Chapter 9 #3
He could change the subject. Give her the polished version, the one he’d perfected for interviews and fan events.
But the urge to tell her the truth pulsed inside him, filled his chest, his throat. Okay, fine. He sat next to her on the bench.
“Emma got worse,” he said. “That fall after you were here. Another round of treatments. More time in the hospital.”
Livvie waited. Patient. Not pushing.
He paused. The memory was so clear—Emma’s face on the pillow, pale but fierce, her eyes bright with something that wasn’t fever.
“Those last weeks, she never could sleep, and she asked me to finish the story.”
He stopped. “And I had nothing to give her. Again.”
He stared at the lake. The light was changing, the afternoon sun dropping lower, turning everything gold.
“She was the spark. I was just…” He trailed off. The old words wanted to come—the typist, the translator, the one who made her ideas pretty—but they felt wrong now. Incomplete.
“She said we were two halves of the same brain,” he continued. “She saw the big picture. I saw the details. Apart, we were just…people with ideas. Together, we made something real.”
A loon called somewhere in the distance.
“We published the first book when I was twenty-three. Emma was twenty-one. The aplastic anemia had been in remission for three years. We thought—” His voice caught. “We thought we’d have time. We thought we’d write a hundred books together.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Four books. That’s what we got. Four books, and then she got sick again, and then she was gone.”
The words hung in the air. He could feel Livvie looking at him, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Not yet.
“She never got to finish it,” he said. “The fifth book. Our story. She had the whole arc in her head—beginning, middle, end—and she was going to tell me, she kept saying she was going to tell me, that there was always more time. Until there wasn’t.”
Silence. The lake lapping at the shore. The dogs breathing at their feet.
“You can finish it, Nate.”
He turned to look at her. She was watching him steadily, no pity in her expression.
“It’s your story too,” she said. “It always was. The world is yours. The words are yours. Yes, Emma gave you the spark, but you’ve been carrying the fire for three years. So finish it.”
He stared at her. “But—”
“Stop trying to listen for Emma’s voice and listen for your own.”
Something cracked open in his chest.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just write it.”
And suddenly, words. In his head. Not Emma’s words—his words. The next line of the story. Something that didn’t come from her notebooks or their old conversations.
The wall didn’t just contain something ancient. The wall WAS something ancient. Alive. Waiting. Looming.
“I have an idea,” he said.
Livvie blinked. “What?”
“For the next part. The scene at the wall.” He turned to her. “Aldric doesn’t make a deal with what’s behind the barrier. He makes a deal with the barrier itself. The wall is alive. It’s been alive this whole time, and no one knew—”
“Then go write it down.”
He looked at her, startled. “What?”
“Go.” She pointed toward the house, visible now through the trees. “Write. Before you lose it.”
He stared at her.
She smiled at him, and just like that, for a second, possibility exploded inside him, a heat, a light and—
And in his head, he leaned forward and kissed her, took his moment instead of walking away. In his head, he tucked that strand of hair behind her ear, ran his hand over her jaw and around the back of her neck and pulled her to himself.
And let his heart free.
But, “Really—go, Nate.” She got up.
Oh.
He stood too, and then he was striding up the path, then jogging, the dogs scrambling to keep up, the idea burning in his head like something that might disappear if he didn’t capture it fast enough.
He didn’t look behind him as he took the path home.
And by the time he got there, the scene had fleshed out in his head.
He shut the door, shucked off his coat, left it on the floor, sat down at his desk.
And wrote.
His fingers flew across the keyboard. The next sentence came, and the next. Not a flood—not like the seven pages he’d written before—but something steadier. More deliberate.
And just like that, an hour had passed. He sat back, the scene nearly ended, and stared at the page.
Fourteen hundred words. Good words. His words.
Huh.
He stared at the words like they were written in a language he was only just learning to read.
Is that all you’re gonna write today?
He looked up at Emma’s chair in the corner by the window—a worn leather armchair, angled toward his desk so she could watch him work. She used to curl up there with her notebook, sketching plot ideas, throwing out suggestions, rolling her eyes when he got stuck on a sentence.
And for a moment, he saw her. Dark hair, sharp eyes, that crooked smile. Then she looked back at her sketchbook, but not without mumbling What does Aldric have to surrender in his deal to get through the wall?
He sat there for a long moment, staring at the chair. The stack of books. The blanket he’d placed so carefully, like it could keep her presence contained.
Then he got up. Crossed the room. Straightened the blanket—a small, unconscious act of tending.
The house was quiet. Through the window, he could see the lake, the late-afternoon light turning everything gold. Somewhere outside, the dogs were barking at something. Livvie’s voice, calling them back.
She was still here.
Nate turned away from Emma’s chair and walked upstairs.
The bathroom was small, outdated, the kind of space that belonged in a lake house from the 1970s. Mint-green tiles. A pedestal sink. A mirror he’d been avoiding for three years.
He stood in front of it now. Made himself look.