Chapter 3
Ian: Do you still have an obsession with true crime?
Me: Wow. Not even eighteen hours since you dropped me off, and I have a text. I’m impressed that you know how to work a cell phone. Also, good morning to you too. I forgot how talented you are at small talk.
Ian: We both think small talk is bullshit.
Me: True. And yes, I am. Just like any sane, single woman who doesn’t want to get murdered.
Ian: And peppermint tea?
Me: What else am I going to drink while I watch hours of footage about unsolved crimes?
Ian: You are so strange.
Me: You already told me you missed me. Can’t take it back.
Ian: I don’t want to. When do we get to hang out for longer than ten minutes?
Me: Can’t today. I have to pretend to work again.
Ian: I … I’m not sure how to respond to that.
Me: Best not to. I’ll explain eventually.
Ian: Why not now? I’m at the jobsite early because I like to see Cameron’s face when I beat him there in the mornings. This gives me something to do until he shows up.
Me: I see you didn’t grow out of your competitive urges with your brothers. That’s strangely comforting.
Ian: Avoiding the question. Interesting.
Me: Ugh, fine. I have writer’s block. So instead of writing actual words for my very legitimate and legally contracted deadline, I sit and stare at a blinking cursor and try not to spiral.
Ian: I fucking KNEW you could do it.
Me: Sigh. You did. As much as I hate inflating your ego by saying this, I probably would’ve given up if it hadn’t been for you.
Ian: Nah. You just needed a kick in the ass, but anything you achieved is all on you.
Ian: I know you don’t write under your actual name because I did sporadic searches over the years.
Me: OMG, you know how to work a search engine?? Who even are you?
Ian: Harlow…
Me: What? You didn’t actually ask me a question.
Ian: What’s your pen name?
Me: You know, the first big life lesson I taught Sage was how to ask for things politely. I know Sheila raised you better than this.
Ian: Can I please have your pen name so I can go buy all your books?
Ian: Don’t ignore me.
Ian: Harlow … don’t be stubborn.
Ian: Who am I kidding? I know people don’t change that much. You’re more stubborn than I am.
Me: Sorry, had to listen to my daily guilt trip from my parents about why I don’t just get another job and quit the author gig. Today’s key points were maternal responsibility and general productivity of society. Also wanting to know why I haven’t found a husband by now. Being home is the funnest.
Ian: Lovely. The pen name?
Me: Oops, sorry, phone is glitching out. Have to get the kiddo off to school.
Ian: Oh, so you’ve turned into a chickenshit the last seventeen years, sparky.
Me: Usage of the old nickname is emotional manipulation. Low blow, Wilder.
Ian: Come on. Like I’m going to judge you.
Me: EVERYONE judges what I do. Part of that whole “creativity is subjective” thing. And they get especially judgey when they realize I haven’t published a book in a year because my brain doesn’t work. My publisher is super happy with it too, trust me.
Ian: Let me know if I can help. Remember how good I was at helping you plot your story ideas?
Ian: Put a pin in that. Cameron just pulled up and I need to bask in the annoyance in his face.
Me: Weirdo. Have a good day.
“Who are you texting?” Sage asked, plopping on the couch and snuggling into my side. With a happy sigh, I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against me, dropping a kiss on the top of her head.
“Totally ready for school? You grabbed your homework folder from the kitchen?”
I could practically feel the eye roll. “Yes. You already asked me about the folder last night.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes asking a question seventeen times is part of being a mom.”
She tapped my phone. “Yes, I’m ready. Yes, I have my lunch and a snack and my water bottle. Now who were you texting? Can I see?”
“My friend Ian. I told you about him last night.”
She nodded, trying to tilt my phone screen so she could read the text exchange. While she did, I settled into the sweet weight of her body against mine. Cuddling was a luxury I didn’t get from her as much anymore.
When she got to the end where he called me stubborn, she snorted. “Grandma says you’re stubborn too.”
Yeah, except Grandma’s use of the word held a bit of a different edge to it than Ian’s, but I decided not to point that out. “She does.”
“Seems like he knows you really well.”
I nodded. “From kindergarten until the end of high school, he was my best friend in the whole world.”
“You never talked about him while we were in New York,” she pointed out. My little skeptic.
It wasn’t like I could answer her truthfully. I didn’t talk about Ian because some subjects were left untouched out of sheer self-preservation.
