PART 1: What Was in the Crawlspace

For twenty-two years I was married to Dennis Santos, the most boring man in America.

I'm not being mean. Ask his coworkers at Hendricks & Lowe. Ask the neighbors, who once watched him spend four hours edging the lawn with scissors.

My husband owns eleven pairs of pleated khakis.

Eleven.

I counted them once out of despair.

Dennis did have one glamorous thing in his life: Veronica Sterling. She was his biggest private accounting client, a famously private romance novelist who paid him ridiculous consulting fees and was forever dragging him to Tucson for publisher meetings.

I was never jealous in the cheating sense. I was jealous of her calendar.

I had never read one of Veronica's books. Petty? Maybe. She already got enough of my husband's weekends. She wasn't getting my reading time too.

So when my daughter Rosie came down from the crawlspace holding a cardboard box, I assumed it was old tax returns. Dennis keeps everything. He has receipts from restaurants that closed before Rosie was born.

It was not tax returns.

Rosie waited until Sunday dinner. Seventeen years old, and she has the instincts of a prosecutor. She waited until all of us were at the table — me, Dennis, her brother AJ, and my father, who comes every Sunday to eat my pork chops and tell me I overcooked them.

Then she dropped a stack of paper beside the gravy.

"Dad. Who is Veronica Sterling?"

I rolled my eyes.

"His client. The famous one."

Rosie looked at me.

"Mom. I don't think she's his client."

I want you to understand what was in that stack. A typed manuscript with Dennis's handwriting in the margins. A publishing contract signed DENNIS SANTOS, WRITING AS VERONICA STERLING. And one royalty statement, for six months, for three hundred and forty thousand dollars.

For one second, I thought Rosie had misunderstood.

Dennis did not argue. Dennis turned the color of unsalted butter.

Rosie lifted her phone.

"Veronica Sterling is the bestselling romance novelist in America. Nineteen novels. Sixty million copies. Nobody has ever seen her. Her author photo is a silhouette."

"Dennis," I said, very calmly, "why is your name on Veronica Sterling's publishing contract?"

My husband — my beige, spreadsheet, decaf husband — put down his fork.

"I can explain the Tucson trips now."

The Tucson trips.

Twenty years of "Veronica needs me in Tucson." Two decades of me kissing him at the airport while he went to publisher meetings and book events.

"Hay naku, Dennis. Twenty years? Loko ka ba?"

AJ filmed six seconds before Rosie slapped his phone down.

Twenty years of lying. That's what I kept coming back to.

Not cheating. Not gambling.

Success.

"Who hides sixty million books?" I yelled.

Dennis opened his mouth.

"Don't answer. Wala akong patience."

Through all of this, my father sat at the end of the table cutting his pork chop into perfect little squares.

Silent.

That should have scared me more. Papa has opinions about how strangers park. But he just watched Dennis over his glasses, like Dennis was a smell that never aired out.

Finally Papa dabbed his mustache with his napkin. Then he reached into the pocket of his cardigan — mustard, pilling, like something a sofa would wear — and set a brand-new hardcover on my table.

The Last Vow of Silverpine.

By Veronica Sterling.

"My book club is discussing this Thursday," Papa said. "I am leading."

He looked straight at Dennis. "It's her best one yet."

Dennis made a sound like a slow leak.

That night, after everyone left and my husband was exiled to the couch, I couldn't sleep. So out of spite — pure spite, I want that on the record — I took the very first Veronica Sterling novel upstairs.

The Duchess Takes the Stairs.

I was going to hate-read it. I was going to read every stupid sentence to Dennis over breakfast in a fake British accent.

I opened to chapter one.

PART 2: What Every Heroine Had in Common

The duchess snorted when she laughed.

I snort when I laugh. I've hated it my whole life. You can hear it during our wedding vows. My cousins have been using that recording against me for twenty-two years.

Fine. Coincidence.

I kept reading.

The duchess burned rice. A duchess. In a castle. Burning rice. She hummed show tunes off-key. She covered her mouth when she smiled because of a chipped front tooth she'd had since falling off a fence at nine.

