Excerpt from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"It's for charity," Kent says to Margaret over dinner that night.

"You're not digging wells in Africa. You're getting drunk at a bar."

"Why don't you come? It'll be fun. I bet I can get them to pay for-"

"No way, buster. I end up taking pictures while you play celebrity." Margaret has just come home from her shift at the hospital, and her face looks like a bruised orange.

"That's not true," Kent says.

"You hate these things. You come back miserable and talk about how annoying everybody is. They spend the entire time either explaining why they really deserved to win their show, or making alliances for a future season, so you drink too much and come home with a massive hangover. Then I have to spend the next day nursing you like a wounded bird."

"It's fifteen hundred dollars," he says, holding out his hands. The truth is, even more than they need the money, he needs the money. He's tired of being a freeloader, tired of watching his wife drink day-old coffee. Kent Duvall's wife deserves five-dollar lattes! Most of all, Kent is tired of the way Margaret looks at him. Like she doesn't expect anything more. Like she's resigned herself to life with a lump.

When he won the show, he quit his job to travel the country on the speaking circuit. His last paid speech was over four months ago. They gave him travel expenses and a five-hundred-dollar honorarium, and for that he rode a bus twelve hours to Shamrock Lakes, Indiana, on a frigid December afternoon. Seven bored kids swiped on their phones while he clicked through his PowerPoint and told them that if they believed in themselves, they could accomplish anything. Afterward, the tweedy professor who had organized the event drove him to the bus depot.

"It's very cold," the professor offered. "I can think of quite a few people who said they would come, but it's very cold."

Kent nodded.

"And the students have finals next week."

"Bad timing," Kent agreed.

"Well, I'm a huge fan," the tweedy professor said, bristling as if Kent were blaming him. "But I have to get back to campus. Do you mind if ... ? The bus should be here any minute." And Kent waited for an hour in the bus depot, which was nothing more than a ticket kiosk and an out-of-order toilet that stank of piss, watching two meth heads bicker over which of them was at fault for ruining the other's life.

Margaret used to come with him, back when he could still fill auditoriums. While he spoke, he would find her in the first row of the audience, and they would lock eyes and share a little smile that said, Isn't this all so silly? She'd drive him home, his right leg still jackrabbiting from the adrenaline, and she would mock the tweedy professors and the pompous administrators who were so honored to introduce-"Honored? Really? No offense, babe, but you're not the president"-and he loved it because he could see her pride. He would see it in the twist of her mouth when people stopped him on the street, or that time he was on the cover of a magazine. Sure, it was his college alumni publication, but still, a glossy object you could hold in your hand. She had the look of a skeptic waiting for the two-bit magician to reveal the wrong card, when suddenly he pulls a dove from the air. She liked dating a reality star. And it seemed in those days that the audiences for the speeches would grow. That a meeting with a producer could turn into a TV hosting gig.

But for Margaret that dream died long ago, and in dying embarrassed her, like he had tricked her into exposing her most secret parts. And he was still giving these speeches.

"This could be an opportunity," he says to her now. "Billy Phillips will be there-"

"Billy Phillips the tech entrepreneur?"

"He was on this past season."

"Why would Billy Phillips do reality television?" she asks, with the disdain she now harbors for the one significant thing in his life.

"I don't know. Because he can? I was thinking-I could hit him up for a job."

Excerpted from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach. Copyright © 2026 by Stephen Fishbach. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.