Chapter Thirty
Eveline stood at the shop window, reorganizing a display of leather-bound classics that didn't need reorganizing. The morning was gray, matching her mood perfectly. Three weeks since Emery had left. Three weeks of dwindling customers and sleepless nights.
“Have you considered,” Maya said from behind her, setting down a tray of coffee she'd brought, “that perhaps throwing yourself into work isn't actually helping?”
“I'm not throwing myself into anything,” Eveline said, adjusting a copy of Jane Eyre for the fifth time. “I'm simply running my shop.”
Maya sighed. “You haven't mentioned her name in three weeks. Not once.”
“There's nothing to say.”
“There's everything to say,” Maya insisted, moving to stand beside her. “Eveline, you can't just shut down and pretend—”
The shop bell jingled, cutting Maya off mid-sentence. Eveline turned, hoping for a customer, for any distraction from this conversation. Instead, she found Charles standing in the doorway, a leather portfolio tucked under his arm.
Something inside her went cold and still.
Maya narrowed her eyes and Eveline sighed. “Maya, this is Charles.”
“Not a good time, Charles,” Maya said.
Charles ignored her, his eyes fixed on Eveline. “I've brought something I think you'll want to see,” he said, his voice carrying that familiar note of confidence that had once charmed her so completely.
“I doubt that very much,” Eveline replied, but her voice lacked conviction. She was too tired for this, too empty to summon the proper anger.
“Five minutes,” he said. “That's all I ask.” He gestured toward the back of the shop, away from the windows where passersby might see.
Against her better judgment, Eveline nodded stiffly and moved toward the reading area. Maya followed, ignoring Charles's pointed look that clearly wanted her elsewhere.
Charles set his portfolio on a small table and extracted a document bound with a blue ribbon. “My publisher has drawn up a new contract,” he said, his voice dropping an octave like it always did when he was being particularly persuasive. “For the re-release of Les Ombres de Provence.”
“I've already told you—” Eveline began.
“With you as co-author,” Charles interrupted, pushing the document toward her. “Full credit. Equal royalties. A formal acknowledgment that the stories were drawn from your experiences.”
Eveline stared at the contract, her fingertips brushing the edge of the paper. “Why now?” she asked, hating the slight tremor in her voice.
He shrugged, a practiced gesture of casual remorse. “Perhaps I've grown. Perhaps I finally understand what I took from you.” He tapped the contract. “This is my attempt to make it right.”
“Nothing to do with your publisher insisting that they get full rights and that there’s no whiff of scandal attached to the book?” Maya asked pointedly.
Charles shot her an irritated glance. “This is about reconciliation.”
“Reconciliation,” Eveline repeated, the word tasting bitter on her tongue.
It had been too long. The gesture was hollow, years too late. And yet, as she looked at the contract with her name printed beside his, something tugged at her. Not love, never love again, but a certain vindication. After all this time, a formal admission that he had taken what wasn't his to take.
She reached for her glasses, her hand shaking slightly as she put them on and began to skim the document.
“You don't have to decide right now,” Charles said, his tone softening. “Take the contract home. Read it properly. But I think you'll find the terms more than fair.”
Eveline continued reading, the legal language swimming before her eyes. Co-author credit. Her name on the cover. A public statement that would clear her of the whispers that had followed her from academia in Paris, that she was difficult, unreasonable, unable to understand the creative process.
She was so tired of fighting.
“Or there's a pen in the portfolio,” Charles said, his voice low and encouraging. “You could end this today. Put the past behind us once and for all.”
Eveline looked up at him. It would be so easy to sign, to finally close this chapter of her life. To have something, even if it wasn't what she truly wanted.
“Don't you dare,” Maya said, her hand closing over Eveline's wrist. “Not like this.”
“Maya, please,” Eveline said, not pulling away but not meeting her friend's eyes either.
“Look at me,” Maya insisted. When Eveline finally did, Maya's expression was fierce with protectiveness. “You're about to sign a contract with a man who betrayed you because you're in pain over Emery. Those are two completely different situations.”
“They both lied to me,” Eveline said flatly.
“You're not thinking clearly,” Maya said. “This isn't about Charles or his book. This is about you trying to make sense of what happened with Emery by lumping her in with him.” She gestured dismissively at Charles. “It's not the same thing, and you know it.”
Charles cleared his throat. “I hardly think this is any of your business—”
“Oh, it is very much my business when you swoop in while my friend is emotionally vulnerable,” Maya shot back. “Could your timing possibly be any more opportunistic?”
“I'll thank you not to psychoanalyze my motives,” Charles said stiffly. “This is between Eveline and me.”
“No, it's not,” Maya said. “Because Eveline doesn't exist in a vacuum. She has people who care about her, who can see when she's about to make a decision for all the wrong reasons.”
