Chapter 7 #2
“What time does Jake usually come back? For the dinner run?”
“Around six. He does an afternoon round of errands, picks up the orders, delivers.” Lila narrowed her eyes. “Livvie. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking…” She watched Jake return to his car, mission complete. “I’m thinking that if Nate won’t open the door for me, maybe he’ll open it for his soup.”
A slow smile spread across Lila’s face. “I knew I liked you.”
Two hours later, Livvie sat in a booth at Maple Deli, pretending to read a menu she’d already memorized.
The deli matched exactly what she’d expected—handwritten specials on a chalkboard, a counter with red vinyl stools, the smell of fresh bread and pickle brine. A woman behind the register had given her a curious look when she’d ordered her third cup of coffee, but said nothing.
At 5:17, Jake walked in.
“Pickup for Rivers,” he told the woman behind the counter.
Livvie stood. Smoothed her blazer. “Actually,” she said, stepping forward, “I’ll take that.”
Jake blinked at her. “Uh, what?”
“The delivery. For Nate Rivers.” She smiled her best I-am-a-trustworthy-person smile. “I’m his neighbor. Lila Fox’s niece. I’m heading over there anyway. Save you a trip.”
Jake looked at her. Looked at the bag. Looked back at her.
“I mean…I guess? But the tip—”
Livvie pulled a twenty from her wallet. “For your trouble.”
Jake’s face lit up. “Yeah, okay. Works for me.” He handed over the bag—warm, fragrant, heavier than expected—and pocketed the twenty. “Tell him I said hi. I mean, he never says hi back, but, you know. The thought.”
“I will.”
The drive from town to the lake houses took fifteen minutes. Livvie used every one of them to rehearse what she would say.
I brought your soup. Let me in.
Too aggressive.
I happened to be in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop this off.
Too casual. He’d see right through it.
Open this door or I’m eating your chicken wild rice in your driveway and you’ll have to watch.
Closer. But maybe she’d save the threats for round two.
By the time she reached his porch, the soup still radiated warmth, the smell tempting her to forget knocking on the door altogether. And her confidence—high. Mostly. Approximately sixty percent steady, which beat the zero percent she’d been working with this morning.
She climbed the steps. Knocked.
Footsteps. A pause. The sound of dogs scrambling, nails on hardwood. Barking.
The door opened.
Nate looked, if possible, worse than he had this morning. Hair wilder. Shadows darker. A different Henley—or maybe the same one, she couldn’t tell—with a new coffee stain on the hem.
“You,” he said.
“Me.” She held up the bag. “I brought your soup.”
“I didn’t—” He stopped. Frowned. “How did you—”
“You can either let me in, or I’m going to stand on this porch and eat your chicken wild rice while maintaining aggressive eye contact. Your choice.”
He stared at her.
She didn’t blink.
Huck and Finn appeared behind him, tails wagging, clearly thrilled to see their new favorite person again. Traitors. Beautiful, useful traitors.
“This is insane,” Nate said.
“Probably.”
“You stole my dinner.”
“I liberated it. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
“Are you going to let me in or not? Because this soup is getting cold, and I didn’t bribe a delivery driver just to face rejection twice in one day.”
Something flickered across his face. Not quite a smile—his mouth didn’t seem to remember how to do that—but something close. A crack in the stone.
“You bribed Jake?”
“Twenty dollars. He proved very reasonable.”
Another pause. The dogs now actively tried to push past him to get to her. One of them—Finn, she thought—had his nose pressed against the soup bag, tail going in frantic circles.
“Fine,” Nate said. And stepped aside.
Livvie walked in before he could change his mind.
The living room held the same chaos she remembered from earlier—books everywhere, blankets on the couch, Emma’s presence scattered through every surface. But something had shifted.
His laptop sat open on the coffee table.
And words filled the screen.
Not many. Maybe a paragraph. Maybe two. But words—actual words—where earlier, nothing but a blinking cursor and blank white space had existed.
She didn’t mean to look. But, well, she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes caught a phrase—the door stood never locked, only heavy—before Nate crossed the room in three quick strides and snapped the laptop shut.
“That’s not—” He stopped. His jaw tightened. “That’s nothing.”
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s garbage. First-draft garbage. It doesn’t count.”
“All first drafts are garbage. That’s what revision is for.”
He turned to face her, and there it came again—that look. The one she’d seen earlier, right before he’d asked her to leave. The look of someone who’d been caught doing something vulnerable and hated himself for it.
