Chapter 13 #2
For a second there, I thought you came to help.
His own words rang in his head as he crossed the threshold into his office. The cruelty of them. The contempt.
His hands shook. He noticed it when he reached for the doorknob—his hand trembling, not quite closing around the brass. Anger, he told himself. He was angry. She’d lied to him, made promises behind his back.
Made him believe that…oh, he wasn’t so stupid as to think she’d come out here on an altruistic motive.
He’d started to talk himself into it, however. But of course it was business. So yeah, he could let that go.
What he couldn’t seem to shake free was the coil around his chest, the one cutting off his breathing.
Five. Days.
Five hundred thousand dollars—gone.
He’d have to sell the house. Maybe declare bankruptcy.
He walked into the house and headed to his office.
He should shut the door. Close out the world, the deadline, the woman standing on his porch with her paint-stained fingers and her well-meaning lies.
Retreat into the silence that had kept him safe for three years.
He didn’t shut the door.
He just sat down at his desk, leaving the door open.
The chair creaked. The cursor blinked.
He put his fingers on the keys. Typed nothing.
Outside, the September morning was shifting toward proper dawn. Golden light slanted through the window, catching dust motes, making everything soft. The lake turned to hammered copper in the rising sun.
He glanced out the window. Spotted her still in the yard. He could feel her presence the way you feel a storm approaching—that pressure in the air, that awareness of something unresolved.
Any second now, she’d come inside. She’d knock on the office door, demand he talk to her, refuse to let him hide. That’s the dance they did. He’d build the wall and she’d figure out how to break it down.
One minute passed. Two.
He stared at the screen. The cursor blinked its patient, mocking rhythm.
Three minutes. Four.
The house stayed quiet. No footsteps in the hallway. No knock on the door.
Five minutes.
She wasn’t coming.
He pushed back from the desk. Paced to the window.
She’d disappeared from the yard. Just the dock stretching into the golden water, the trees in their fall splendor, the kayak rack with its single boat.
For a second there, I thought you came to help.
He heard himself say it again. The ice in his voice. The dismissal.
She’d flinched. He’d seen it—the way her whole body had absorbed the blow, the way her face had crumpled for half a second before she’d smoothed it over. And then she’d just stood there, arms wrapped around herself, and let him walk away.
She hadn’t argued. Hadn’t pushed. Hadn’t done any of the things he’d expected.
She’d just let him go.
Six minutes. Seven.
He paced back to the desk. Sat down. Got up again.
The panic was still there, thrumming under his skin, but something else was creeping in alongside it. Something that felt like shame.
Eight minutes.
She’d made a mistake. A big one. But she’d made it trying to help him, trying to manage the pressure so he wouldn’t have to feel it. That was wrong, but it wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t betrayal, not really.
And he’d treated her like she was just another shark. Another person trying to squeeze words out of him for someone else’s benefit.
Nine minutes.
For a second there, I thought you came to help.
She had come to help. He knew it in his bones and had thrown it in her face anyway.
Okay. I was a jerk.
The admission sank like a brick in his chest. He’d been scared and he’d lashed out, and now she had likely fled back to her aunt’s house, probably crying, definitely hurt, because he couldn’t handle his own fear without turning it into a weapon.
He could stay in here. Let her leave. Build the wall higher and pretend it didn’t hurt.
He’d done that for three years. And what had it gotten him? An empty house. An unfinished book. A life that wasn’t really a life at all.
He grabbed his boots from beside the door. Pulled them on over bare feet. Snagged the flannel shirt from his desk chair and shrugged into it without buttoning.
The whole house was quiet—that particular silence of a space holding its breath.
He opened the front door.
She sat in the wicker chair on the porch. The one that used to be Emma’s.
The sunrise had turned the world to gold and rose, the lake reflecting the colors so perfectly that sky and water merged into one.
The air was cool—that September chill that lingered before the sun had fully climbed—and she’d pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders.
Finn was lying at her feet, head on his paws, tail thumping once when Nate stepped out onto the porch.
She didn’t look at him.
Her hair was loose, falling around her face in a way that made it hard to see her expression. But her shoulders were set—tight, braced.
She’d been crying. He could tell even before he saw her face. Something in the way she was holding herself. Something fragile underneath the stillness.