So far, Sage hadn’t shown any sort of abandonment issues. No gaping, obvious wound from having no father in the picture to teach her a different perspective. That wound would show eventually, but I did my absolute best to be both parents.
There were a lot of really hard things about being a single mom. No one could shoulder any of the burden with me, especially when we were still in Manhattan. When I was sick or exhausted or sad, I was still the only person who could handle the shit that needed to be handled. But out of that hard grew a really special relationship between Sage and me.
We talked about everything, and I made it a point very early on that I wouldn’t hide the truth of my life from her because I wanted her to understand the trade-off of the choices we made in life.
It was probably the bias talking, but my kid was the absolute best. A million hard days were unquestionably worth it if it meant we had little pockets of good like this—a cuddle on the couch before she left for school.
My daughter, who’d rather knock over every obstacle in life with tight fists and a vicious gleam in her eyes, wasn’t much of a cuddler anymore. Only when she was sick or a little tired. She was tough as hell, which I loved, and so self-sufficient. Both of those things came from a mix of genetics, the place she’d been raised, and a bit of necessity.
“You’re right, I didn’t talk about him.” With my shoulder, I nudged her. “Because we both moved on to different places, and I was a little busy raising you to keep in touch with people from home,” I said. “But he’s back in town too, and it’s nice to be able to have an old friend back in my life.”
When her eyes flicked briefly up to mine, she was chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip. “Was he ever your boyfriend?”
“No,” I said with a short laugh. “It was never like that with us. He was just … Ian. The guy who gave me a coat on the playground when I was cold. And listened to me talk about the books I wanted to write, and helped me pick out a prom dress when the cute football player asked me to go with him.”
“He sounds all right, I guess. For a boy,” she added distastefully. We were fully entrenched in the boys are gross and stinky era.
“Some of them are pretty great.” I laughed when her lip curled into a sneer. “Trust me,” I told her, dropping a kiss on her forehead, “someday, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
My mom popped her head into the family room. “Bus is down the street, Sage.”
Sage popped off the couch, snagging her backpack and waving over her shoulder. “Love you, bye!”
The door swung shut as I told her I loved her too, and I sighed.
Watching your kid get older was the strangest double-edged sword. Feeling your heart break daily because they didn’t depend on you quite as much while wanting to cry from how fucking proud you were that they weren’t a total asshole human being.
“You going to work today?” my mom asked. She was tying her favorite blue gingham apron behind her pencil-thin waist, studying me with a slightly pinched expression.
Slowly, I nodded. “Gonna try. I have a call with my agent soon, but I’ll head to the coffee shop after that if you don’t mind me borrowing your car.”
She sighed. “Fine. I shouldn’t need it today.” My mom paused, the knuckles on her dainty hands white from how tightly she was gripping the mixing spoon in her hand. “Your dad told me they still need help at the mill. Wouldn’t be much—cleaning up and such, some light office work, but it’s honest, hard work.”
I swallowed down the immediate response that my job was honest, hard work too, because I knew she meant well. They’d always meant well. But my parents had an incredibly different idea of what providing for your family meant. With the benefit of time, I realized how hard it must have been for them when my sister and I were young, living paycheck to paycheck with no extra. Theirs was a stress that I came to understand when I was down to my last few months in New York and rent became a bit harder to pay with royalties that were drying up.
“Thanks, Mom,” I told her. “If I can’t get something started in the next month, I’ll … I’ll talk to them.”
No doubt about it, Mom was chewing on some words, based on the tightness in her jaw, but she left them unsaid.
My agent, however, did not have the same compunction.
“You need something, Harlow.”
I groaned. “I know, I know. I’ve tried, and I’m just”—I paused, mimicking a brain explosion next to my temple—”empty.”
Through my phone, she sighed, sounding incredibly put out. Why was she so stressed? I was the one who needed to write the fucking book.
“What about that female serial killer idea you had? You could easily get a four- or five-book series out of that. A little cat-and-mouse game with a hard-jawed, silver-fox detective.” She made an encouraging little noise that made me want to punch something. “You were so excited about that last year.”
“Past me was excited about a lot of things, Cora. She was delusional.” I flopped back on my childhood bed, the frame squeaking like it did when I was in middle school. There was something weirdly comforting about that. Except for when it happened in the middle of the night because my daughter liked to starfish in bed and whack me in the face with her arm. “I tried to start it, and nothing. Even the idea that she was only killing men who deserved it couldn’t get me going.”
