recalibrated. "You understand the material."

*The material.* As if their history were a craft element. As if the worst night of her life were a plot point.

"I do," she said. "Which is why I need to ask you something before we go any further."

"Ask."

"Did you send this to me because I'm a good agent, or because I'm Lena?"

Leo held her gaze. He didn't flinch, didn't look away, didn't do any of the things that would have made it easier for her to dismiss him.

"Both," he said. "And I think you already knew that."

Emilia picked up her pen, uncapped it, and set it down again. It was a gesture she recognized as a stalling tactic, and she suspected Leo recognized it too.

"Fine," she said. "Then let's get to work."