Chapter 5
Five
That last summer Livvie had driven to Maple Lake, Emma had been sitting in the passenger seat, on her way home from the hospital in Duluth.
They’d had the windows down. Emma’s hair whipping everywhere, some terrible pop song on the radio, both of them singing lyrics they didn’t actually know.
Emma rode the wave of her latest treatment, energy crackling through her for once, and Livvie had cast her own troubles aside and allowed herself to be swept up in their reunion.
The summer yawned ahead of them, possibility stretching in every direction.
The world glowed golden and infinite and theirs.
Seven years ago.
Now the passenger seat held a messenger bag full of submissions she was supposed to read and a protein bar she’d bought at a gas station because nerves had stolen her appetite for actual food.
The radio sat silent. The windows stayed up.
And Emma occupied a headstone in a cemetery Livvie still couldn’t bring herself to visit.
Focus, she told herself. This is a work trip. A professional obligation. You are a professional doing professional things in a professional manner.
Her GPS chose that moment to die.
“In eight hundred meters, turn—” The confident British voice cut out mid-sentence. The screen froze, then went dark, then displayed a spinning wheel of digital uncertainty that seemed like a personal judgment on her life choices.
“Great,” Livvie muttered. “Perfect. Thank you so much.”
But her hands were already turning the wheel, taking the left onto County Road 7 without needing to be told.
Past the farm stand with the hand-painted sign (still there, still crooked).
Past the bend where Emma had made her pull over for wildflowers.
Past the old church with the cemetery she refused to think about.
She knew this road. It lived in her bones like muscle memory, like lyrics to a song she hadn’t sung in years but could still hum in her sleep. Every curve, every landmark, every sun-dappled stretch of pavement led to the same place it had always led.
To him.
Which brought the panic.
She’d written the perfect pitch. Professional but warm. Clear but not pushy. Acknowledging the difficulty while emphasizing the opportunity. She’d practiced it on the plane, in the rental car line, and all during the drive to Maple Lake.
I understand what you’re going through, she’d planned to say. Empathetic. Relatable. A bridge between corporate obligation and human connection.
The words had sounded reasonable in New York.
Persuasive, even. Now, bumping down a road she’d traveled a dozen times, with a ghost in the passenger seat, the perfect pitch seemed to belong to someone else.
Someone who hadn’t spent three years not quite thinking about the man she planned to ambush.
Someone who hadn’t stood in the back of a funeral home waiting to be seen by someone who’d never looked.
She didn’t understand what he’d gone through.
She understood her own version—the Emma-shaped hole, the texts she still almost sent, the dreams where they turned twenty again and nothing hurt.
But his version? The blank page. The shared pen name.
The book that wouldn’t write itself because half its author lay in the ground.
Honestly, who was she fooling? She had no idea.
Another hand-painted sign appeared around a bend: Maple Lake – 3 mi. Weathered white paint, a carved wooden loon, slightly less crooked than the farm stand’s sign.
Three miles. Maybe four minutes.
Livvie pulled over.
The shoulder barely fit her rental car, and a branch scraped against the passenger window like fingernails on a chalkboard, but she needed a minute.
Just one minute to remember how to breathe like a normal human being who stood on the edge of making the biggest mistake of her professional and personal life simultaneously.
She flipped down the visor mirror. Her reflection stared back—mascara intact (miracle), hair doing that thing where it couldn’t decide between wavy and chaotic (inevitable), blazer wrinkled from three hours of stress-gripping the steering wheel (unfortunate but fixable).
“You can do this,” she told her reflection.
Her reflection looked skeptical.
“You are a competent professional. You have read every book he’s ever written. You know this material better than anyone at the agency.”
Her reflection seemed to ask why, if she qualified as such a competent professional, she sat giving herself a pep talk on the side of a rural Minnesota road instead of actually doing the job.
Fair point.
She flipped the visor up, put the car in Drive, and didn’t let herself stop again.
His lake house looked like a held breath.
Same bones she remembered: the green shake siding, the big windows facing the water, the stone path from the driveway to the porch. Same dock extending into the lake, same boathouse, same firepit area around the side where blue camp chairs circled a ring of stones.