“That’s pretty serious.”
“No shit. What have you heard from my publisher? I don’t know if I dare reach out and ask for another extension.”
“They’re not the happiest. You were lucky, kid. They loved your first two series enough that they didn’t need more than a whisp of an idea for your contract, but if your brain doesn’t kick it in, they might ask for that advance back.” In the background, I heard the tap-tapping of her keyboard. She said it so casually. They might ask for that advance back. Like that didn’t make me want to curl up and cry. “I’ll shoot him an email, but I think their patience is close to running out.”
Using the back of my hand, I gently tapped my forehead like it would knock loose some earth-shattering, bestselling idea. Unfortunately for me, that was not the way it worked. I would’ve hooked myself up to a lightning rod if I thought it would help.
“You talk to that writing coach Paloma told you about?” she asked.
“We have a call scheduled for this afternoon.”
“Good. You can get through this, I promise.”
I snorted. “You’ve been saying that for a year, but I appreciate your unwavering optimism, Cora.”
“That’s my job, honey. Tell Sage I said hi.”
That made me smile. “You might be the only thing she misses about New York.”
“Smart kid.” She cleared her throat. “All right, no mushy stuff. You’ll be fine. I believe in you, Miss Keaton.”
It was amazing how powerful words like that were. Words, in general, held so much weight. You never quite realized how much until someone said something that cuts you straight to your gut—painful and demoralizing. Today, I’d had a little bit of both, but fortunately for me, Ian and my agent outweighed that slight thread of disbelief that my parents always had in my career. In all my life choices, really.
I packed my laptop bag and noise-canceling headphones, along with a notebook, heading to the coffee shop downtown for what was likely another exercise in futility. But my parents’ house just didn’t have the juju. And creating the correct writing juju was very, very important.
Sometimes I found it in a library or a coffee shop. Sometimes it was on a small desk tucked into the corner of our tiny one-bedroom apartment. But it worked. That small desk in the place Sage and I used to call home was the birthplace of six of my ten novels.
But that particular juju was expensive, and I couldn’t justify close to four grand a month for a six hundred square foot apartment when my daughter was craving family and a different experience.
That different experience involved saving money, swallowing my pride, and giving her the thing she wanted, even if it meant I had to listen to a bit of “I told you so.” Even as I stared at my blinking cursor again and felt some of the stares at the coffee shop while I sat down with my drink, I knew it was worth it.
The phone call with the author coach was … fine. It wasn’t like she told me anything I didn’t already know, but I found my frustration bubbling higher and higher the longer I sat there and thought about what she’d said. And I’d been doing that for hours.
Creating a place that fosters your creativity is the best thing you can do.
Embrace your process instead of fighting it.
Maybe your brain needs a break from the dark and twisted. Have you thought about writing something different?
I laid my head down on my folded hands and groaned. “Every fucking day,” I mumbled.
“Talking to yourself. Not a good sign.”
At the sound of Ian’s voice, I snapped back up, my hair sliding out of its ponytail holder. He was holding a cup of coffee and wearing a smirk on his face that immediately lightened the tight pressure in my chest.
“It’s not,” I said. I wrenched my hair back and lifted my chin at the bench opposite of me. “What are you doing here? Figured you’d be building someone’s dream home until after dinner.”
As he slid his big body into the seat, I took a moment to study him again now that the shock of his presence had worn off.
Sort of worn off.
In the years I’d been away, Ian had grown himself into a man. The lanky boy from high school was long gone, and in his place was a tall, broad specimen of mountain man goodness. Gawd, he should be on a magazine cover somewhere.
Go hike mountains and chop down trees and build things and you too can look like me.
That would be the headline, and men everywhere would do exactly as he commanded because he was a veritable poster child for testosterone and conventional masculinity.
Not that there was anything wrong with unconventional masculinity. I’d dated a couple of guys who were prettier than me, but Ian was the kind of man who would fit right under the dictionary definition for manly man.
He took a slow sip of his coffee, eyeing me over the rim.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re the one staring.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, well, I’m still getting used to your face. It’s not the same, you know. Covered in copious amounts of hair and all.”
He raised a hand—that was big and strong-looking too—and scratched at the dark, trimmed beard covering his jaw. “Not a fan, are you?”
