Chapter Six
Ciara
How did it go?
The text from Maddie comes later that night as I’m wiping down my kitchen table. I think about not replying and then send her a thumbs-up emoji because I’m a liar.
Then he tried to give me homework.
Or at least that was what it felt like.
“Try a writing sprint,” he’d said. “Just push through it. Twenty minutes. No distractions. Just type.”
Just type. Says the man who probably never wrote anything longer than an email in his life. But I got worried if I said no he would never leave, so I ended up agreeing to send him fifteen hundred words by tomorrow.
It shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not as if I haven’t been punching out that same number every day for weeks now.
I know Sam thinks I haven’t been writing, but I’ve been writing more than I ever have in my life.
That’s not what’s wrong. What’s wrong is that it’s all bad.
The prose is forced. The dialogue stilted.
I don’t sound like my dad, and I’m also starting not to sound like me, and it’s freaking me out.
But it’s not like I’m going to sit and explain all that to a stranger who has made it crystal clear he already has his doubts about me.
I Googled him extensively when he left, looking up everything I could find on my hotshot New York editor.
Because he is a hotshot New York editor.
I found three announcements of his various promotions, all within Richardson Books, and page after page of high-profile deals and industry awards.
There’s even an article about him in Publishers Weekly from four years ago.
Seven hundred words about how great he is next to a picture of him leaning against his desk with the same haircut he has now.
He doesn’t seem to have taken a breath in the past decade.
And now he’s here.
I scroll absently through a list of his other authors, picking out the ones I know as I finish cleaning the kitchen.
Every night, it feels too hot to cook and I end up eating what amounts to half a baguette and some kind of cheese, along with whatever vegetables Maddie puts in my fridge.
Yet even without any cooking, the kitchen is always a mess by the time I’m done.
The whole house is a mess. Even though I got rid of most of the stuff in it.
Even though I feel I barely exist in it.
There’s always something to do. Something to fix.
Laundry to wash. Floors to sweep, carpets to hoover.
There’s dust everywhere and fruit flies constantly banging on the windows and how can a place so empty feel so dirty?
I wonder what Sam thought of it. If he was disappointed when he saw the peeling wallpaper and scuffed floorboards. He must have been. He’s probably one of those readers who grew up dreaming about this house. And now he sees the reality.
But it’s not like I’m not trying. I read two books on grief when my father died.
In both of them, there was a chapter about clearing the dead person’s house and how it can be an important part of the mourning process.
That it’s tough but cathartic. Tear-inducing, yet therapeutic.
There were tips and advice and a link to a podcast.
It took me two weeks, with some help from Maddie and others.
We went by object size instead of room, but I was methodical and ruthless through it all.
I sold what furniture I could and threw the rest into a skip.
I got rid of all the ancient electronics and the twenty-year-old cutlery.
I tackled the Closet of Towels. I dumped the Drawer of Cables.
I polished the floors and washed the curtains and took a power hose to the porch.
The only things I didn’t touch were to do with Dad’s books.
His notebooks and his sketches and his boxes of fan letters and old contracts and mementos from over the years.
Mostly because I didn’t know what to do with them.
Weirdly, they were the only things in the house that felt as though they didn’t belong to me.
But I didn’t dwell. I stored them away and closed the door and that was that.
I was excited at first. I got some new furniture, which seemed like a lot when I ordered it, and nothing at all once it was in the house.
I bought a colorful throw rug and an essential oil diffuser and daydreamed about what paintings I would buy and where I would put them.
I thought I had beaten the system. Bucked the trend.
And then, one day, I woke up and realized that my father wasn’t here anymore. That I had scrubbed the place clean of him.
None of the books told me how I was supposed to feel when the house-clearing was complete.
I think they assume you’re going to sell it.
Or maybe move in with your loving partner and two-point-four children.
Life moves on, they all seemed to say. There wasn’t a chapter for twenty-nine-year-old orphan daughters with a tiny social circle and no consistent sleep schedule.
No footnote on what to do with the emptiness I didn’t know how to fill.
And now here I am almost a year later and the house I grew up in still doesn’t feel like home.
I move on from Sam’s professional life to his personal one, looking up his social media as I turn off all the lights and double-check the doors are locked.
The extra security is new, but the rest is more out of routine than concern.
Even as a kid, the nighttime wind-downs often fell to me, though back then I set my own bedtimes too.
Sometimes it would be nearly three a.m. by the time I finally got to sleep.
It’s not as if I was abandoned or anything, but Dad was the kind of writer who would disappear into his work, which meant I had free run of the place most of the time.
How did it really go?
