4. Everly
Four
Everly
I’m playing a losing game against a blank screen. The cursor’s a cheater—it’s been blinking at me, menacingly, for the last forty-seven minutes while I develop dry eye. I give in and shut my eyes.
Ugh. Another round to the blank page.
It’s been like this since Tuesday. The blank page winning, doing fist pumps and leaving me slumped at my desk like a deflated pool float, hair piled into a messy bun inside my fuzzy hooded blanket, and stacks of half-empty mugs at the edge of my desk growing new lifeforms.
My research wall devours the space above my desk—a floor-to-ceiling collage of photos, articles, sticky notes, and red string that makes me look like the subject of a future Netflix documentary.
Hockey plays. Xcel Center photos. A glossary of terms I cobbled together when I started writing hockey romance.
And then there’s Beckett Benson.
His section colonizes the right third. Action shots clipped from games. Magazine clippings. A printed timeline of the doping scandal. Notes in my handwriting:
Defensive style—patient, reads the play, positions himself between threat and goal.
And underneath, scrawled in red marker from a night I’d mainlined too much coffee:
Why can’t I make him real on the page???
That was before the gala. Before the elevator. Before I said no to cookies and watched his face slam shut like a vault door.
Now every photo has shifted. The action shots are no longer just a specimen pinned under glass—they’re of a man who’s haunted by a past he can’t outrun. The timeline is no longer just a plot structure but a culmination of the worst moments of someone’s life. His life.
My laptop glows with Ice Cold Heart, due in eleven weeks. My editor Margot’s last email has taken up permanent residence in my anxiety center.
The hero reads as emotionally distant. Almost clinical. Like you’re writing him from behind glass. Where’s the man underneath? Where’s the thing that makes him ache? Find that, and you have your book.
Where’s the man underneath?
I found him. He was in an elevator, in the dark, telling me things he’d never have said aloud if he’d known who I was. He was honest and vulnerable and…the complete opposite of everything I know about Beckett Benson.
I stare at the scene I’ve been stuck on for three days. Jake is trying to say something romantic to the heroine, and all I can think of is something about cannibalism, and clearly that does not belong in a rom-com! Sheesh, pull yourself together, Everly.
Maybe I need more chocolate.
My phone buzzes. Bree’s name flashes on the screen.
I should not answer that. Then again, maybe she can help me through this slump. I swipe the screen and answer.
“Tell me you’re writing,” she says.
“I’m writing.” Liar, liar, pants on fire. Really, the entire house is burning down.
Bree lets out a heavy sigh. “Why must you lie to me, Everly?”
Aw, am I that easy to read?
“Okay, I’m thinking about writing. It’s almost the same thing.” The blank screen goes dark, and I jiggle the mouse, bringing it back up.
“Margot wants a progress update by Friday.”
“Tell Margot I was eaten by wolves. Tell her a sinkhole opened beneath my desk and swallowed me and my laptop and all evidence of my existence—”
“What’s the block? Still the hero?”
“The hero has the interior life of a brick. I’ve been staring at the same scene for three days, and the most compelling thing on my screen is the cursor.”
Bree pauses, her voice softening. “Have you tried writing what actually happened?”
I go very still. “What do you mean?”
“Everly. You went to a gala. Got stuck in the elevator with the very man your story is based on, and came out looking like you got trampled by rhinos.” A beat. “Something happened with him.”
“You know, I’m really regretting telling you about that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Whatever happened between you and him—put it on the page.”
She hangs up. I stare at the phone. Then the wall. Then the manuscript.
Write what actually happened.
What actually happened is that I stood in a dark elevator with a man I’ve hated for seventeen years, and he said things that made my bones hurt and made me question everything I knew about the hero in my story.
That’s what happened. And I can’t write it, because it’s not fiction. It’s just true.
I let out a breath and push my chair away from the desk.
You win again, empty page.
My socks muffle the sound of my feet padding toward the kitchen. The afternoon light pours through the massive windows overlooking a slushy, half-melted yard while I scrounge through the cupboards in search of brain food.
That’s when I remember the envelope.
It’s sitting on the kitchen counter where I abandoned it yesterday, my initials typed on the front in Stratton Publishing’s standard forwarding label: S.B. It came in the mail yesterday, passed along by Bree with some other reader mail.
