Chapter 6
Six
And beneath it: nothing. A blank page. A cursor blinking with infinite patience.
“This is it.” He gestured at the screen. “This is what I have. Two chapters I wrote three years ago. Nothing since.”
Livvie stared at the laptop. Then at him. Then back at the laptop.
He could see her processing it—and of course, as she stood there, for the briefest moment, she was the girl sitting at the firepit, looking at the stars, listening to him tell her about the stories he and Emma were writing.
The irony.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Okay, that’s—we can work with that. What if we just brainstormed? I could take notes, you could talk through ideas—”
“There are no ideas.”
“There are always ideas. You just have to—” She turned, scanning the office, and her eyes landed on the corkboard. The index cards in three different styles of handwriting. “Emma’s notebooks. We could look at where she left off, see what threads she developed—”
Emma’s name hit him like a fist to the sternum.
“—and the maps are incredible. Nate, there’s so much material here. If we could just find the through line, the thing she was building toward—”
She moved around the office now, touching things. His things. Emma’s things. Picking up a notebook, flipping through it, her eyes scanning pages he hadn’t looked at in three years.
“This is her handwriting, right? And this is yours. I can tell by the—”
The walls crept closer.
“—and if we cross-reference with the plot outline from book four, we might see where she—”
He couldn’t breathe.
It was happening again. That thing his body did sometimes, when everything became too much and the world started narrowing to a pinpoint. His chest tightened. His hands tingled. The air in the room had turned to syrup and he tried to breathe through it but nothing got in.
“—the structure is all here, really, it’s just a matter of finding the emotional core, and Emma always said that represented your strength, the way you could take her ideas and—”
“Stop!”
The word came out strangled. Wrong. Something desperate in it.
Livvie rounded, her eyes wide, her mouth open.
Okay, yes. But he needed air.
“Nate?”
He gripped the edge of the desk, his knuckles going white. His heart slammed against his ribs like it was trying to escape. “You need to leave.”
“What? I—”
“Now.” He stood up too fast, the room tilting, and forced himself toward the door. Toward the hallway. Toward the front of the house, where the exit waited. “Please. You need to leave now.”
“Nate, I don’t understand. I just tried to—”
He opened the front door. The September air rushed in, cool and sharp, and he gulped it like a drowning man. The porch. The yard. The lake glittering in the distance. Escape routes he couldn’t take because she remained here, still in his house, still holding Emma’s notebook like it belonged to her.
Livvie appeared in the doorway, her face a mess of hurt and confusion.
The afternoon sun warmed the bronze in her hair, turned her hazel eyes almost gold, and even now—even in the middle of whatever was happening to him—some traitorous part of his brain registered that she still looked beautiful. That she’d always looked beautiful.
Please, leave.
“I’m sorry if I—”
“You’ve wasted a trip, Livvie. And I’m sorry, but I need you to go.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then something in her expression shifted.
Not pity. Something else. Something worse.
Understanding.
“I’m staying at my aunt’s place,” she said quietly. “If you change your mind.”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m not giving up on this, Nate.”
She walked past him, down the porch steps, across the gravel drive. The dogs tried to follow her, whining, and he had to call them back. Had to watch her get in the rental car and start the engine and back down the driveway without looking at him.
The silver sedan disappeared around the curve.
He closed the door.
His legs gave out somewhere between the door and the couch.
He ended up on the floor, back against the wall, knees pulled up to his chest like a kid hiding from a thunderstorm. The panic crested now—wave after wave of it, that horrible airless sensation, his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.
Breathe. You’re supposed to breathe. In for four, out for four. Isn’t that what the therapist said?
He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t think. He could only sit there and shake and wait for his body to stop betraying him.
The dogs crept over. Huck settled against his side, warm and solid. Finn put his head in Nate’s lap, those big brown eyes full of worry.
They stayed like that for a long time. The light shifted. The house creaked and settled around them. Slowly, so slowly, his heartbeat eased, leaving that familiar hollow exhaustion in its wake.
Nate tipped his head back against the wall. Stared at the ceiling.
She’d seen everything. The mess. The blank page. The litter of coffee cups on his desk.
I’m not giving up on this, Nate.
Which meant she’d be back. Tomorrow, probably. Maybe the day after. She’d knock on his door, and he’d have to do this again, face her again, experience all of this again.
And somewhere underneath the panic and the shame and the exhaustion, something else stirred. Something small and inconvenient. Something that had given way when she’d smiled at him, and hadn’t quite closed back up.
The way she’d said his name.
Trouble had arrived. So much trouble.
He looked down at the dogs.
Huck’s tail thumped weakly against the floor. Finn was still giving him those worried eyes, ears drooped, clearly concerned about the emotional stability of his primary food source.
“Betrayers,” Nate said.
His voice cracked on it. Just slightly.
The dogs didn’t argue.