“I never said that,” I demurred. “Just remembering how you used to shave your single piece of facial hair in tenth grade because you liked to pretend you’d get stubble if you didn’t.”
“I had more than a single piece,” he shot back. “Besides, you were stuffing your bra with paper towel when I was pretending to shave, so I don’t think you’re in any position to judge.”
“Touché.” I sighed, then patted my chest. “Thanks to the wonders of childbirth and the fifteen pounds I never quite lost, I have the cleavage I always dreamed of. No paper towel necessary.”
Ian’s dark eyes never dropped from my face. What a good boy.
“Seriously, though,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to pick something up from the hardware store. Saw you pounding your head on the table through the window and decided to step in before you concussed yourself.”
I grinned. “So thoughtful. Nice to see you haven’t lost that.”
“Only with you.” He said it so quietly, but I heard him loud and clear, and it sent a warm, gooey wave of happy through my bones. Ian knew I heard it too, his eyes darting away after a long moment.
“How’s Sheila?” I asked quietly.
His jaw did this clenching motion before he answered, and a brief desolate look flashed through his eyes, there and gone in a blink.
“She’s doing okay. Keeps busy, talks to the girls a lot.” His big hands fiddled with the coffee in front of him, his gaze locked on the surface of the table.
“And you?”
This question was phrased a bit more tentatively. Maybe because everything about this body language screamed don’t come any closer. But there was no way I wasn’t going to ask.
There was a loaded pause before he answered, his eyes locking on mine briefly before he glanced away again. “I’m fine.”
My chest went tight at the gruff, terse way he said it. Half the battle of being friends with this man was knowing when to push and when to back off. Given it was day two, I decided to go with the latter. I gave him a small smile, and his chest expanded on a deep breath when he realized I wasn’t going to pry.
“How’s it going at your parents’?” he asked.
The immediate slump of my shoulders must’ve given me away because he laughed—a low, rough, eardrum-tickling laugh that came from deep in his chest.
“That good?” he asked.
I propped my chin on my hands and sighed. “I wanted it to go well, Ian. I swear. I’ve been gone for so long, I thought maybe my parents and I would be able to coexist because I was finally coming home, and they finally have Sage here all the time like they wanted.” I covered my face briefly because holy shit it was a relief to finally be able to admit some of this out loud. “Coming home was the right thing to do, and I know that. But they see life so differently than I do. They cannot understand why I keep writing as a job when it’s so fickle, so hard to predict.” I dropped my hands. “To them, that’s the height of being an irresponsible parent.”
The quiet way he watched me unload my feelings was like shooting back in a time machine. It was one of the things he did so well, and apparently, still did.
“You keep trying because it’s what you’re meant to do, and you love it.”
My shoulders dropped another inch. “That simple, huh?”
“Yes.” His tone was stern, but his face was soft, a word most people would never, ever use to describe him. “So they still don’t support you, even after all these years.”
“They are letting me stay at their house for free,” I said carefully. “That’s a form of support.” I thought about my mom’s comment from earlier. Honest, hard work. Like I didn’t have any clue what that meant. “Though, I don’t know how long that will last. They want me to get a job. And I might,” I conceded. “If I can’t get something started. My publisher is pretty much out of patience.”
Ian’s hands were clasped together when he leaned forward, setting them on the table between us. It was almost impossible to hold his unwavering eye contact because I knew he was about to ask me something I didn’t want to answer.
“What do you need, Harlow?”
Something about his easily asked question, smooth and deep and unthinking, had a nervous tickling erupting in my belly. So naturally, I deflected like a champ. “Like, in general or right at this moment? Very different answers.”
One side of his lips hooked up. “To write. What do you need?”
I knew the answer, but I didn’t really want to say it because I knew this man. Knew him despite the time and distance. He’d do whatever he could to help me because if a single person had proven his desire to make my life better, it was Ian Wilder.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly.
He tilted his head. “Bullshit. You know what you need. You just don’t want to tell me.”
I leaned forward. “Don’t you think it’s weird that I haven’t seen you in forever, and you’re sitting here trying to pry my innermost thoughts out? Because this can’t be normal. This should be awkward, you know? Seventeen years of not seeing you should mean a transition period of small talk and catching up and talking about the weather, at least for a few days.”
Ian leaned back in the booth and spread one arm across the back of the bench, much like he’d been sitting on his couch the night before. “I’m not overthinking it like you are.”
“Clearly.”