He’d done that. He’d made her cry.
His chest twisted.
The boards creaked under his boots. She still didn’t turn, but her shoulders tensed further.
He sat down in the other chair, the wood cold through his jeans. He looked at the lake, not at her, because, well, that might destroy him.
And he needed to get words out.
Somehow.
The silence stretched. A loon called somewhere across the water, that eerie, lonely sound that always made him think of ghost stories. The sun was cresting the tree line now, bleeding gold into the orange and rose.
“I’m sorry.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat.
“What I said out there—about thinking you came to help. That was…” He shook his head.
“You did come to help. You’ve been helping since the day you showed up.
And I threw it in your face because I got scared.
” He still couldn’t look at her. “That’s not an excuse. There’s no excuse. I’m just…sorry.”
More silence. The loon called again, closer now.
Then, quietly, she said, “I should have told you sooner. About the deadline.”
He risked a glance at her. She was looking at the lake, her profile lit gold by the rising sun. The tears cut red tracks down her cheeks—dried, but there. Evidence.
“I kept hoping Richard would back off,” she continued. “That I could buy you more time without you having to know. I thought I was protecting you. But I was just…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I was doing. Being a coward, probably.”
“You were trying to help.”
“I was trying to control things I can’t control.” A small, bitter laugh. “Old habit.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. So he didn’t say anything. Just sat there, watching the sunrise paint the lake in impossibly beautiful hues, feeling the distance between them—the physical space of two feet, the emotional space of hurt not yet healed.
“I keep getting stuck,” he said finally. “In the book. There’s this scene—the confrontation—where Aldric has to face the man who killed his mentor. And I don’t know how to write it.”
She turned her head slightly. He could feel her looking at him.
“I think it’s because I don’t know how to do it myself. How do you face something you can’t do?” He rubbed his face with both hands.
“You have though.” Her voice was soft. “The scene you wrote last week—the grave scene. That was you walking through it.”
“That was one scene. This is the whole rest of the book.” He dropped his hands, stared at the lake. “Ten chapters. Fifty thousand words. Five days. I don’t know how to do it.”
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to do it anyway.”
He laughed—a short, humorless sound. “That’s not how it works.”
She glanced at him. “That’s exactly how it works. You sit down and you write garbage until the garbage turns into something else. That’s what you told me, remember?”
He did remember. Years ago, when he’d thought he knew the answers. That night, when they’d sat under the stars.
When she’d declared that she liked him.
The night he should have kissed her.
“You remember that?”
She nodded. “I remember everything.”
Oh. Um.
Yeah, him too. But he looked away and reached for something else. “And it isn’t just me writing. You’ve helped…a lot.”
She nodded, just slightly.
“I wish you could just climb inside my head and fix whatever’s broken.”
“I wish I could too.” She was quiet for a moment. Then, “It’s not broken, you know. Your head. It’s just…crowded. Full of pressure and deadlines and people telling you what you should be able to do. That’s not an environment where creativity thrives.”
Huh. “You’re pretty good at this.”
It earned him a small smile.
The sun climbed above the tree line. The gold spread across the lake, glittering on the gently rippling surface.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked after a while.
He turned to look at her. She was picking at the arm of her chair, not meeting his eyes.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“I know what it’s like. The pressure. The expectations. The feeling that you’ll never be enough no matter what you do.” She took a breath. Let it out slowly.
“My parents were high achievers. Both of them. My dad was a corporate lawyer—partner at his firm by thirty-five. My mom was a CEO. They worked constantly, both of them. I was a latchkey kid. Let myself in after school, did my homework at the kitchen table, made my own dinner. I learned early to not need things. To not ask for things. To be easy.”
Another breath. Her voice was getting smaller.
“The gold star was love, in my house. Praise came for wins, not effort. So I got really good at winning. At fitting in. At anticipating what people needed and giving it to them before they had to ask. Because that’s how I belonged. By being useful.”
Finn lifted his head, whined softly, then settled back down.
“After my mom died…” She shook her head and wiped her hand across her cheek. “I tried so hard to be what my dad needed. Quiet. Competent. No trouble. I thought if I could just be easy enough, helpful enough, he would finally see me…”
“Livvie—”