But tired now. Paint peeling on the shutters. Gutters that needed cleaning. The garden Emma used to tend had gone wild in that particular way of things once loved and then abandoned—not dead, just waiting for someone to care again.
A single kayak leaned against the dock. There used to be two.
The porch swing had vanished. Just empty hooks where the chains used to hang.
And on the porch itself: a stack of packages, some still in shipping plastic, others weathered by rain.
He didn’t even bring in his mail.
Livvie turned off the engine and sat there, hands still on the wheel, heart doing something arrhythmic and unhelpful in her chest.
This moment. Right here. She would get out of this car, walk up those steps, knock on that door, and then—
Two dogs exploded off the porch.
They came at her like furry missiles—medium-sized, brown and white, tails wagging so hard their entire back ends swung with the motion.
By the time she got her door open, they were already crowding around her, sniffing her shoes, her hands, her messenger bag, apparently determining whether she qualified as friend or threat and landing firmly on friend.
“Oh. Hello.” She crouched down, letting them investigate. One of them, the slightly larger one, immediately tried to lick her face. The other circled behind her and stuck his nose directly into her bag. “That’s—those are submissions, buddy. They’re not very tasty—”
“Huck. Finn. Down.”
Livvie’s head snapped up.
And there he stood, in the doorway.
Nate Rivers. Twenty-nine years old. Bestselling fantasy author.
He stood taller than the author photo suggested—or maybe she’d just forgotten.
Dark curly hair, longer than in the picture, falling across his forehead in a way that said I have not thought about a haircut in months and I do not intend to start now.
The kind of stubble that said shaving wasn’t a priority either.
A gray Henley with a hole near the hem that he probably didn’t know existed.
His eyes, though. Yes, his eyes remained exactly the same. Hazel in this light, heavy and probing, watching her like he was trying to decide whether to be annoyed or just tired.
The dogs ignored his command completely. The face licker redoubled his efforts while the bag sniffer succeeded in extracting a granola bar wrapper from an outside pocket.
“They’re not usually this friendly with strangers,” Nate said.
“I have that effect on dogs.” Livvie stood, brushing dog hair off her blazer. Deep breath. Professional smile. “Hey, Nate.”
“Livvie.”
Aw, just her name on his lips, in his low and rumbly voice, sent tremors right through her, to her heart, her core.
“I…I texted. And left a few voice messages.”
“I got them. The texts. I haven’t checked my voicemail.”
Oh. Um. The silence stretched. The dogs, having completed their investigation, returned to the porch and flopped down on either side of Nate like furry sentinels. Except their tails knocked against the boards.
She started toward the steps, not sure what to say.
He filled in the silence. “I don’t need a babysitter. Or a deadline enforcer. Or whatever it is they sent you to be.”
“I’m not—”
“The answer is no.” He was already stepping back, hand on the door.
“You can tell them I’ll send updates when there are updates.
You can tell them pressuring me won’t make pages appear.
And you can tell them that if they want to sue me, they’re welcome to try, but I don’t have anything left to take. ”
The door started to close.
Three seconds. Maybe two. And then it would end—the pitch, her mission, her job, everything she’d built toward.
Livvie heard herself speak. “The Hollow Crown. Chapter twelve.”
The door stopped moving.
“When Aldric realizes the enemy he’s been fighting is his own fear,” she continued, the words coming from somewhere deeper than her rehearsed pitch.
“When he’s standing at the edge of Thornwood and he understands that the monster isn’t in the forest—it’s the story he’s been telling himself about who he is. That moment—”
Her voice cracked. She let it. “That moment changed my life, Nate. I turned twenty-three, and I carried so much certainty that I didn’t measure up, that I’d never measure up, and then I read that chapter and I thought—” She stopped.
Swallowed. “I thought, Someone understands. Someone put words to the thing I couldn’t name. ”
Nate’s hand stayed on the door. But he didn’t close it. Something flickered in those eyes. He swallowed.
“I’m not here to push you,” Livvie said. “I’m not here to threaten you or guilt you or give you some corporate pep talk about brand obligations. I’m here because your books matter. Because you matter. And because I think—”
Don’t say it. Don’t say it. It’s too much, it’s too honest. He’s going to think you’re insane—
“I think you still have stories to tell. Even if you don’t believe it yet.”
The silence shifted now. Charged. The dogs lifted their heads.