“What do you need?” he said again, the slight edge of demand to his voice.
The last year had drained me so much more than I realized, and maybe it was as simple as someone I trusted asking me a really straightforward question. In the necessity to keep moving forward, I didn’t usually stop and dwell on what made all these decisions of mine so hard. But swallowing your pride after months of not feeling like you could do your job anymore had exhaustion stamped down to my marrow. It felt an awful lot like conceding to a battle, even if I was the only one fighting it.
No one had warned me about how your soul deflated when you couldn’t find the words you needed. No one warned me that coming back home and trying to keep my chin up was the most debilitating sort of humility. And no one had asked me something this simple.
What did I need to write?
“I need something to inspire me. I need space and quiet, and I need someone to metaphorically hold my hand and tell me I can still do this, even when it’s hard.”
Dammit, my voice got all wobbly at the end, and the bridge of my nose tingled ominously.
Ian nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Once the unexpected wave of emotion had passed, I took a deep breath and straightened in the booth. “Okay, what?”
“I have an idea. You’re going to say no at first, but eventually, you’ll admit that I’m right.”
“Gawd, no wonder you’re single. That’s your best approach when asking a woman to do something?”
Ian’s eyes sparked with humor, but his firm lips stayed in a straight line. “Move in with me.”
“What?” I yelled. The coffee shop fell silent, and when everyone turned in our direction, I sank in the booth and covered my mouth with one hand. Ian choked on a small laugh. I kicked out underneath the table, connecting with his shin. When he grimaced, I dropped the hand covering my mouth. “Absolutely not.”
“See? Just as I predicted.”
“Oh fuck off,” I said, completely without heat. “Ian, that’s crazy.”
“Why?” he asked. “I have a big house. You and Sage could have the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. I work full time. I’m at my mom’s house for dinner a couple of times a week. You’d practically have the place to yourself.”
My mouth fell open. “Holy shit, you’re serious.”
The chiseled features on his face didn’t move a single inch. “Would I offer if I wasn’t?”
“No,” I answered slowly. My brain was moving pretty fucking slow, too, because this was not the thing I’d expected when he asked me that question.
I thought about his house—that pretty, big house with the pretty, big piece of land. I thought about how he’d always believed in me and how easy it was to be around him again.
“What’s your hang-up? I can see the wheels turning up there.”
“It’s not just about me,” I told him. “I have a daughter. She’s ten, and … this might be confusing to her.”
“If you want me to meet her first, we can do that. Kids fucking love me.”
I snorted.
“They do. Greer has a stepdaughter who’s obsessed with me. Last week when they were visiting, Olive refused to sit on anyone’s lap except mine.” He paused. “Erik has a daughter, too, but she’s less than a year, so she hasn’t been able to form a true opinion of me yet. That’s more of a her problem than a me problem.”
Had I mentioned that the Wilder family was massive?
They were normal size when I met Ian. He had two brothers. Simple enough. Then his mom died—which was sad enough at the time, even though I couldn’t really wrap my brain around it when we were less than ten years old. A couple of years later, his dad remarried Sheila—she had three kids of her own, and a couple of years after that, they welcomed Poppy into the mix. Brady Bunch on crack and with a lot less manners.
“So one kid likes you,” I said. “Let’s give the man a gold star.”
Ian didn’t find me very funny, which was a shame because I thought I was hilarious.
“Bring her over tonight,” he said. “Tell her you need to drop off a housewarming gift. If she hates me, you don’t move in.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You are simplifying this way too much. Did you ever consider that the overthinkers among us are the ones who know what’s up?”
“No.”
With a sigh, I slumped back against the bench. “Fine. I’ll bring you some chairs so people can actually eat at your table.”
His eyes crinkled at the edges when he smiled, and it made him look annoyingly dashing. “I’m almost done with the chairs, if you must know.”
My head reared back. “You … what?”
“I’ll be home around five thirty,” he interrupted smoothly. “If you want to eat at my place, let me know, and I’ll pick up pizza. Otherwise, I’ll reheat some leftovers.”
“You made that table?” I asked.
His eyes stayed steady on mine.
And with my mouth hanging open, my brain whirring at a million miles a minute, Ian stood from the booth.
“See you later?” he said.
“I … yes?” I answered weakly.
He gave me a tiny wink and was gone.
I folded my arms on the table, dropped my forehead on the table again, and groaned.