Chapter 8 #2
Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or discomfort at being seen. He looked away.
“Tell me where you’re stuck,” she said, softer now. “Maybe I can help.”
Silence stretched. She thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then: “Aldric stands at the Wall of Sorrow, the one that protects Thornwood Forest. He has to reach Elara before the Blood Moon, but the wall is impenetrable—sealed for three hundred years. The magic that held the secrets of passage died with the previous Keeper of Secrets, his mentor, Morvain.”
“So go around it.”
He gave her a look of pure, undiluted pity. “The wall extends from the Frozen Reaches to the Burning Sea. Six months to circumnavigate. Aldric has six days.”
“Okay, sorry, I just—”
“And the territories on either end are hostile. The Valdorians would execute him on sight. The Fire Clans would—”
“I said sorry.” She held up her hands. “I’m not the expert here. You are.”
“I’m not an expert. I’m stuck.” He sat up, running a hand through his hair. “Three years stuck. A thousand solutions tried and discarded. Every work-around violates established lore. Every clever trick undermines something else.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for three years?”
His jaw tightened.
Okay, maybe she shouldn’t have said it quite that way. And then, wait—“What if thinking isn’t the answer?” she asked quietly. “What if you need to stop thinking and start moving?”
“Moving.”
“Literally.” She stood, crossing to a coatrack by the door. It held various sweaters and a worn canvas jacket. She threw it at him. “Let’s go.”
He’d sat up and caught it. “Where?”
“Outside. Fresh air. A change of scenery.” She found a scarf, threw that too. “Sometimes the best ideas come when you’re not trying to have them.”
He looked at her like she’d suggested they swim to Canada.
“This is ridiculous.”
“Probably. Put on your shoes.”
Miraculously, he obeyed. Maybe she’d call it desperate.
She led him outside to a trail that wound through the woods behind his property, a narrow path carpeted with fallen leaves. The air smelled like cold and decay and wet stone, but the trees were backdropped by a sky so blue it hurt to look at.
Huck and Finn ranged ahead, noses to the ground, deliriously happy to be outside with their humans.
Nate walked beside her in silence, hands shoved in his pockets. She let him have it—the quiet, the space. Sometimes people needed room to think. And maybe that had been his problem all along—thinking in the same four walls, staring at the same blank screen, drowning in the same stale air.
“Emma and I used to walk this trail,” she finally said. “That summer. She’d make up stories about the trees—which ones hid enchantments, which ones concealed fairy courts.”
No response.
“She saw magic everywhere. Even in ordinary things.” Livvie stepped over a fallen branch. “I think that’s what made her such a good storyteller.”
Still nothing.
She tried a different angle. “She would have wanted you to finish the book. She would have—”
“You weren’t there.”
The words came out quiet. Final.
Livvie stopped walking. “What?”
Nate had stopped too, staring at the path ahead. The dogs circled back, sensing the shift.
“Those last days. Before she—” He didn’t finish. “You weren’t there.”
The truth of it landed like a stone in her chest. She hadn’t been.
She’d already moved to New York, already started her job, already become swept up in her new life.
She’d meant to visit. She’d planned to. And then Emma had gotten worse and then died, and Livvie had come back for the funeral, but it was too late.
Too late for all of it.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t.”
He started walking again without another word. She followed.
They emerged from the trees at the edge of a small clearing, and Livvie drew a breath. A weathered wooden bench faced the lake. The view stretched for miles—trees and sky and that endless, glittering expanse.
Nate stopped. Stared.
The wind picked up, rustling leaves overhead. Somewhere, a bird called—drawn out, mournful, echoing.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then something in his posture shifted. Straightened.
“The wall isn’t the problem.”
Livvie blinked. “What?”
“Aldric doesn’t need to get through it.” Nate still stared at the water, but something had shifted in his face. Come alive. “He needs to understand why it exists. The Keepers didn’t seal it to keep people out. They sealed it to keep something in.”
“I don’t—”
“He’s been fighting the barrier. But the barrier isn’t his enemy.
It’s a warning.” He turned to look at her, and his eyes burned differently—bright, urgent, present in a way he hadn’t been since she’d arrived.
“He doesn’t need a door. He needs to find the thing the wall protects. And make a deal with it.”
“Nate—”
“The deal has to cost him something. Something real.” The words tumbled faster now. “The thing behind the wall has been waiting three hundred years. It won’t let him pass for free. And his love for Elara—that’s his greatest strength, so it has to—”
“Get back to the house.”