I haven’t opened it. Opening it means reading words from Beckett Benson that he doesn’t know I’ll read as Everly.
Instead, it’s been sitting like an unpulled grenade on that counter for twenty-four hours. It’s radioactive. I should stay away.
I turn, putting the fridge door between me and the letter.
My eyes graze over the contents of the fridge without taking them in…because the letter is calling to me. Like Jumanji.
I lean back, peek around the door again. A ray of sun catches the letter. Read me.
“Ugh. Fine.” I slam the fridge door, snatch the letter, and tear it open.
Dear S.B,
I met two women tonight. One was a voice in the dark, who told me everyone deserves a second chance. The other was a woman I’ve spent seventeen years being wrong about—or maybe seventeen years being right about. I can’t tell anymore.
My heart picks up a beat.
The thing is, she treated me just the way I always thought she would. And I’m not sure I blame her. So I don’t know why that broke something in me, except maybe that I think I’d started to hope, and hope is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever carried.
I keep thinking there’s a version of my life where I’m not always on the wrong side of the glass. Where I don’t manage to screw everything up. Your books make me believe that version exists. Your letters make me believe I might deserve it.
Write back. Please—B.B.
Heat rises in my chest, a mixture of sympathy and righteous indignation battling for space inside my head. Why? Why did he have to be Beckett Benson?
I set the letter on the counter. Carefully. The way you’d set down a land mine prepped and ready to blow.
She treated me just the way I always thought she would.
I can’t write back. If I respond as S.B.
and pretend I don’t know who he is—that’s a lie wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache.
If I say The cookie woman was scared, give her time—I’m literally puppeteering my own romantic disasters through a pen name, which is the kind of thing that happens in the novels I write and which always—without fail—ends up in heartbreak.
The only difference here is that that’s fiction and this is real life, where that sort of thing winds up with you in court, not the chapel.
I leave the letter. March back to the office. Open the laptop.
I type:
He finally looked at her. Really looked. And the thing that cracked open in his chest wasn’t love—not yet. It was something more terrifying. Recognition. The realization that this woman saw him—not the jersey, not the headlines, not the mistakes, not the performance—and didn’t look away.
My pulse thuds in my wrists. It’s a start, right?
Problem is, it’s not fiction.
But from there, the words start flowing. It’s well into evening when my phone buzzes again, pulling me out of the story, back to the real world.
Dad
Hey Evie, just touching base about the Farewell Skate event this weekend. Think you can make it?
It takes a moment to process the words. The Farewell Skate—I vaguely recall my dad mentioning it during the gala the other night. One last community skate before the old Sutton Arena comes down.
Everly
I don’t know. I’m so far behind on this book.
Three dots appear.
Dad
It would mean a lot to me, and to the community.
Blake’s Café is still there.
Ah, he knows how to motivate a gal. Blake’s Café. The wobbly stools where he used to boost me up before anyone else arrived, just the two of us, while the barista played Miles Davis and the rink hummed next door and I thought I was his whole world.
Clearly, I come by the lying honestly.
Everly
All right, I’ll be there.
Dad
Good.
Everly
I’ll get ONE hot chocolate. I’m not staying for the exhibition. And I’m not signing anything.
Dad
We’ll see. You are my daughter, after all. The rink’s in your blood, whether you like it or not.
Love you, Evie.
Everly
Love you too, Dad.
I set the phone down and sit in the silence of my office. The evening shadows are long, the room well past that romantic afternoon glow. My gaze travels to the letter I set nearby. I think of that version of Beckett in the dark—a man trying to run from the past.
It’s about time I face mine.
BECKETT
Sutton Arena smells the same. That’s what gets me—not the banners or the scarred boards or the scoreboard flickering like it’s sending an SOS to a rescue team that disbanded in 2004.
The smell. Cold air and rubber and that specific sweetness of fresh ice that has no name but lives somewhere in the back of my skull, labeled home.
They’re ripping the rink out next month—gutting the arena space and pouring concrete for Sparky’s Laser Tag.
I’ve tried not to read into the fact that Sutton Arena was once called home by some of the greatest hockey players of our time and will now be home to acne-riddled prepubescent teens wearing sweaty Velcro vests.
Yes, this is a true tragedy. At least the mall will go on. The stores will stay. But the ice is living on borrowed time.