“Why are you here?” His voice came out flat. Tired. “Really. Why?”
Livvie set the soup on the coffee table, next to the closed laptop.
“Because you need to write,” she said quietly. “And I think that terrifies you. And I think you need someone to tell you it’s okay to be terrified and do it anyway.”
Nate didn’t answer. But he didn’t ask her to leave either.
So far, so good.
She’d seen his pitiful words. There was no coming back from that.
The silence stretched between them, filled only by Huck’s tail thumping against the floor and Finn’s hopeful whine at the scent of today’s soup.
Which was—
“What kind of soup—”
“Chicken wild rice.”
He should tell her to leave. Should grab the soup, thank her for the delivery, and shut the door on whatever this—whatever she—threatened to become.
Instead, he watched her pick up the soup container and head toward his kitchen like she owned the place.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding you a bowl.” She said it like it should be obvious. Like she broke into grieving authors’ homes and raided their kitchens every Tuesday.
“I can see that. Why?”
Because you need to write. And I think that terrifies you.
She had no idea. Terrified. She’d called it exactly right, and he wanted to hate her a little for that. As if.
She didn’t answer. She’d already pulled down one of the blue ceramic bowls—the ones his grandmother had bought in the seventies to match the aggressive optimism of the orange cabinetry—and ladled soup into it. Rich and warm and faintly sweet.
The microwave door opened and closed. Buttons beeped. The machine hummed to life, casting a yellow glow across the kitchen as the turntable began its slow rotation.
Livvie opened another drawer. Nate’s drawer. Found a placemat he’d forgotten he owned—woven, rust-colored, probably also from the seventies. A cloth napkin. Silverware that she actually matched, which amounted to more effort than he’d put into a meal since he couldn’t remember when.
She arranged them on the kitchen table like she was staging a photo shoot for a homemaking magazine. The table sat in a nook by the window, looking out at the lake and the dock and the two Adirondack chairs that had been sitting empty for three years.
The microwave beeped. The soup came out steaming, and she set it on the placemat with the kind of care usually reserved for royalty. Bowl. Napkin. Spoon. Glass of milk. A place setting for one, in a kitchen that had seen nothing but cereal and despair for longer than he wanted to admit.
“Sit,” she said. “Eat. You need nourishment for creativity.”
He sat.
He had no idea why he sat. Maybe because she’d told him to. Maybe because no one had set a place for him in three years, and the simple domesticity of it—bowl, napkin, glass of milk—hit somewhere behind his sternum he didn’t have defenses for.
Maybe because she’d seen the words on his laptop and called them something instead of nothing, and that terrified him more than the blank page ever had.
He didn’t pick up the spoon.
Livvie didn’t seem to notice. She was a small tornado of purposeful energy, gathering the dishes from the counter and stacking them in the sink with efficient clinks and clatters. She found a sponge—he didn’t know he had a sponge—and attacked the counter like it had personally offended her.
And then she talked. “You need to finish this book.” A coffee stain met its end under her assault.
“Do you understand how many people love these books? I’ve read reviews—actual reviews, not the garbage ones from people who think criticism means cruelty—where readers talk about how Thornwood got them through chemo.
Through divorce. Through—” She scrubbed harder. “Through losing someone they loved.”
She moved to the dog food scattered around Huck’s bowl. At some point, Huck had arrived to supervise, his tail wagging hopefully. Livvie scooped up the kibble with her bare hands and deposited it back in the bowl, then scratched behind his ears like they’d known each other for years.
“Your sister did amazing work.”
Huck’s tail reached maximum velocity. Livvie kept scratching, kept talking. “The way she built that world—the magic system with the three sources, the political tension between the kingdoms, the languages—I mean, who creates an entire linguistic family tree for a fantasy novel?”
Nate’s hand tightened around the spoon he still hadn’t used. “I did.”
She looked up. “What?”
“The languages. The maps. The history of the Third Age and the genealogy of the noble houses and the—” He stopped himself. Shook his head. “Emma did the plot. The characters. The story. I did the…other stuff.”
Something shifted in her expression. Her hand paused on Huck’s head, and the dog nudged her impatiently until she resumed.
“I always assumed…So, you built the world?”
“I built the set dressing.” The correction came out automatically. An old argument, one he’d had with himself more times than he could count. “The world-building doesn’t matter if there’s no story to put in it.”