Page 40 of The Perfect Rom-Com

I’m sucking in tea from my straw and nodding at the same time. So I was kidnapped for the purpose of providing answers for the discussion questions tonight. Easy peasy.

In fact, aside from inhaling Amelia’s overly pungent beachy perfume (she also tends to follow the rule of “the bigger the event, the more dousing in perfume”), this is even a bit of a treat.

Tomato pie. Sweet tea. Gaeta’s glorious atmosphere. If I’m painfully honest with myself, I even like talking books with Susanna and Mona—so long as Amelia falls into doomscrolling the internet for paparazzi photos of herself under the veil of “work” and doesn’t interfere. Actually, being personally asked about the books I wrote makes me feel in the tiniest way special.

A little interview of my own. About the book I hugged so closely for hours and weeks and months.

“Terrific.” Susanna claps her hands as she snaps open her laptop. “Does this sound good to you, Amelia? Shall we start this new plan tonight?”

“Yeah. Fine,” Amelia says with a little shrug, her eyes starting to droop toward her phone.

“And so you can listen here to what Bryony says so you’re ready, okay?” Susanna says, with the softest little nudge that screams, “For the love, please listen so you don’t try to crash all of our careers, okay?!”

Which is the tricky thing about Amelia, as a matter of fact. Her math skills aren’t the brightest, and so despite the fact that the one book she wrote a handful of years ago garnered ten thousand sales, only roughly fifty times less than what her books sell now in the first year, she was and forever claims she is the original author. The real writer. Hence why Susanna and Mona can’t convince her to worry much about her little ghostwriter secret. Because to her, she is the writer. Sometimes she throws out a little line suggesting a setting or occupation to me and somehow thinks that equals her actually playing a major role in the writing portion. I’m just a Penny to her—the person jotting down those eighty-thousand-word little details surrounding her brilliant concept of “make her a yoga instructor.”

“Okay,” she says, but she’s already sucked into her phone.

I exchange glances with Susanna and Mona and, for a moment, do feel for them. It’s like trying to convince a toddler to eat her peas. The best you can do is put the plate in front of her and sit there, desperately hoping she picks one up and ingests it.

The tomato pie comes to the table and we dig in—while Amelia picks here and there at the iceberg in her salad. Penny scribbles furiously through the questions. Should I buy her a stenograph machine like Gloria has for court reporting as a Christmas-in-July present? Help with the inevitable carpal tunnel she is getting as we eat?

The questions are typical.

“What was your inspiration for The Seven-Year Holiday?”

“In chapter 5, we see Nate returning to his elementary school as they open up a time capsule from thirty years prior. Why does he find the compass? What’s the meaning behind the compass?”

“What was it like writing the scene where Nate is given the contents of his former best friend’s capsule addition? Why is the baseball card poignant?”

At one point Amelia lifts her head to interrupt my lengthy answer to “What is the most difficult part of writing a book?” with “Picking the cover,” followed with a syrupy laugh that forces laughs from everyone else, after which she points to Susanna and says, “Write that down.”

The cadence of the rest of the hour goes pretty smoothly, though. Mona asks a question, I answer, Susanna types and coughs every once in a while to grab Amelia’s attention. Mona asks a question, I answer, Susanna types and coughs with a poignant, hopeful stare in Amelia’s direction.

It’s all pretty cut-and-dried until the last question, when Amelia pulls away from her social media stupor and fixes her attention on us. “What was that last question?”

“What are you working on next?” Susanna says. “And Bryony said”—Susanna looks at her computer screen—“‘I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m thirty thousand words into this heartwarming story set in one of my favorite places on earth: deep in the heart of the marshlands of Beaufort, South Carolina. A single parent of nine-year-old James moves in next door to a third-generation farmer and her own nine-year-old, and when the children become fast friends, they spark something and ultimately teach their parents about how life is miraculous when people, against all odds, sacrifice for the well-being of one another.’”

Amelia frowns. “Where’s the romance?”

“It’s with the parents,” I say.

“Where’s the comedy?”

“There’s humor. It’s woven throughout.”

“I don’t know how it can when it sounds like you’re so busy dealing with ‘sacrificing’ and ‘miraculous living.’”

“Amazingly enough,” I say with a snap in my tone, “books can be romantic comedies and use more descriptors than saying the guy was ‘a billionaire and, like, super hot.’”

“Bryony has managed to make room for it all. That’s what makes all these books so special,” Susanna adds quickly, nodding fervently between us.

Amelia squints. Opens her mouth.

We wait for her to speak for ten seconds.

Then wait again as she tilts her head, screwing up her forehead in thought. She presses her lips together with a faraway look, as if this is all really important and it is vital that she be the one to figure it all out.

At last, she comes to “Change it to the Keys.”