I chipped my tooth falling off the Delgados' fence. I was nine.

I read until four in the morning and cried into my pillow like an idiot.

Monday, I went to the library. Monday night, I bought three more as e-books because the library didn't have enough. By Wednesday, I had basically stopped being a functioning member of the household.

Nineteen novels. Nineteen heroines.

Every single one was me.

The rancher who talked to her plants. The pastry chef who cried at insurance commercials. Book eleven's heroine was a dental hygienist.

I am a dental hygienist.

He didn't even change my job. He just gave me a castle.

Twenty years, this man sat in his little office with his calculator, and the whole time he was writing love letters.

Sixty million copies of love letters.

About me.

I stopped being mad at Veronica somewhere around book six.

I was still mad at Dennis.

I did not tell him any of it because, frankly, I was enjoying the couch situation.

When I finally walked downstairs with a stack of paperbacks in my arms, Dennis stood up like sentencing had begun.

"Sol—"

"Why does Lady Beatrice hate raisins in embutido?"

He froze.

"Why does Margaret sing 'Hopelessly Devoted to You' while washing dishes?"

His ears went red.

"And why," I said, holding up book eleven, "did you make me a dental hygienist with a castle?"

Dennis looked at the floor.

"That one sold very well."

I hit him with the paperback.

Not hard.

He confessed everything. He started the first book when we were broke newlyweds above a laundromat. He couldn't sleep, so he wrote a woman who looked like me, laughed like me, and somehow lived in Regency England.

He sent it to one publisher because he was sure they would reject it. They bought it in four days. Then it hit the bestseller list.

Dennis panicked.

"How was I supposed to tell you?" he said. "Hi, mahal, pass the rice, also I am Veronica Sterling?"

"Preferably before book nineteen."

"Yes."

He waited for the excitement to die down.

It did not.

Then the secret got bigger, then embarrassing, then impossible. So he stayed Dennis at home and Veronica everywhere else for twenty years.

"Sol," he said, "all those Veronica checks you knew about? They were royalties. Every dollar was on our taxes. The house and the kids' college were exactly what I told you they were. I lied about where the money came from, not that it existed."

That made it better.

Not okay. Better.

I was so busy being furious and moved at the same time that I missed the other problem.

The villain.

Reginald Blackwood appears in almost every Veronica Sterling book.

Blustering patriarch. Silver mustache. Taps his watch when displeased. Thinks every young man is unworthy of his daughter.

And wears a mustard cardigan.

I stared at the description. Then I looked toward the chair where Papa had been sitting Sunday.

"Dennis."

He covered his face.

"Oh, Diyos ko."

In book four, Reginald sneers at the young hero and says:

"You will amount to nothing, boy. And when she realizes it, I will be waiting."

My father said that.

To Dennis.

On my parents' porch, when Dennis was a broke accounting student with a rusted Corolla and Papa thought I could do better.

I know because I was listening through the screen door. Nobody else heard it.

Nobody except Dennis.

And Papa's book club — twelve retirees at Sunset Pines who take literature more seriously than the Nobel committee — was discussing the newest Reginald book Thursday.

Led by Papa.

Thursday was tomorrow.

Papa was about to lead twelve retirees through the book where Reginald finally apologizes, and as far as I knew, he had no idea he was Reginald.

"No," I said.

Dennis looked at me.

"We tell Papa first."

"Before book club?"

"At book club. Before he finds out in front of Dorothy and the Fontanilla sisters. Kung ayaw mo, too bad."

Dennis went butter-colored again.

So Thursday afternoon, we drove to Sunset Pines with a tray of lumpia and a husband who looked like he was heading to his own execution.

Through the rec room window, I saw Papa standing in front of his book club with The Last Vow of Silverpine open in his hands.

Then I heard which scene he was reading.

And I grabbed Dennis's arm so hard I left marks.

PART 3: What Happened at Sunset Pines

Here's what you need to know about The Last Vow of Silverpine.

After eighteen books of scheming, Reginald Blackwood finally apologizes.

