Five People, Four Rejections, They Voted to Erase Me, So I Erased Them novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Number

I came out of the shower in Ronan's spare sweatshirt and heard my mother's voice.

It was coming out of his laptop.

It was small and polite and entirely in charge.

"She's still crying, yes," my mother said. "Last month's coat episode did the biggest number we've had. Eugene doesn't want to risk a softer version."

Ronan sat very still.

He did not look at me.

He moved the cursor to stop it, and I said, "Don't."

I stood behind the chair with the towel in my hands and listened to my mother tell a stranger how well I cried.

The man from Hearth asked if there was any chance I might get used to it.

"She's very sensitive," my mother said. "It lasts."

I said, "Play the whole thing."

It ran forty minutes.

When it was over, nobody in the loft spoke.

Ronan opened the folder it had come from, and then the next folder, and the one after that.

I had never seen my mother's filing before.

It was beautiful.

Every episode of the Fair Table had a sheet, and every sheet had a column for views and a column for revenue.

At the bottom of the Denied Girl sheet, in my mother's neat hand-typed font, was a total.

Two million, nine hundred and forty thousand dollars.

"Four years," Ronan said. "Just the playlist."

I could not feel my fingers.

He scrolled down.

There was a contract, thirty pages, with the Hearth logo on every one.

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