Chapter 2 #2
I close the file before I can read more and hate myself harder.
This is definitely not about Jessica.
This is a fictional character who happens to have hazel eyes and run a bookstore and make me feel like I’m standing outside a world I don’t deserve to enter.
Completely different.
I’m a professional.
There’s a knock on my front door.
I check my watch. Four-thirty. Right on schedule.
I lock the writing office with the speed of a serial killer hiding a body—which, emotionally speaking, I kind of am—and open the front door to find Grayson Reed standing there with two cups of coffee and insufferably perceptive.
“You look terrible,” he says by way of greeting, pushing past me into the condo.
“Hello to you too. Please, come in. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind my fragile emotional state.”
“When’s the last time you slept?” Grayson hands me one of the coffees and settles onto my couch, which cost eight thousand dollars and is approximately as comfortable as sitting on a marble slab.
I bought it because it looked impressive.
I kept it because returning furniture felt like admitting defeat.
“I sleep.”
“For more than four hours?”
“That’s plenty. Some historical figures operated on less. Napoleon. Einstein. Various people who definitely didn’t die of exhaustion-related complications.”
“Scott.”
Grayson and I have been business partners for fifteen years. We built Reed Development from nothing but student loans and audacity. Survived recessions, bad investments, and that one year where we nearly murdered each other over a zoning dispute that still gives me a twitch.
He knows me better than anyone.
Which is precisely why this conversation is going to be painful.
“I’m fine,” I say, settling into the chair across from him. “Just busy. The Harrington project is demanding more attention than anticipated, and the quarterly reports need—”
“I got Harold’s email.”
I freeze with the coffee halfway to my mouth.
Grayson’s expression is carefully neutral. The neutrality of a man who’s about to say something I don’t want to hear. “He cc’d me. Wants to discuss the boardwalk property.”
“It’s handled.”
“You told her sixty days?”
“I told her sixty days.”
“And you think that’s enough time for Jessica to either agree to a forty percent rent increase or find a new location?”
The way he says her name—gentle, knowing, like he’s handling explosives—makes me want to throw something.
“It’s not about what I think. It’s about what the numbers say.”
“Right. The numbers.” Grayson takes a long sip of his coffee, studying me over the rim like he’s reading a very obvious book. “The same numbers that say we’ve been carrying that property at a loss for three years that somehow never make it into the quarterly reports we send to Harold and Patricia.”
My jaw tightens. “I’m handling it.”
“You’re in love with her.”
“That’s—”
“Scott.”
“—completely—”
“Scott.”
“I’m not—” I catch the look on his face and abandon the denial. It was a terrible denial anyway. Wouldn’t have convinced a jury of sympathetic blind people. “It’s complicated.”
“You’ve been in love with her for two years.
You bought her building specifically so you could be her landlord.
You’ve invented approximately forty-seven ‘routine property inspections’ as excuses to see her.
Last month you rearranged your entire Tuesday schedule so you could ‘accidentally’ be at the library when she does her volunteer literacy program.
” Grayson ticks these off on his fingers like he’s been keeping a list, which he probably has, because he’s thorough and annoying. “What part of this is complicated?”
“The part where she thinks I’m a soulless corporate shark trying to destroy everything she loves?”
“Have you considered...not acting like a soulless corporate shark trying to destroy everything she loves?”
“It’s called a defense mechanism, Grayson. Some of us have those.”
“Some of us have healthier coping strategies.”
“You proposed to Michelle with a coffee blend. You don’t get to lecture me about healthy.”
“That was romantic.”
“That was unhinged. You spent months perfecting the roast profile.”
“And now I’m engaged to the love of my life.” He spreads his hands. “Results speak for themselves.”
I slump back in my chair, defeated by his annoyingly functional relationship. “It’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
Because I’m secretly V. Langley, and she’s secretly J.A.
Reads Romance. Because she told the world my writing lost its soul while I had her removed from my ARC team for telling the truth.
