Chapter 8 #3
“I should keep going,” he said, already turning back toward the hall. “While it’s still…”
“Go. Write. I’ll be here.”
“Can I ask you something?” He lingered in the doorway, one hand on the frame, like he might bolt at any moment.
“You just did.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “What do you create?”
She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You spend all your time championing other people’s stories. Reading other people’s words. Fighting for other people’s dreams.” He tilted his head, studying her with that quiet intensity that made her feel like a manuscript he was reading too closely. “What’s yours?”
The question landed somewhere soft and unprotected. She turned her coffee mug in her hands. “I used to paint. Watercolors, mostly. Nothing serious.”
“Used to.”
“Life got busy. Work got busy. It’s hard to justify spending time on something that’s just”—she waved her hand—“for me.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, without inflection, without judgment: “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week.”
She opened her mouth to argue—to say she was fine, she had plenty of creative fulfillment through her work, thank you very much—but he was already continuing.
“Emma used to draw. Terribly. Stick figures with crowns. She’d illustrate entire battle scenes with what looked like a kindergartner’s fever dream.
” A ghost of something crossed his face.
“But she loved it. She never once cared that she was bad at it. She just made things. Because making things made her happy.”
He held her gaze for one beat longer than comfortable. “Not everything you make has to be good, Livvie. Some things you make just because you need to make them.”
Then he turned and walked back down the hall. The office door clicked shut. The typing resumed.
Livvie sat on the couch, coffee cooling in her hands, and felt something she couldn’t quite name pressing against the backs of her eyes.
Four pages. A breakthrough. Exactly what she’d come here for.
But her mind wasn’t on the manuscript.
It rested on a notebook full of watercolor dreams. A children’s room never built. A sister’s vision, waiting in the dust for someone to bring it to life.
The Storybook Corner.
She stared at the book in her lap without seeing it, her thoughts already spinning ahead. The library? Emma had worked there for years, since a teenager.
There lived more here than a deadline. More than a manuscript. More than her job.
There lived a ghost who’d left something unfinished.
And maybe—just maybe—more than one way to help Nate Rivers find his way back to himself.
The breakthrough had lasted exactly one hour and fourteen minutes.
Four pages this morning—the most he’d written in three years.
Aldric at the Wall of Sorrow, finally understanding what the Keepers had been protecting.
The deal taking shape. The cost becoming clear.
Four pages that had poured out of him like a dam breaking, words tumbling over each other in their rush to exist.
And then, just over an hour later, a grand total of seven pages.
And now nothing. The cursor blinked with infinite, mocking patience on the last sentence he’d written.
The thing behind the wall had been waiting.
Waiting for what? For whom? For how long? What did it want? What would it cost Aldric to make the deal?
Emma would know. Emma always knew.
He got up and went to his bookshelf and reached for her notebooks, desperate now, pulling three of them from the shelf and spreading them across his desk.
He opened them to random pages as if her handwriting might somehow transmit directly into his brain.
Her plot notes. Her character sketches. Her brilliant, effortless ideas that used to spark something in him.
The story needs to breathe here. Give the reader space before the next blow.
Aldric’s flaw isn’t pride—it’s the pride he uses to hide his fear.
What does the antagonist want? Not power. Power bores me. She wants to be RIGHT.
Her voice, frozen on paper. Preserved like a pressed flower, beautiful but brittle, impossible to bring back to life.
He read through page after page, looking for something—anything—that would reignite what he’d had this morning. Some spark, some thread, some whisper of her genius that would show him how to continue.
Nothing.
The notebooks functioned as a phone line to someone who’d stopped answering. He could see her words, but he couldn’t hear her voice. The conversation had ended three years ago.
He closed the notebook. Opened it again. Closed it.
Outside the office, Livvie moved around. Dishes clinked. Cushions thumped softly as she straightened them. She was cleaning again—couldn’t seem to help herself—and humming something. Some melody he almost recognized.
She radiated good mood. Of course she did. This morning he’d written four pages. This morning the breakthrough had landed real, and she’d gotten so excited, her eyes bright, her smile enormous.
Go. Write. I’ll be here.
And he had. For about an hour, he had. The thread had still held, the words still coming, and he’d thought: This is it. I’m back. I can do this.
Then just like that, his own wall had shut him down.
He stared at the cursor. Willed something—anything—to come.
The thing behind the wall had been waiting.
Waiting for what?
Her footsteps approached down the hall. A soft knock on the door.
“Nate? I made fresh coffee. Want some?”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His throat had closed too tight.
The door opened anyway. Livvie appeared in the doorway, a mug in each hand, that careful hopefulness on her face. The sage-green sweater she’d changed into at some point made her eyes look warmer, and her hair had come loose from its clip, strands framing her face.
She looked happy. Relaxed. Like being in his disaster of a house put her exactly where she wanted to be.
“How’s it going?” She crossed to the desk, set a mug beside him. She picked up his empty mug from earlier. “Are you still in the zone?”
He looked at the screen. “Just taking a break,” he heard himself say.
“Good. You’ve earned it.” She glanced at the notebooks spread across the desk, and something flickered across her face—recognition, maybe, or concern. “Are they helping?”
No. They’re making it worse. They’re reminding me that she ran the engine and I just made her words pretty. They’re proving what I’ve always known—that I can’t do this without her.
“Sometimes,” he said.
Livvie nodded, not pushing. She’d learned not to push. “I made cookies. They’re in the kitchen if you want some. Edie’s recipe—she wrote it out for me.”
“Thanks.”
She backed toward the door, giving him space. “I’ll let you get back to it. Just yell if you need anything.”
The door closed.
He stared at the screen.
The thing behind the wall had been waiting.
What came next?
What came next?
What came next?
The light outside shifted as twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. The afternoon sun dropped lower, painting the lake in shades of gold and copper.
He couldn’t do this.
The realization pressed him into the chair like a physical weight.
The three new pages amounted to a fluke.
The breakthrough had ended. He’d landed back where he’d spent the last three years—staring at a cursor, reaching for words that wouldn’t come, drowning in a silence that used to be full of Emma’s voice.
This would never work.
He closed the laptop. Not gently—with force, like slamming a door on something unbearable.
The office shrank around him. The walls pressed too close. Emma’s notebooks covered every surface, her handwriting staring up at him, and he couldn’t breathe.
He stood up. Pushed back from the desk. Walked out of the office and down the hall, expecting—
What? An empty house? Livvie finally giving up, packing her things, driving back to New York where she belonged?