Chapter 1 #3
Mist rose off the water in slow curls, softening the edges of everything. From out here, the town of Maple Lake looked like a postcard—the kind tourists bought at the General Store and mailed home with notes about how they’d found the perfect hideaway.
Truer words had never been penned.
But for a hideout, it had its charm. A sort of Mayberry feel, except along a lake, surrounded by woods.
The maples were just starting to turn. In another week or two, the whole town would be on fire—reds and golds blazing against the steel-gray water, tourists clogging Main Street for the Flannel Festival, the Maple Sweets Bakery selling out of maple pecan pie before noon.
But for now, in the blue-gray stillness of early September, the leaves were only hinting at what was coming. A flush of amber here. A streak of crimson there. The trees holding their breath.
A flock of Canada geese lifted off the lake, loud and protesting, on their way south.
He spotted his neighbor, Lila, putting in her canoe. The only other early-morning paddler from the residential area that stretched along the southern shore of the lake.
Farther around the lake sat a row of Victorian houses in butter yellow and burnt orange and dusty mauve, their white trims catching the first pale light. Wraparound porches. Gabled roofs. The kind of architecture that belonged on a Christmas card or a jigsaw puzzle.
And beyond them, on the northern shore, the town stretched out along the waterfront, just waking up with the smells of the bakery.
He could see the steeple of the Lutheran church rising above the tree line.
The striped awning of Maple Sweets. The hand-painted sign for Maple Reads, the bookstore where his books sat on a shelf he hadn’t visited in three years.
Farther down, the Brew was lit up, Mandie probably inside, prepping the espresso machine, moving through her opening routine in the quiet before the town truly rose.
The paddle dipped. Pulled. Dipped again.
This was the best part of his day. Out here, with the sky shifting from purple to pink at the edges, he could almost pretend he was just a guy in a kayak.
Not Nate Rivers, one half of the bestselling Ian Rivers author team.
Not Nate Rivers, professional disappointment.
Just a body moving through water. Existing without anyone expecting anything from him.
Don’t think. Just paddle.
A loon called from somewhere in the fog, that eerie tremolo that sounded like laughing and crying at the same time.
Another answered from the far shore, near the state park where the hiking trails wound through stands of white pine and paper birch.
The lonely sound lifted across the water, hollow and ancient.
Found the recesses of his heart and echoed there.
He turned the kayak toward the southern shore, away from town.
His property sat at the end of a gravel road, tucked into a curve of shoreline where the maples grew thick and the neighbors were few.
June Bellamy lived two houses down—retired English teacher, widow, bringer of casseroles he never ate.
Beyond her, nothing but woods and water for half a mile.
And of course, Lila Fox lived on the other side in her crazy pink house with the expansive front porch that Livvie used to sit on, doodling, or sometimes painting.
And where had that thought come from?
He turned toward his house, the old Craftsman materializing out of the mist as he paddled closer. Two stories of green cedar shingles, white trim glowing faintly in the dawn light, a wraparound porch that stretched toward the water like an invitation no one accepted anymore.
Too many memories of Emma lived here, but when his parents had decided to move a few years ago, he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of losing the house and had bought it himself.
But he hadn’t exactly taken care of it. The porch swing hooks hung empty—he’d taken it down when the chains finally rusted through. The garden beds hadn’t been touched in three years. The trim was starting to peel near the gutters.
Felt like a commentary on his life.
The shore came up fast. He pulled the paddle across his lap and felt the bump and scrape of rocks against the hull.
And there they were.
His two silly labradoodles.
Huck sat at the end of the dock, tail thumping against the weathered wood. Finn bounded down to the waterline, barking, spinning in circles, nearly knocking Nate into the water trying to lick his face.
“Yeah, yeah.” He climbed out, boots splashing in the shallows. “I’m back. Don’t throw a parade.”
Finn indeed threw a parade, jumping up, dancing around him, brown eyes bright. Huck just watched from the dock with those soft brown eyes, tail still thumping.
Emma had named them. We need literary dogs.
He hauled the kayak up onto the sand and paused.
The firepit sat cold, ringed by blue camping chairs. Four chairs, arranged for gatherings that didn’t happen anymore. Emma’s was on the right, angled toward the water. His was on the left. The one directly across—
Don’t.