Because we’ve been corresponding through anonymous letters for six months and she’s told me things—vulnerable, beautiful, devastating things—that she’d never say to Scott Avery the corporate villain.
Because I’m lying to her in approximately forty different ways, and when she finds out, she’ll hate me.
And she’ll be right to.
But I can’t tell Grayson any of that without explaining the secret author identity I’ve hidden for fifteen years, and that’s a conversation I’m not prepared to have. Today or possibly ever.
“It’s complicated,” I say again, because apparently that’s my entire vocabulary now.
Grayson sighs. “For what it’s worth,” he says, standing to leave, “Jessica caught the bouquet at my wedding. And Amber said she saw you watching her with so much intensity it should probably come with a warning label.”
“Amber talks too much.”
“But she’s perceptive.” He pauses at the door. “She also said you looked like a man realizing he was in love and having a complete crisis about it. Her words.”
“I was not having a crisis.”
“You spilled red wine on the mayor’s wife.”
“That was—” I stop. I don’t actually have an excuse for that. I spilled red wine on the mayor’s wife because Jessica looked at me across the room while holding that bouquet, and my brain completely short-circuited.
“The mayor’s wife is still upset,” Grayson adds helpfully. “That dress was dry-clean only.”
“Thank you for the reminder.”
“What are friends for?” He opens the door, then turns back. “Just think about what you actually want, Scott. Not what the numbers say. What you actually want.”
He leaves before I can answer.
Which is probably for the best, because what I actually want is impossible.
I want Jessica to look at me the way she looks at her favorite books.
I want to stop being the villain and to tell her everything—about the writing, about the letters, about the fact that I’ve been in love with her since she passionately defended the romance genre to a condescending tourist and made me want to applaud.
But that would require honesty and vulnerability, the willingness to let someone see the real me and risk them finding me wanting.
And I’ve spent forty-five years building walls specifically to prevent that.
So instead, I pour myself a drink, sit in my expensive uncomfortable chair, and stare at the harbor view that cost a fortune and means nothing.
This is fine.
Everything is fine.
Two hours later, I’m back in my writing office, tipsy and fully committed to making questionable decisions.
I’ve pulled up the email I use for V. Langley correspondence, and there’s a message from my agent, Rodney.
Your new manuscript pages are incredible. This is your best work in years. When can we send it to the publisher?
Never. Not while every page reads like a confession to a woman who doesn’t know I exist.
I close the message without responding and do the thing I definitely shouldn’t do.
I open the folder on my phone marked “Property Documents.”
It does not contain property documents.
It contains screenshots of J.A. Reads Romance’s Instagram. Her profile picture is a blurry photo of a bookshelf, carefully anonymous, but I’d know that shelf anywhere. I’ve studied every spine in that image, trying to decode her taste, trying to understand her better.
This is not stalking. Its…research.
Into a woman whose identity I’ve already figured out but am pretending I haven’t because acknowledging it would require dealing with the implications, and I’ve already met my emotional processing quota for the decade.
Her latest post from this morning shows The Fiction Nook’s staff picks table. My books—V. Langley’s books—prominently displayed.
I zoom in on the handwritten recommendation card.
V. Langley’s early work is required reading... His recent releases, however, have lost what made him special... watching a gifted author hide behind his own walls.
She wrote that on a recommendation card in her shop. Where customers can see it.
She’s literally warning people away from my recent books with handwritten notes.
I should be offended.
Instead, I’m reluctantly charmed, because she’s right, and because the fact that she cares enough to be disappointed means she cared in the first place.
My phone buzzes with a different notification.
New letter in the Letters to Local Authors drop box. From Between the Lines.
I should wait. Should go to the PO box tomorrow during business hours like a person with boundaries and self-control and a functional relationship with patience.
Instead, I grab my keys, knock over my drink in the process, spend five minutes cleaning whiskey off my manuscript pages, and then grab my keys again.
