Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
PENELOPE
If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be running a bonus Saturday morning Fanfic Club meeting because the group had begged for one, I would’ve laughed so hard my glasses fogged.
But here I was, standing in the rotunda with every beanbag chair filled while three kids sat cross-legged on the floor because we’d run out of seats. Again.
The energy in the room was electric, buzzing with the kind of enthusiasm that made my heart swell with pride.
I’d built this.
When I’d started at the library, Holly had put me in charge of programming. And this club was the first thing I’d added. The kickoff meeting had had two attendees.
Now, I might need to think about offering a permanent second time slot each week just so everyone who wanted to attend could.
“Look.” Molly jabbed her pen toward Theo, her eyes narrowed. “All I’m saying is that if the hero doesn’t have at least one unhinged moment of devotion, what’s even the point?”
Theo pinched the bridge of his nose. “There’s a difference between devotion and a restraining order, Mol.”
“Not in fiction, there isn’t.”
“Your indifference to red flags is genuinely concerning.”
The room erupted in debate, half of them agreeing with Theo, while the other half looked at him like he’d personally insulted their book boyfriends.
I bit my lip to keep from laughing, my heart so full it barely fit inside my chest.
And it wasn’t just the club. Everything in my life was clicking right now. My writing was flowing in a way it hadn’t in months—maybe ever. My friendships had deepened into something I hadn’t ever experienced before—something I hadn’t known I was allowed to have. And Declan…
God. Declan.
The man who scowled at the world but made sure I had coffee or tea—whatever the day demanded—before I left the apartment. Who washed puke out of my hair and cooked me dinner and carved himself into my skin in a way that felt like he’d always been a part of me.
I was in love with him. Completely, terrifyingly, recklessly in love.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared of it.
“Miss Pen?” Molly’s teasing voice interrupted my thoughts. “You’re smiling at nothing again.”
I cleared my throat as heat flooded my cheeks. “Not true. I’m smiling at your passion for morally gray love interests.”
“Uh-huh.” She pursed her lips and squinted at me. “You’ve been smiling like that all morning. It’s suspicious.”
“It’s called being well rested.”
“It’s called being well something,” Theo muttered without looking up from his notebook, and the room dissolved into snickers.
I shook my head and redirected them back to the discussion, but the warmth in my chest didn’t fade. If anything, it only grew as the meeting continued—the debates growing more animated, the laughter booming, and the creative energy in the room crackling like static before a storm.
By the time we wrapped up, my cheeks ached from smiling. The group gathered their things in the usual flurry of zipping backpacks and overlapping conversations, calling goodbyes as they filtered toward the exit.
I straightened up the space, stacked the scattered notebooks left behind, and collected the scraps of paper I’d been scribbling on between conversations—a habit I couldn’t seem to break.
Had stopped even trying to. Especially when the thoughts came to me unbidden—snippets of dialogue, plot notes, a half-formed scene that hit mid-discussion and demanded to be captured before it evaporated.
I shoved everything into my bag without bothering to organize any of it. The old Penelope would’ve sorted each scrap by category and cataloged them appropriately. The current Penelope was too creatively wired to take the time.
Riding the high of a perfect morning, I was already composing a text to Declan, seeing if he wanted to meet me for lunch. I’d come in on my day off for the meeting, and since he was working today, I planned to spend the rest of it typing away like a maniac.
But lately, my best writing happened after I’d been near him. Like he was the spark and my words were the wildfire. Besides that, I just really wanted to steal an hour of him before I squirreled away.
Before I could hit send, I glanced up, realizing I wasn’t alone. Molly and Theo stood silently a few feet away. Since silence and those two didn’t belong in the same sentence, I hadn’t even noticed they were still here, lingering behind after everyone else had gone.
“Hey, you two.” I tucked my phone away and smiled warmly at them. “Everything okay? Need me to take another pass at those college essays?”
“No, it’s not that.” Molly radiated a kind of frenetic energy—like she couldn’t contain it all in her skin. And while she was usually on the hyper side, this was over the top, even for her. “But I did want to ask you something. I just didn’t want to do it in front of everyone.”
“Of course. What’s up?”
She hesitated and shot a look at Theo, who not so gently pushed her toward me.
“All right,” she hissed at him, shoving his hands away.
Then she strode toward me with a book clutched to her chest in one hand and a pen in the other. “Um…I was sort of hoping you’d sign this for me?”
“Sign what?” I asked.
And then she loosened her grip on the book, held it out for me, and my heart seized in my chest while everything else went white-hot inside me.
Because the book in Molly’s outstretched hand was The House of Sovereign Sin with Eden Foxbury’s name branded across the cover.
Except she’d asked me to sign it.
Molly’s voice was urgent now, excited and tinged with a thread of awe that made my stomach drop straight through the floor. “This is my favorite book I’ve read this year. And finding out you wrote it? Our Miss Pen? It's like finding out your favorite teacher is secretly a rock star."
The room tilted. Not slowly—not like a gradual lean I could correct. No, it lurched, the walls narrowing and the air thinning until all I could hear was the rush of blood in my ears and the frantic beat of my heart pounding against my chest like a fist.
She knew. I darted my gaze to Theo, who wasn’t just watching—he was waiting. Eyes bright and smile wide…the unmistakable look of someone who was in on a secret they thought was amazing.
They both knew.
“I don’t— How did—” The words wouldn’t form. My tongue was too thick and my throat was too tight and the room was shrinking around me.
The fluorescent lights were suddenly too bright, and Molly’s hopeful, earnest face was starting to blur at the edges.
How? How?
Only one other person in the entire world knew Penelope Shea and Eden Foxbury were one and the same. One person I’d trusted with the most protected part of myself.
One person who’d promised me it would stay between us.
“Miss Pen?” Molly’s expression shifted from awe to concern. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m sorry,” I managed, though I barely recognized my own voice. “I—I have to go.”
I grabbed my bag and pushed past her—too fast and too clumsy and nothing like the composed, put-together librarian they were used to. My hip caught the edge of a chair on my way out, and it scraped across the floor with a loud sound that made me flinch.
But I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop.
Ignoring the calls of goodbye from colleagues and patrons, I hit the library’s front door and burst into the late October air, the cold slapping my face. But it did nothing to stem the tears blurring my vision.
My gaze snagged on Declan's motorcycle parked half a block down—in an actual parking space for once. Every instinct in me wanted to storm into Steele Ink and demand answers. Demand to know how he could promise me something and then break it like it was nothing.
But my mind was spinning and my lungs weren’t cooperating, and I knew—I knew—if I tried to speak right now, I’d crumble.
My chest was caving in on itself—collapsing under the crush of panic and betrayal and the sickening realization that the most carefully guarded secret of my life was no longer mine.
And there was only one person who could’ve released it into the world.