Dennis wrote the scene because readers kept asking why the old man never learned. At the lovers' wedding, Reginald admits he was protecting his pride, not his daughter, and asks the young man to forgive him.

That was the scene Papa was reading aloud when Dennis and I reached the rec room door, and Papa's voice was cracking.

We froze there. Me holding lumpia. Dennis looking ready to faint.

Papa lowered the book. Dorothy, Eugene, the Fontanilla sisters — all twelve members of his club — were staring at him.

Papa tapped the page.

"I have read all nineteen of these books," he said. "I have hated Reginald Blackwood for nineteen books."

Dorothy raised a hand.

"Because he's the villain, Efren."

Papa looked at her.

"Because he is me."

You could have heard a denture drop.

Dennis stopped breathing beside me. Papa opened book four. He already had a yellow tab on the page.

Of course he did.

"Reginald says something on a porch," Papa said. "Word for word, something I once said on my own porch to a boy courting my daughter."

He looked toward us.

"Only two people heard me say it."

My stomach dropped. Papa took off his glasses.

"I knew by book four."

"Papa. You knew?"

"Yes."

"And you never told me?"

"It was not mine to tell." He looked at Dennis. "And I wanted to see if he ever would."

Dennis whispered, "Oh, no."

Papa heard him.

"Yes. Oh, no."

The book club turned around. Now everybody saw us.

Papa pointed at Dennis with the hardcover.

"For years, I said nothing because I was angry. Then I kept reading because..." He frowned. "The books were good."

Dorothy snorted. Papa ignored her.

"Seventeen books, he made me Reginald. Every bad habit. Every speech. Every stupid thing I did because I thought nobody was good enough for my daughter."

His voice got rough.

"And the worst part was, he did not have to invent much."

Nobody laughed at that.

Papa looked down at the new book.

"Then this one."

He held it up.

"He gives Reginald the apology I should have made years ago."

His mustache trembled.

"So I will not steal his words."

Papa crossed the room. My father — who once blamed me for his own parking ticket — stopped in front of my husband.

Dennis looked terrified.

Papa said, "You amounted to something, boy."

Dennis's mouth twitched.

Papa shook his head.

"No. More than something."

Then he took a breath.

"I made you prove yourself long after you already had. I made my daughter choose between peace and pleasing me. Mali ako."

Dennis's eyes filled.

"I'm sorry."

The Fontanilla sisters started crying immediately. Eugene was filming vertically with his thumb over half the lens.

And me?

I was crying into the lumpia.

Papa looked around at the book club.

"Now tell them the other part."

Dennis looked at me. I nodded.

He stepped beside Papa in his pleated khakis and wiped his face.

"My name is Dennis Santos," he said. "For twenty years, I have published romance novels as Veronica Sterling."

Dorothy screamed. Eugene almost dropped his phone.

Papa stared at Dennis for one second. Then he smacked the hardcover against Dennis's chest.

The room exploded. Everybody started talking. Eugene was still filming.

I held up The Duchess Takes the Stairs.

"I'm still mad."

Dennis nodded.

"Very."

"But I read the books."

His face changed. I looked at him.

"Nineteen women, Dennis?"

He swallowed.

"It was always one woman."

Okay.

Fine.

That got me.

I kissed him while twelve retirees screamed like teenagers.

Papa immediately stepped in front of Eugene's phone.

"And I am Reginald Blackwood," he announced. "The mustache is real. The cardigan is real."

He held up the book.

"Buy this one. I improve."

That was the clip Eugene posted.

By dinner, everybody had shared it.

My accountant husband in pleated khakis, me crying over a paperback, and Papa admitting he had been America's hated romance patriarch for seventeen books.

Dennis showed me the dedication page for book twenty.

For nineteen books, Veronica Sterling had written:

To the one who knows.

This one said:

For Marisol. It was always you.

Underneath, Dennis had added by hand:

And yes, everyone was right about the snort.

I laughed. I snorted.

From the kitchen Papa yelled, "I heard that!"

Dennis looked at me and smiled.

Thanksgiving is at our house this year.

The villain is bringing the wine.