Twenty minutes later, I’m at the post office in the next town over at the PO Box I rent under Coastal Quill’s LLC so no one in Twin Waves connects it to me.
A cream colored envelope is there, sealed with a small sticker of stacked books.
I wait until I’m back in my car to open it, hands shaking like a teenager with his first love letter.
Which, in a way, this is.
She doesn’t know I’m V. Langley, the author whose recent work she’s publicly mourning. I didn’t know she was J.A. Reads Romance until three months ago, when a reference in one of her letters matched a detail from one of her reviews.
I should have stopped writing then, but I didn’t because I’m an idiot.
I unfold the letter.
Dear Coastal Quill,
You asked if readers would give an author another chance. The answer is yes—but only if that author is brave enough to be vulnerable. To write from the wound instead of around it.
As for whether people can change: I have to believe they can. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories, of hope?
The author who lost his way is still the same person who wrote those early books that mattered. The heart that created that work didn’t disappear. It just got scared and built walls.
But walls can come down if someone’s brave enough to risk it.
Tell your author friend that the readers who loved his early work are still here. Still hoping he’ll remember what made those stories sing. Still believing in second chances.
Even the ones he kicked off his ARC team.
Yours in stubborn hope,
Between the Lines
She’s talking about V. Langley, but she doesn’t know she’s talking directly to him.
And that line—even the ones he kicked off his ARC team—I can hear the hurt underneath her stubborn hope. Six months later, and she’s still wounded by the rejection.
I hurt her because I was too much of a coward to face honest criticism. Too afraid of being seen.
And now she’s writing to me, offering hope and second chances, not knowing I’m the person who needs to hear it most.
The irony is so thick I could choke on it.
I pull out the notebook I keep in my glove compartment—physical writing for moments when typing feels too distant—and start composing a response.
When I’ve finished a few minutes later, I stare at what I’ve written.
I’m asking the woman I love to teach me how to tell her I love her while hiding behind a pen name and a PO box.
This is either poetic or pathetic. I address the envelope anyway.
Tomorrow I’ll drop it in The Fiction Nook’s brass mailbox. She’ll read my words and not know they’re mine. Tomorrow we’ll continue this dance where I can only be honest with her when I’m lying about who I am.
I’m a romance author who writes love stories for a living.
I should be better at this.
I drive home as the sun sets over Twin Waves, painting the harbor in shades of orange and pink that would look beautiful on the page if I could figure out how to write beauty without it feeling false.
Back in my writing office, I pull up the manuscript. The one that’s supposed to be honest. The one where I’m trying to find my way back.
I need to write the next scene: the hero confessing his feelings to the heroine who thinks he’s her enemy and doesn’t know he’s been writing her love letters for months, who has no idea that every harsh word is armor against the terrifying vulnerability of actually being seen.
My fingers hover over the keyboard.
In the manuscript, the hero is braver and smarter than I am. A man capable of closing the distance between who he is and who he needs to be.
In real life, I’m just a guy who threatened to evict the woman he loves this morning and is now writing her anonymous love letters this evening.
I’m a romance author who can’t figure out his own love story, who forgot how to write the truth and is slowly, painfully, trying to remember.
I start typing.
Outside my window, Twin Waves settles into evening. Somewhere out there, Jessica is probably closing The Fiction Nook. Feeding Austen, who inexplicably likes me. Reading the letter I wrote as Coastal Quill.
Not knowing the man who gave her an ultimatum this morning is the same man asking her for hope tonight.
Not knowing that I’d give up every property in my portfolio, every dollar in my account, every carefully constructed piece of my public persona, if it meant she’d look at me the way she looks at the books she loves.
With the kind of stubborn faith that says second chances are real and walls can come down and even authors who lose their way can find it again.
If they’re brave enough, and I’m not there yet.
But I’m writing my way there.
One honest word at a time.
How hard can that be?
Don’t answer that, I tell myself, and keep typing.