Chapter 18 #2
All right, here goes. I close my eyes and try to pray, try to pull the words from my heart, but…
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve prayed before…
but somehow this feels different. As I sit in the golden lamplight of my mother’s living room, the silence makes me self-conscious.
I feel ridiculous. Bare and vulnerable. I open my mouth. Close it again. Look at my hands.
Finally, quietly—barely above a breath, and maybe not even that—I say it.
“All right. I’m here. You told the weary and burdened to come to You.”
A pause.
“Well. Here I am.”
The quiet surrounds me, wrapping around my shoulders, holding me. And I just…wait.
It lasts maybe thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. A small eternity in a life that has been in constant motion. And in that minute—in the stopping, in the stillness, in my weary-and-burdened breaths—something shifts.
Not the hollow filling. Not the shame dissolving. Something quieter. The first millimeter of a hand beginning to open. The first breath of a man who has been holding his breath since he was eight years old.
And finally, it clicks.
I don’t have to be enough, because God is. And anything I try to substitute for that…no wonder they leave me hollow. Oh. I guess I do have things to say to God, starting with I’m sorry. And ending on…I need you.
I open my eyes, not surprised to find my mom standing there, that quiet smile on her lips.
“Thank you,” I say. “For leaving the light on.”
“Always.”
My apartment is quiet the way midnight is quiet—not peaceful, just empty.
The city lights bleed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, pooling across the rug, across the coffee table, across the manuscript in my hands.
Three hours. A glass of water untouched.
The Minnesota night is cold and deep, but the stars are close.
I’ve been on page twenty-four for the last twenty minutes. Not because it’s slow—it isn’t. Because on page twenty-four, a man shows up, bursting onto the page with charm and genuine goodness. And somehow still painted as a villain just long enough for you to wonder if he might be.
He’s me. Sort of. He’s me in the way a reflection is you—reversed and slightly wrong, and yes, there are angles that seem brutally honest.
And the woman who sees him—she’s not what you’d expect either.
She knows everything about hockey and has never once set foot in an arena.
She has a voice that eighteen thousand people would recognize and a face that none of them would.
She has built an entire life inside the safe perimeter of her own walls, broadcasting her sports podcast from a home studio.
She hasn’t been to a game. She hasn’t been to a grocery store or a restaurant or anywhere that requires her to walk out her front door and trust that the world won’t hurt her.
She’s afraid to be seen. To be known. Instead of hiding behind pen names, she hides behind her walls.
Until Jake. He shows up when the heroine needs him. She doesn’t ask him to. He’s just there. And he makes her feel not so alone.
And she sees him. Not the stats or the jersey, but the man underneath. She sees his walls and doesn’t demolish them. She stands on the other side and says I’m here. When you’re ready. However long it takes.
So I keep reading, the sun starting to gleam on the streets when I reach the final chapter.
Jake stepped out of the tunnel in his sweats, wearing his skates. One last moment on the ice. He doused the memory of the crowd jeering as he started toward the bench. Where he’d be sitting until the end of his suspension. Or until the fans ran him out of town, whichever came first.
He just needed this, quiet ice time, to mourn.
And that’s when he saw her. There, at center ice, knees rattling on wobbly ankles, stood Lily. On skates. And in full gear—his. Helmet slightly crooked. Holding the boards like they were the last solid thing on earth.
He stopped skating.
She spotted him across the ice, and her whole face lit up, chin rising, jaw set, eyes a little too wide. She set out toward him, arms waving as though she was trying to tread water.
He skated to her. Slow. Stopped just short.
“What are you doing?” His voice came out low. Just for her.
“Standing on the ice.” She looked down at her skates like they’d personally betrayed her. “Poorly.”
“Lily.”
“No,” she said in that strong, familiar, stubborn voice—the one she’d kept hidden for all these years.
“You didn’t abandon me. In my worst moments, when I finally gathered the courage to leave the comfort of my home, you were there, and you never let me down.
And now I’m here for you. No matter what. They don’t know you. But I do.”
He could hardly process what he was hearing. “You left your house.”
“It was worth it,” she said, sucking in a nervous breath, wobbling just a little. “I’m team Jake Reeves. One hundred percent.”