“What?”
“Now. Right now.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the trail. “Before you lose it.”
They quick-walked to the house, but now Nate kept talking, his breath huffing out fast. “The sacrifice can’t be clean,” he said. “It has to haunt him. Change him. If he crosses that wall the same person he entered as—”
“Nate.”
“What?”
“Save it for the page.”
He took off ahead of her, jogging to the house, the dogs bounding after him.
“I’ll make coffee,” she called, also picking up her pace, her heart hammering.
His office door was shut when she came in.
Livvie stood alone in the clean kitchen, heart thundering.
It’d worked.
The coffee maker still held warmth from the morning. She poured herself a cup she didn’t need and leaned against the counter, listening.
Silence. Then the clatter of keys.
He typed.
She pressed her hand to her chest and let herself breathe.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. The typing continued—erratic but persistent, bursts and pauses, the rhythm of someone working through something hard.
She should stay put. She should wait. She should absolutely not go wandering through his house while he worked.
But the kitchen had already been cleaned. The coffee had already been made. And Livvie had never been good at sitting still when there might be something useful to do.
She went wandering.
The living room she’d already seen. The dining room revealed a table buried under mail and manuscripts—a project for another day. A bathroom with a leaky faucet she made a mental note to mention. A linen closet stuffed with mismatched towels.
She headed upstairs to the two bedrooms.
Okay, yes, she was headed for Emma’s room. She found it at the end of the hall, a door. Slightly ajar.
A board creaked under her foot and she froze. But no voice rose to stop her, so…she opened the door.
The room was small, dusty light filtering from a window facing the lake. A twin bed with a faded, handmade quilt. A bookshelf crammed with paperbacks. A desk cluttered with art supplies—pencils, markers, watercolors in a ceramic dish.
Emma’s room. Untouched. Three years of dust and silence, preserved like an exhibit in a museum of grief.
Livvie’s throat tightened. She should leave. This belonged to someone else, sacred and private—
But there on the desk, a notebook lay open. And even from the doorway, she could see color. Drawings.
She crossed the room before she could stop herself.
Dozens of them. Watercolor sketches of a room that didn’t exist—hand-painted murals of enchanted forests, a reading nook built into a tree trunk, bookshelves carved like castle walls, tiny chairs shaped like woodland creatures.
She turned the page. Floor plans. Color swatches. Notes in Emma’s handwriting:
Window seats here—kids can see the lake while they read
Needs a secret door! Every magical place needs a secret door!
Reading corner for storytelling—big enough for fifteen kids
And at the bottom, in careful letters:
Children’s Room at the Library—The Storybook Corner
Her breath caught. Emma’s dream. Designed but never built. Waiting.
She closed the notebook carefully and backed out of the room, pulling the door to the same slightly ajar position.
Downstairs, Nate’s office door creaked open.
She moved fast, tiptoeing down the stairs, slipping into the living room, grabbing the first book her hand touched from the shelf by the fireplace. She dropped onto the couch, opened to a random page, and tried to look like she’d been there for hours.
The footsteps stopped in the doorway.
“You’re reading my book.”
She looked up, forcing her expression into something resembling casual. Nate stood there, rumpled and dazed, dark circles under his eyes but something else there too—something that looked almost like hope.
“I’m rereading your book,” she corrected, glancing at the cover. The Court of Thornwood. Book one. Good—she actually knew this one. “Quality control. Making sure it holds up.”
“And?”
“The prose is insufferably good. Very annoying.” She closed the book, keeping her finger in the page like she’d actually been reading it. “How’s it going in there?”
He leaned against the doorframe. Ran a hand through his hair. “Four pages.”
“Four pages?”
“Rough. Needs work. But—” He stopped. Swallowed. “Something.”
“Nate.” She set the book aside, heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with almost getting caught. “That’s amazing. That’s—”
“It’s not amazing. It’s four pages. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s four more pages than yesterday. Four more than the day before.” She stood, crossing toward him. “That’s how it works. Word by word. Page by page.”
He looked at her, really looked, maybe for the first time since she’d arrived. Like he saw her instead of seeing through her.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For the walk. The cinnamon roll. Whatever you did.”
“I didn’t do anything. You did.”
“You made me leave my office.”
“A revolutionary technique. I call it ‘touching grass.’”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. But close.