Eveline stared at the contract, Maya's words penetrating the fog that had surrounded her for weeks. Was that what she was doing? Using Charles's offer as some twisted way of processing what had happened with Emery?
“I think,” she said finally, her voice steadier than it had been in days, “that I need more time.”
Charles's expression hardened almost imperceptibly before smoothing back into practiced charm. “Of course,” he said, reaching for the contract. “Take all the time you need. But the offer won't stand indefinitely. My publisher is eager to move forward.”
“I'm sure they are,” Maya muttered.
With a tight smile, Charles gathered his things and departed, the shop bell signaling his exit with a cheerful jingle that seemed entirely out of place.
When he was gone, Eveline sank into a chair, suddenly exhausted. “I nearly signed it,” she said. “I hadn’t even read it. What's wrong with me?”
“Nothing's wrong with you,” Maya said, sitting beside her. “You're hurting, and hurt people don't always make the best decisions.”
Eveline laughed without humor. “I thought I was past that sort of foolishness.”
“We're never past foolishness,” Maya said, patting Eveline's hand. “It's part of being human.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the empty shop quiet around them.
“Truth isn't everything, you know,” Maya said finally. “We all tell a hundred little lies every day. Everybody’s truth is different.”
“This wasn't a little lie,” Eveline said.
“No, but it wasn't malicious either.” Maya studied her face. “Have you told Abe the truth yet?”
“About what?”
“About you and Emery.”
Eveline looked away. “No. He doesn't need to be burdened with that right now. He's still recovering.”
“So you've lied to him,” Maya said. “By omission, at least.”
“That's different,” Eveline said.
“Is it?” Maya asked gently. “You're protecting him because you care about him. Is it so hard to imagine that Emery might have had similar reasons? That maybe she told one lie and then things spiraled beyond her control?”
Eveline stood abruptly, not wanting to have this conversation. “It's not the same thing.”
“Try to put yourself in her shoes,” Maya said. “She walks into a shop where the owner openly despises romance novels, the very thing she writes. Can you really not understand why she might have hesitated to reveal herself?”
“She had weeks to tell me the truth,” Eveline said, her voice rising. “Weeks where things were… where we were…” She couldn't finish the sentence.
“Where you were falling in love?” Maya supplied.
“Stop it,” Eveline said, turning away. “Just stop.”
Maya sighed. “Alright. But think about what I've said.” She gathered her things, heading for the door.
The shop bell jingled once more as Maya left, her words hanging in the air behind her.
???
Emery sat cross-legged on her living room floor, surrounded by the contents of the box Ollie had delivered. The copy of When a Bride Meets a Groom lay open in her lap, Eveline's neat handwriting filling the margins.
She'd finally worked up the courage to read the annotations, bracing herself for criticism, for all the ways Eveline must have found her writing lacking. Instead, what she found left her breathless.
Fine, there were critical notes. “Melodramatic,” Eveline had written beside one particularly flowery passage. “Unrealistic,” beside another.
But there were other comments too, ones that made Emery's heart contract painfully in her chest.
“Yes,” Eveline had written next to a paragraph about vulnerability, about the courage it takes to let someone see your true self.
“This is real,” beside a passage where the heroine admits her deepest fears about not being enough.
And most devastating of all, a single word beside the novel's final declaration of love. “Perhaps.”
Emery traced Eveline's handwriting with her fingertip, imagining her sitting alone in her flat above the shop, reading these words, arguing with them, questioning them, and ultimately, somewhere deep down, connecting with them.
She looked up at her bookshelf, where each of her own books sat in a neat row, gifts from her publisher. Emerald Pearl's books. Stories about people who fought for love, who refused to give up, even when everything seemed hopeless. Stories about grand gestures and second chances.
Had she really written all those books about courage in love, only to fail the test in her own life?
“Because maybe Domi is right,” she whispered to the empty room. “Maybe happy endings have to be fought for.”
Emery stood, the book still clutched in her hands, a feeling stirring in her chest that she hadn't felt in weeks. Determination. Purpose.
She'd spent three weeks wallowing in misery, accepting Eveline's decree that they were finished. She'd let a lawyer's letter and a cardboard box be the final chapter of their story.
But that wasn't how Emerald Pearl's heroines would act. That wasn't the ending her readers would accept. And it wasn't the ending she wanted either.
She didn't know if Eveline would forgive her. She didn't know if the damage could be repaired. But she did know, with sudden clarity, that she couldn't live with herself if she didn't try.
“I'm not letting it end like this,” she said, closing the book with a decisive snap.
Whatever happened next, it wouldn't be because she'd given up without a fight. Because some endings were worth fighting for.