Attachments
written by: Arshi Mortuza
Leona stood at the doorframe of the hotel ballroom, snapping the rubber band on her wrist. She promised herself that she would not attend his book launch, especially since he had not invited her. She had spent the night with him in one of the rooms of the same hotel, but not once had he said that he wanted her there. She stared at the banner with his photograph and his name. The world felt distant. The chatter and laughter of the crowd oscillated from muffled to muted.
It was happening again: the dissociation from extreme mental overload.
“So, how do you know the writer?” a woman interrupted. She seemed to be around forty, a decade and a half older than Leona.
“He’s…” Leona hesitated. “We… actually, I don’t know him at all,” she said awkwardly, then rushed off. This could have been a good chance to practice small talk, but her stomach was in knots. Copies of his memoir were laid out on the table. It centered around his struggles with infidelity, addiction, and depression.
She had agreed to be his ghostwriter but had never thought he’d treat her as a ghost altogether. His brief to her was to make him a sympathetic figure, so she exaggerated his mental health struggles, at times completely borrowing from her own experiences with Quiet Borderline Personality Disorder. Over dinners that started off professional, he rambled on about his life, and she found very little substance in his stories. She knew he didn’t have her language or emotional intelligence, but she sat there wondering if he thought she was pretty. He never said it, and even though she didn’t like or even necessarily respect him, the fact that she was sitting across from a man who had not shown any romantic interest in her stung. Then one day, he finally leaned forward and kissed her as he thanked her for listening. She knew it was wrong, but it felt good to be acknowledged.
Over the last six months, her nights were filled with drafts, rewrites, and fragmented voice notes. She was paid, of course—but the bare minimum. While negotiating the costs, he and his wife had simply told her she did not have enough experience. Then, one day, he started buying her dinners and leaving gifts like roses, chocolate, and lingerie, saying that it was “the least he could do.”
When she emailed him the final draft, pausing over the word “attachment,” her eyes welled with tears. She felt strong pangs of ache in her tightening chest as she sensed that their own chapter was coming to an end. Her voice of reason said, good riddance, but every other part of her screamed that she was being abandoned once again. He didn’t respond to that email, but a sharp alert on her phone told her that he had sent in her final transaction.
She buried her face and sobbed into a pillow for the rest of the week, barely getting up for meals, not even switching on the lights in her studio apartment. She lay in complete silence, darkness, and despair, not knowing how to move forward without him—a man she did not even like. In the past few months, she had fully immersed herself in his stories, however tacky they seemed at times. Who was she without him? She couldn’t remember. She didn’t know.
Then one day, she picked up her phone to renew her ad for her writing services. Just then, a text came. She had never saved his number, but she would recognize the illegibility and lack of punctuation in his words anywhere:
I’ll be at Hilton tonight room 305 if your around but text before coming
She sprang up, like a switch had flipped in her brain, and somewhere in the process turned on every light in the apartment. She was pulling on her knee-high boots before her mind could even fathom what was happening. She texted, I’m on my way, to which he simply reacted with a thumbs-up.
When he opened the door, he was beaming with joy. She learned that he had received a copy of his book in print, and this was the glow of becoming a first-time published author. Envy took a backseat. She was just happy to see him again. He boasted about his new book, totally ignoring the obvious: that they were her words. It seemed as though he had fully convinced himself that he had written it.
Her reverie was interrupted by applause from the crowd as he entered the ballroom in a suit, his wife in a sundress loosely clinging to his arm. The press took their photos, and guests raised their glasses. They smiled and rushed to talk to attendees. Leona faded into the background, taking it all in. She scanned the tables, but her name existed nowhere in the room—not even on the place cards.
She prayed to zone out again, but instead became hyper-aware of her surroundings. If she did, indeed, have a soul, she could have sworn it floated out of her body, rested somewhere atop the grand candelabra, and watched a petite brunette isolating from the crowd while everyone else just… mingled effortlessly.
She ferociously tugged at the rubber band on her wrist and snapped back into reality.
She spotted the woman who had approached her earlier. She was standing in line to get her book signed.
“You asked how I knew the author.”
The woman seemed to hold her breath in anticipation.
“His book…I wrote it.”
The woman’s eyes widened, and she let out a laugh. “Well, in that case,” she said, handing her a pen and turning to the first page of the book.
He was now looking in their direction, eyes piercing into hers. She averted her gaze and signed her name on the woman’s copy, who thanked her and wished her well.
The words were hers, and she claimed them in a small way. But his mess did not have to be. It would be years before Leona would have half the confidence of the next person in that room, but that small moment was the start of something monumental.
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