“Come on,” he told the dogs. “Breakfast.”
He should probably do the dishes, but they were stacked in the sink. He glanced at the calendar. Two days until the cleaning lady.
He threw some dish soap on them and ran water while the dogs inhaled their food. The soundtrack of his mornings: kibble crunching, tags jingling, the old radiator ticking as the house warmed, chasing out the slightest nip of fall in the September air.
Coffee next. Grinding the beans—the Brew’s dark roast, bought in bulk so he didn’t have to go to town and make small talk with Mandie about how he was doing. Boiling the water. The bloom of grounds in the French press, that first rush of scent.
He took his mug and stood in the hallway. Looking at the office door.
Not yet.
He detoured to the living room instead. Checked his phone. The screen was a graveyard of notifications—emails from his publisher, a few from his parents in Florida.
The photo on the mantel caught his eye.
Emma and Livvie, Fourth of July, seven years ago.
Arms around each other, laughing at something off camera.
Emma wearing a red tank top and that ridiculous stars-and-stripes headband she’d bought at the General Store.
Livvie in one of Emma’s old sweaters, the cream-colored one with the oversized collar.
And in the background, slightly out of focus: him. Caught mid-turn, looking at Livvie.
Emma had it framed. Evidence, she’d called it.
He should have taken it down.
The coffee finished steeping, he poured a mug, then headed to the office, not sure why.
Habit? Hope? The office door opened with a creak.
The room was exactly as he’d left it yesterday—and the day before, and the week before.
Desk buried under books and papers. Cold coffee mug from some indeterminate point in the past. Laptop closed.
And the walls.
Maps everywhere. The entire world of the Thornwood Chronicles rendered in ink and colored pencil—trade routes in red, military movements in blue, the slow creep of the Blight in sickly green.
He’d drawn most of these. Late nights, early mornings, the scratch of pen on paper while the lake lapped against the dock outside.
You’re the cartographer. I’m just the one making up stories about the places you build. He could almost hear Emma, even now, from her spot on the floor, surrounded by her notebooks, sketching out plot threads while he mapped the terrain.
See, that’s why he should sell the house. Nowhere was free of her.
Still, he sat down and opened his laptop. The document appeared: Book 5 – DRAFT.
The cursor blinked.
One line of text at the top of the page: Chapter Three.
That was it. Three years and two chapters.
Write something. Anything.
His fingers hovered over the keys. The cursor blinked. The blank space stretched out.
He closed the document.
Opened email instead.
The inbox was its usual disaster—spam, newsletters, the weekly desperate email from his editor. But there was a notification badge on the browser, and he clicked on it, and—
A review. New, posted this morning, featured on one of those fantasy blogs with reach. The headline:
The Thornwood Chronicles: Still Waiting for Book Five. Has Ian Rivers Lost His Magic?
He should close the tab.
He read it.
Rivers’s first four books carried a spark that his subsequent silence has only magnified in memory. Readers waited. Readers hoped. And readers have finally begun to ask the question no one wanted to voice: Where has he gone? And will we ever get book five?
His throat tightened.
The Thornwood Chronicles were published under a shared pen name—Rivers and his late sister, Emma, who passed three years ago.
In her absence, Rivers has produced nothing.
No short stories. No updates. Not a single word.
One might argue grief requires time. But at some point, silence becomes an answer.
And the answer seems increasingly clear: Emma was the story.
Without her, maybe there is no story left to tell.
He closed the laptop.
Stood up.
Sat back down.
The dogs were watching him from the doorway. Huck lay on the floor, his brow furrowed, eyes deep with concern. Finn clamped a tennis ball in his mouth.
“I’m fine,” he told them.
Finn dropped the ball and whined.
He picked it up and headed back to the kitchen. The mail on the counter. The stack he’d been ignoring for two weeks, maybe three.
The envelope on top had an official seal. County of Maple Lake.
He opened it.
NOTICE OF TAX DELINQUENCY
Six months overdue. Failure to remit payment. Foreclosure proceedings.
Thirty days. They were giving him thirty days before they started the process of taking the house.
The house where they’d written the books, where she’d told him stories from her hospital bed over video call, where her room was still closed.
So, that was great.
He set the notice down. Picked it up and read it again.