The crowd noise in his head faded. The arena, the suspension, the six months of doubt and careful damage control—all of it—went somewhere far away and quiet.
He reached up and unsnapped her helmet, tipped it back off her head. She blinked up at him, cheeks flushed from cold.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Jake laughed. “What does it look like?”
He kissed her. Right there at center ice, one hand cupping her face, her fingers curling into the front of his sweatshirt like she needed something to hold on to.
She kissed him back like she meant it—like a woman who’d spent years building walls and was finally, deliberately, choosing to stand outside them.
I close the manuscript.
The hollow doesn’t just fill. It cracks open. The way ice breaks in spring—not violently, but the slow structural surrender when the sun pours down and the world turns warm.
Jake isn’t even proven innocent yet, and she’s there for him. She sees him, and she’s willing to stand by him. Willing to see past all the things that try to define who he is.
And suddenly, I get it. She was never using my letters as material—only as light for a broken character worth a second chance.
And maybe, yes, she added some depth into Jake—frankly, he’s a lot more conscious of his feelings than I am, so maybe that’s a bit of overwriting there, but okay, fine. I liked it.
Really liked it. I lean back against the sofa, not tired. And then I get up, go to my mother’s desk, and find some paper.
I pick up a pen.
Dear S.B.—
EVERLY
It’s an unexplainable feeling when the writer inside you comes alive. It’s like you were seeing in black and white, and suddenly you’re in a Technicolor world again. Today…is not that day.
Nope. But it’s okay, because it’s been a full ten days since the mall, and I’m doing something I haven’t done since the morning after the mall: working on my thriller.
Mostly because I finished my rom-com in earth-shattering record time. What can I say? When you’re hot, you’re hot.
But now I have my laptop open. E.J. Hartley thriller on screen. Cursor blinking, just a little judgment in each blip.
Back off, oh cursor. I’ll figure it out.
The thriller has been waiting. Patiently. The plot sitting exactly where I left it weeks ago, the protagonist frozen mid-investigation, the entire fictional world in suspension while I switched my focus to finishing Ice Cold Heart in my pajamas while eating tubs full of dairy products.
But today, I’m showered. Dressed. I’m back at it. And the words are coming. Slowly. Reluctantly. The way words come when the writer has been through something and the sentences have to navigate around the rubble. But they’re birthing, one word at a time.
I’m writing the scene where the protagonist breaks into an office. Drops into the hall from the ceiling—a little trick I learned from Beckett—cobwebs caught in her wild, crazy red hair.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but every author does it. There’s a little slice of us hidden in every character we write. That’s a universally known fact.
The scene goes on:
The heroine tries the door—locked. She—
The doorbell rings.
Bree Holloway is standing on my doorstep holding two things: a latte from Brew & Rumor and an envelope.
“Before you say anything,” she says, extending the latte with the practiced gesture of a woman who knows editors who bring an offering of caffeine are more likely to be admitted, “I come bearing gifts. And news. And”—she holds up the envelope—“this.”
I take the latte because I am a writer, and we are physiologically incapable of refusing free coffee.
I eye the envelope.
It’s plain. White. But addressed in handwriting I recognize immediately.
Something in my chest shifts. The sudden full-body tense of having salt pressed to an open wound.
“This came to the office today,” Bree says.
“Hand delivered, in fact. By a man who is significantly taller and more attractive than our usual mail carriers and who, according to Janine at reception, stood in the lobby for approximately four minutes before approaching the desk, which Janine interpreted as either nervousness or unfamiliarity with the concept of a reception area.”
“Bree—”
“She also noted that he was”—she makes a gesture that I think indicates burly, but could also be interpreted as hairy—“and that he asked very politely if the envelope could be forwarded to the author and then left without providing a name, which was unnecessary because Janine has a Blue Ox calendar and he is, apparently, Mr. November.”
“Bree!”
“Right, sorry! Anyway, here.” She hands me the envelope, and immediately I know it’s not just a letter. Something jostles inside, across the bottom. Bree does not wait for an invitation—she settles at my kitchen table with her own coffee and folds her hands.
She waits. Patiently. The way a police siren wails quietly. Not.
She smiles at me, eyes shifting to the envelope and back as though to say Go on, then, I’m waiting.
I sit. I open it.