Page 6 of The Perfect Rom-Com

“There’s only a tiny piece of magical realism, for the sake—”

“How many words was this again?” He cuts me off.

I bite my lip. I knew this one was going to come up.

“It’s 149,800.”

I do not round up, specifically because I’m delusionally hopeful those two hundred words make a difference.

He chuckles a little. Under his breath. Like an insider looking at the pitiful, pitiful little girl who knows approximately nothing.

“Do you think you’re Stephen King?”

I cast my gaze around uneasily. “What?”

“Do you think you’re Stephen King?”

I’m falling into a trick question, I know, but have no choice but to reply. “No.”

“Then what makes you think you can bypass all the laws of commercial fiction and write a book easily twice the allowed number? It costs the publisher money for those pages.”

I am beginning to dislike this man immensely. (Of course I’ll work with him—I’ll work with a shoe if it could sell my books—but I am absolutely not going to enjoy it.)

“Right,” I say slowly. “I know it’s an issue. I know about King’s ‘kill your darlings’ and all that. It’s just, this novel—”

“Manuscript.”

“—is about the legacy my grandmother has created within the organization I work for. It’s just—and I know people must say this all the time—but there’s nowhere to cut.”

“There are approximately seventy thousand places to cut—”

“Every part is special—”

“Then put those seventy thousand words in a family scrapbook where they belong.”

“If you could just read it—”

“I don’t make the rules, love.”

My nose wrinkles in distaste at his choice of words there. Who exactly does he think he is? A sweet old Southern woman at the grocery register? A brawny Scottish herdsman bringing his sheep across a gorge? These are the only acceptable people for such a use as “love,” and he, with his scrawny bookish arms, is neither.

But there it is.

Time slows to a crawl as his finger, with the power of a judge’s hammer, taps my folder two painfully slow, painfully definitive times.

And Jack, his phone flipped over now, doesn’t even give me the decency of looking me in the eye as he says, “Pleasure meeting you. Enjoy the rest of the conference.”

Enjoy. The rest of the conference?

The six hours left of the conference?

As if I haven’t spent thousands of dollars and spent six months in savings and taken off work and traveled across the country for only the smallest glimmer of hope of fifteen minutes with four agents—four—for the pleasure of being told to “enjoy the rest of the conference”?

And this guy was my last shot.

And now here I am, with—I check the clock—ten minutes and twelve seconds to go.

A lifetime.