Chapter 9 #2
“Fine. Forget the current book.” She leaned forward. “How did you start this project anyway? Go back to the beginning. How did you and Emma come up with the whole thing?”
His shoulders tensed. She could see him closing down further, folding into himself, becoming smaller and more unreachable with every question.
This wasn’t working. None of it was working.
She sighed and stood up, turning toward the kitchen. “I’ll make coffee.”
“It all started with Emma.”
She froze. Didn’t turn around.
“She was fourteen the first time she told me the story. We were in her hospital room. She was hooked up to all these machines, and she couldn’t sleep, and she asked me to tell her something. A story. Something to take her mind off everything.” His voice was quiet, rough.
“I went blank. I had nothing. Stories were her gift, not mine. But she said, ‘Fine, I’ll tell you one. But you have to remember it, because I might forget.’ And she started talking about this kingdom.
This world. A prince who didn’t know he was a prince, and a girl who could see the future but couldn’t change it, and a wall at the edge of everything that no one had crossed in three hundred years. ”
Livvie kept her eyes fixed on the doorway. Held her breath as he paused.
“She talked for hours. And I sat there with a notebook I’d grabbed from the nurses’ station and wrote it all down. Every word. Because she said she might forget, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
Livvie smiled but stayed silent.
“They were these wild, impossible stories.” His voice was alive suddenly. “Dragons and kingdoms and heroes who didn’t know they were heroes yet.”
A pause.
“That’s how the first book started. I was just…transcribing her. Trying to keep her alive on the page.”
She waited. More words came—slow, halting, but there.
“After she got better that time, we kept going. It became our thing. She’d imagine and I’d write. Every summer, every visit when she was well enough, we’d work on it together. By the time I was in college, we had enough for a book. Your Aunt Lila—she was the one who told me to submit it.”
Aunt Lila. Another thread connecting them all.
“I never thought anyone would want it,” he said. “But they did. And then they wanted more. And for a while, it was the best thing in my life. This world we’d built together.”
His voice cracked slightly on the last word. She still didn’t turn around.
An idea was forming in her head. A theory.
He can’t talk face-to-face. Eye contact feels like exposure. But if we’re not looking at each other—that works.
She walked to the coat hooks by the door. Grabbed his jacket, her jacket. Turned around and tossed his at him.
He caught it reflexively. “What—”
“We’re going for a walk. Bring the dogs.”
He was almost—dangerously close to—enjoying himself.
The September air had a bite to it, sharp and clean, carrying the smell of fallen leaves and woodsmoke from somewhere down the shore.
They’d been walking for an hour, maybe more.
Huck and Finn bounded ahead on the path that wound along the lake’s edge, noses to the ground, tails high.
He should have hated it. He didn’t.
Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped bracing for the conversation to go wrong. Stopped waiting for her to ask something he couldn’t answer. Stopped counting the minutes until he could escape back to his silent house.
Livvie walked beside him in her rust-colored coat, the wind catching her hair and blowing strands across her face. She kept tucking them back behind her ear.
He kept noticing.
Fact was, he had a hard time not noticing her, ever since the day they’d met, all the way back when she was sixteen.
But now, now she wasn’t sixteen. Wasn’t even twenty and his sister’s best summer friend.
And Emma wasn’t here to give him the side-eye.
Well, sorta.
“So what happened after the first book?” Livvie asked.
“We wrote three more. Always the same way—her ideas, my words. She’d call me in the middle of the night with some breakthrough, and I’d have to scramble for a pen.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “She used to say I was her translator. That she spoke in color and I wrote in black and white.”
“That’s not true.”
“What?”
“Please. You know I’ve read your books.” Livvie stopped walking, turned to face him.
The afternoon light caught her freckles, the warmth in her hazel eyes.
“Those words aren’t translation—they’re creation.
The way you describe Thornwood at dawn, the way Aldric thinks about the heroine…
that’s not transcription. That’s yours.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever separated his words from Emma’s. Not even Emma.
They started walking again, but something had shifted. The tightness in his shoulders had eased, just slightly.
They emerged from the woods onto the boardwalk that ran along the lake’s edge, the town square visible ahead. Workers on ladders were stringing lights between the lampposts, and a banner stretched across Main Street: MAPLE LAKE FLANNEL FESTIVAL – 11 DAYS!
