Free The Stud Book by Monica Drake

for ten years already, in bits and pieces—itwas her PhD dissertation:
Implied Narrative and Suppressed Symbol in the Paintings of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
.
    She could smell the best-seller possibilities!
    With a shift in tone and scope she’d turn her dissertation into a commercial manuscript—play up the romance, the tragedy. Manufacture a lot of deeply felt emotion.
    Pssst!
They don’t tell you this in grad school, but here’s a tip: People go nuts for deeply felt emotion.
    Vigée-Lebrun was a beautiful raven-haired portrait artist who flattered her patrons and worked her way into Marie-Antoinette’s life as a court painter. She lived at the Palace of Versailles with her infant daughter. When the French Revolution hit, when Marie-Antoinette lost her head, Vigée-Lebrun and her child escaped overnight, in a seriously competent mother moment.
    This woman’s life was destined for the big screen! Georgie opened the file. Bella slept in her bassinet. The house was quiet. First thing Georgie did was revise the title of her work:
The Secret Narratives of Vigée-Lebrun
.
    Readers love secrets.
    Success inched closer. Somerset Maugham could have his laugh, but she’d win out and find her own rules. Her writing project had a nerve-racking sense of suppressed urgency.
    Back when Georgie’s mom left town, Georgie dropped out of school. Social workers tracked her down. Her dad must’ve given them Sarah’s address. She was with Sarah’s family, eating their Pop-Tarts, bread, and tuna. She had Pop-Tarts hidden in her pockets. Heat pumped out of the vents in Sarah’s house, a minor miracle. She slept in Sarah’s extra bunk bed, on an extended sleepover, ready to leech love from a family that wasn’t hers.
    She was a stray.
    Now the bruised feeling around her C-section incision had started to lessen. Bella, mid–baby dream, scrunched up her face like Margaret Thatcher on a bad day—like Marie-Antoinette, when politics took a wrong turn—but still she slept.
    What could go on in those new dreams? Freud suggested dreams were about working through repressed urges. What would be repressed in a newborn baby? Maybe Freud didn’t take care of enough babies.
    Georgie readied her hands over the keyboard.
    To spell
and
to cast a spell
came from the same Middle English, the same source and sorcery, the same impulse and high hopes: to charm an audience.
    The goal was to get the right letters in the right place, the right words in the right order, and seduce. She started to type, launching in earnest into her project, and at that very second, as though tied to the touch of Georgie’s fingers against the keyboard, Bella woke up and began to cry.
    That angel. The girl’s face got so red! Was that natural? Did babies ever have aneurysms with all their screaming? And what were those blotches on her cheeks?
    Georgie picked Bella up to croon in her ear. Then she saw marks, little crescents, etched in her daughter’s forehead. Claw tracks?
    They weren’t deep. It was like a rat had prodded the child.
    A rat?
    If Georgie were to call the advice nurse again, what would she say? Hey, remember me, the one who gave my daughter drugs? I have one little question.…
    No. Instead, she turned to the computer, held Bella in her arms, and typed, “baby + blotchy + cuts on forehead.” Thousands of answers and nonanswers came up, a world of parents trying to sort things out from home.
    One search result read: cancer.
    Georgie’s heart, her blood, her brain—everything stopped, instantly sick. She held her daughter closer. Cancer?
    Oh my God! They’d spend every minute together. Life was short.
    She tipped the baby back and looked at Bella’s face again. The splotches had subsided but the slim nicks in her forehead were still there. She pulled the sweet bundle closer, talking herself back off that ledge: not cancer, not cancer. Not everything is cancer.
    There were other answers to choose, all more reasonable, more manageable. That was the