I smirk as Maddie messages back, debating calling her. But it’s late and she’s probably in bed.
I think I’ve forgotten how to write books.
Isn’t he here to help with that?
I hate it when she’s logical, so I tell her this as I finish downstairs before heading back up to my office.
It’s another sticky night and I push the window open, keeping the lights off so I don’t become a moth magnet, but the soft glow of my laptop screen only highlights the emptiness around me.
I meant to do something with this room. Some proper bookshelves, some pictures, maybe one of those desk things with the pendulums. But, like most things in my life right now, it’s been pushed down the list, so it just looks as unlived-in as the rest of the house.
Maybe I’ll get a fern.
I collapse into my chair, spinning once before opening my email.
My inbox is both horrifying and impressive in equal measure, but I manage to find something from Casey easily enough and pull out his number.
It rings for five seconds before he picks up.
“Ciara. How are you?” He sounds delighted that I called, and I feel calmer just hearing his voice.
Dad used to refer to him as “one of the good guys,” and I picture his lined face and hunched shoulders, sitting behind some messy desk thousands of miles away.
He was with my dad from the beginning and is one of the people I trust most in this world, so I get right to it.
“Please tell me you sent that man with the shoulder bag to my door and it’s not an elaborate plot cooked up by one of the superfans.”
“That depends,” he says. “What does he look like?”
I groan, dropping my head back to the ceiling. “When we talked about it, I thought you meant it was going to be you.”
“And I thought Sam would be better.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m seventy-three years old and have a business to run. How’s it going?”
“Badly.”
Casey pauses. “Did something happen?”
“No,” I say quickly. I’m not about to get somebody into trouble because I’m an insecure mess. “I was being flippant. He’s fine. Or at least I presume he is. He’s just trying to do his job. I’m the problem. I’m the one who—”
“Ciara,” he interrupts, as gentle and firm as always, and it’s because of that tone that I stop talking.
Because, in that moment, he sounds like my dad. And the thought hits me in the chest so hard it’s like I’ve been punched.
“Sam’s one of the best in the business,” he continues. “He knows what he’s doing, and he cares deeply about these characters. More than anyone I know.”
“But—”
“You need help with this,” he says bluntly. “You’re stuck.”
“Yeah,” I say, and there’s a beat where I wait for an exhale. For something to click in my brain. That’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? You confess something and the weight on your shoulders feels lighter? Your mind calmer?
I feel none of that. Just the same.
Like crap.
“Massively, shittily stuck,” I continue.
“You’re a good writer. I wouldn’t have brought this to you if I didn’t think you could do it.”
“I guess,” I mumble. “I’m sorry I’ve been AWOL. Time is kind of running away from me.”
“You’re going through a lot.”
I actually feel like I’m going through a perfectly normal amount and I just can’t deal with any of it, but I don’t tell him that.
“I don’t want anyone else to write this book.”
“That never occurred to me,” Casey says. “Frank wanted you to write it and I’m not going against his wishes. But you don’t have to do this alone. You have to give us a chance to help you. And you have to give you a chance as well.”
“I’m trying. Admittedly, not very hard, but—”
“Just show Sam what you have,” Casey says. “And let him do his thing.”
“You make it sound like he’s going to wave a magic wand and make everything better.”
“Sometimes all you need is a different perspective. Your father used to always say that when he was asked for writing advice.”
“Yeah, but that was also the man who’d eat a peanut butter and pickle sandwich every night, so I’m not sure we can trust him.”
“You know, he brought me over to his side on that one. Though I did once see him pair half a tomato with a bar of chocolate, which is where I drew the line.”
I smile even as an ache shoots through me. He did have the grossest food habits. I used to have to leave the room sometimes when he was creating a snack. Of course, now, I’d give anything to have one more meal with him.
“I miss him,” I say, and Casey sighs.
“I do too,” he admits. “I wish I’d spent more time with him toward the end. He invited me out many times, but…”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“No.” And now it’s his turn to sound sad. “Did I ever tell you about the time we got stranded by a storm in Miami?”
“No.”
“Must have been the first tour,” he muses.
“Or maybe the third. No, it wasn’t the third, we didn’t go to Miami for the third.
It was before the first film, anyway. He wanted to spend a day sightseeing.
You’d apparently demanded a picture of your father with an alligator, so off we went on one of those tourist-trap tours.
And it was all going fine until Frank realized he’d left his reading glasses on the boat. So he turned around and headed back…”
Casey’s voice grows warmer and more animated as he talks, as soothing as listening to the waves on a beach, and as he goes on I close my eyes and listen. Just listen. And if I feel a tear at the corner of my eye, I do nothing with it but let it fall.