Eleven days. And then two more days until the deadline Livvie had given him for the manuscript.
A few people were out—a woman walking a golden retriever, an older man on a bench with a newspaper. Heads turned as they passed. He could feel their eyes on him, the weight of their curiosity.
Nate Rivers. Outside. With a woman no one recognizes.
He could practically hear the gossip forming.
“So what draws you back?” Livvie asked, steering them toward the main street. “To this world, these characters. After everything, what makes you want to keep writing about them?”
He was quiet for a long moment. They passed Lakeside Brew, the local coffee shop known to the locals just as “the Brew,” and through the window, he saw Mandie behind the counter, watching them with undisguised curiosity. She’d probably have the whole town informed by dinner.
“Aldric,” he finally said. “I know how that sounds—he’s my own character—but sometimes it feels like he’s waiting for me to finish his story so he can rest.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“I don’t know how it ends.” The words came out rough. “Emma always knew. She’d see the whole arc, beginning to end, and I’d fill in the details. But the fifth book…she died before she could tell me. And I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since.”
They turned onto Main Street, the shops of downtown Maple Lake stretching ahead. Window displays had already gone full autumn—pumpkins and gourds and arrangements of crimson leaves. A chalkboard outside the General Store advertised “Flannel Festival Supplies—Plaid Shirts 20% Off.”
Edie waved from inside Maple Sweets, where a sign in the window promised “Festival Pie Preorders Now Open.” Jake’s car was parked outside Fisher’s and Kline’s, and he gave them a thumbs-up through the window.
“Maybe you already know,” Livvie said. “Maybe you’ve been building toward it this whole time and you just can’t see it yet.”
He glanced at her—a quick, sideways look. “That’s very optimistic.”
“I’m an optimistic person.”
“I noticed.”
She smiled, and yep, he noticed that too, and the way it felt like honey poured into his soul. Oh boy. “So, I seem to remember that you used to paint,” he said.
Livvie’s stride faltered. “What?”
“That summer. The watercolors on Lila’s porch.” His voice softened. “Landscapes of the lake. The light through the trees. You were good.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She was quiet for a moment. They passed the gift shop and the General Store, passed a group of kids playing on the steps of the post office. Huck stopped to investigate a fire hydrant, Finn circled back to check on them.
“It was just for fun,” Livvie finally said. “Something I did to relax. When I moved to New York, started at the agency…there wasn’t time. You know how it is. You make choices. Some things fall away.”
He did know. That was the problem.
“Do you miss it?”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Sometimes.” Her voice was softer now. “When I see Aunt Lila working. When the light hits the lake a certain way and I think, ‘I know exactly how I’d capture that.’ But then I remember I haven’t picked up a brush in six years, and it feels like that person was someone else entirely.”
She carried a wistfulness in her expression and seemed to watch the lake like it held something she’d lost.
He recognized that look. He saw it in the mirror every day.
“You’re not how I remember you,” she said quietly.
He stopped walking. “What?”
“From the summers. When I used to come visit.” She kept her eyes forward. “You were different.” She glanced at him then. “Not bad different. Just…different.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Something flickered in her expression. Recognition, maybe. Memory.
“You’re not how I remember you either,” he said quietly.
She lifted an eyebrow, but he didn’t explain—how the girl who’d painted watercolors on Lila’s porch had become this woman with steel beneath her softness, how seven years had made her vibrant while he’d slipped into the shadows.
“What happened after you left?” he asked. “That summer. I always wondered.”
“I went back to New York. Finished my internship. Got hired at the agency.” She tucked her hair back again, her necklace catching the light. “Spent the next six years trying to prove I belonged there. Climbing. Achieving. Waiting for someone to finally see me.”
“And did they?”
“No.” A small, rueful smile. “That’s the thing about being invisible. You can work yourself to the bone, and people still look right through you.”
They’d reached a bench at the edge of the boardwalk. The lake stretched out before them, flat and silver, the trees reflected in its surface.
“What about you?” Livvie asked quietly. “What happened after I left?”
The question landed hard in his chest, a weight, almost cutting off his breathing.
He could deflect. But she went over, sat on a bench, as if waiting for his answer. The dogs flopped at her feet, panting.
She leaned over, rubbed Finn behind his ear.