Chapter 16 #2
Her career—the career she’d spent six years building, the career that had felt like everything until two weeks ago, when everything had started to feel like something else.
“I’ll be there,” she heard herself say.
“I’m sorry, Liv. I know you were—” Priya hesitated. “I know things were complicated there. With the author.”
Complicated. That was one word for it.
“It’s fine,” Livvie said. “I’ll book a flight.”
She hung up. Sat in the quiet kitchen with her mother’s ring on her finger and her heart in pieces and the notebook still sitting on the table like a grenade.
Aunt Lila appeared in the doorway. She didn’t ask—she’d heard enough.
“You’re leaving,” she said.
“I have to.” Livvie’s voice was hollow. “There’s a meeting tomorrow. If I’m not there, I lose my job.”
“And Nate?”
Livvie looked toward the window. The green Craftsman was still quiet. Still closed.
“He doesn’t want me here,” she said. “He made that clear.”
Lila was quiet for a moment. Then, “What will you do?”
Livvie looked at the notebook. Emma’s story ideas. Emma’s gift to her brother—the gift Livvie had found and fumbled and maybe ruined.
“I’ll write him a letter,” she said. “I’ll put it in the notebook and leave it on his porch. And then…” She swallowed. “Then I’ll let go.”
The letter took three tries.
The first was too defensive. The second was too desperate. The third—the one she finally folded and tucked into Emma’s notebook—was simple. Honest. Everything she couldn’t say to his face.
Nate,
I’m sorry. I should have told you about the notebook the moment I found it. I should have trusted you to decide what to do with Emma’s words instead of deciding for you. That wasn’t my call to make, and I made it anyway.
You were right about another thing—I do help too much. In fact, I’ve spent my whole life trying to be useful, trying to be needed, trying to earn my place. It took your anger to make me see how exhausting that must be. For me, and for everyone around me.
I have to go back to New York. There’s a meeting Sunday, and my job—whatever’s left of it—is on the line. I won’t be at the dedication tomorrow, and I’m sorry for that too. I wanted to see Emma’s Storybook Corner full of children. I wanted to see you read there someday.
I’m leaving the notebook on your porch. Emma’s ideas are inside—plot threads, character notes, pieces of the ending she never got to write. I don’t know if you want them or not. But they’re yours. They were always yours.
I hope you finish the book. Not for the deadline, not for the publisher, not for me—but for you. For Emma. For the story only you can tell.
I’m not your sister, but I think she would have wanted you to know: The ending doesn’t have to be hers. It gets to be yours.
Thank you for showing me Maple Lake. Thank you for the fudge and the hat and the dance and the kiss. Thank you for making me feel, just for a little while, like I was someone worth seeing.
I hope you find your way through the grief. I hope the storm passes. I hope—
She stopped. Pressed the pen to the paper one more time.
I hope you write your happy ending.
—Livvie
The walk to Nate’s cottage took less than a minute.
Livvie moved through the trees on the path she’d walked a dozen times, the notebook clutched against her chest, her packed bag waiting by Aunt Lila’s door.
She’d booked the flight already. Duluth to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to JFK.
By tonight, she’d be back in her apartment, surrounded by other people’s manuscripts and a life that didn’t quite fit anymore.
The Craftsman was quiet. Curtains still drawn. No sign of movement inside.
She climbed the porch steps, her heart pounding. Part of her wanted to knock—wanted to see his face one more time, wanted to plead her case, wanted to fix this the way she fixed everything.
But that wasn’t how this worked. That wasn’t who she was going to be anymore.
She set the notebook on the doormat, propped against the doorframe, where he’d find it. Her letter was tucked inside, nestled between Emma’s words and Emma’s dreams.
She pressed her hand flat against the door. Just for a moment. Just to say goodbye.
Then she turned and walked away.
The drive to Duluth was long and quiet.
Livvie kept the radio off. Let the silence fill the car. Let herself feel the weight of what she was leaving behind—the lake, the festival, the mural she’d painted, the man she’d fallen in love with.
The fall colors blurred past her windows, beautiful and meaningless. The road wound through small towns and empty fields, carrying her farther and farther from everything she’d started to want.
He will rejoice over you with singing.
She held on to that. Turned it over in her mind like a stone, smoothed by years of her mother’s faith and her aunt’s wisdom.
She couldn’t fix Nate. Couldn’t fix her father. Couldn’t fix the mess at Pemberton or the career that might already be over.
But she knew who she was now.
Maybe that would have to be enough.
He’d written the same sentence forty-seven times.
Aldric stood at the threshold, and—
Delete.
Aldric stood at the threshold, knowing that if he—
Delete.
Aldric stood at the threshold. The woman waited on the other side. All he had to do was—
Delete. Delete. Delete.
The cursor blinked. Patient. Mocking. Waiting for him to figure out what came next.
He didn’t know. That was the problem. He’d been able to write everything else—the action, the world-building, the grief. But this? The moment where the broken man steps into his happy ending?
He had no idea how to write that.
Because clearly he had no idea how to do it.
The lake house was too quiet. Not empty quiet—he was used to that.
This was different. This was the quiet of something missing.
The space where her coffee cup should be clinking against the counter.
The absence of her humming in the kitchen.
The void where her voice used to fill the afternoon with questions about his characters, his plot, his life.
Her mug sat on the counter. The blue one with the chip.
She’d claimed it two weeks ago, and now it sat there with a coffee ring inside, untouched since yesterday.
Her sweater was draped over the couch arm.
Her handwriting covered the Post-it wall—yellow squares mapping a story they’d built together.
He hadn’t touched any of it. Couldn’t bring himself to wash the mug, fold the sweater, take down the notes. That would make it real.
Huck lay by the cold fireplace, watching him with worried eyes. Finn kept going to the front door, sniffing at the crack, whining softly, then padding back to lie at Nate’s feet. They knew something was wrong. They just didn’t understand what.
He pushed back from the desk. The chair scraped against the floor. Outside, the lake was gray under a sky that had turned overcast. No gold, no blue. Just flat, colorless water reflecting flat, colorless clouds.
The dock was wet with morning dew. He’d forgotten shoes, and the cold soaked through his socks as he walked to the end. The two Adirondack chairs sat empty, the way they’d been empty since Emma.
He closed his eyes. Breathed in the lake air—mineral, green, the smell of decay from fallen leaves along the shore.
Where are you?
He was talking to the mist. To the gray water. To the ghost he’d been conjuring for three years.
Why won’t you help me? You always had the answers.
A loon called from somewhere across the lake. Mournful. Distant. The water lapped against the dock posts.
Nothing else.
She wasn’t here. Maybe she’d never been here—just him, talking to himself, giving himself permission to feel things he couldn’t feel alone. The conversations he’d thought he was having with Emma were just his own voice, speaking in the cadence she’d taught him.
And now even that was gone.
He stood there until his feet went numb. Until the clouds thinned and the gray sky showed patches of blue. Until he accepted what he already knew:
Emma was gone. And she wasn’t coming back. Not today. Not ever.
And now he didn’t have Livvie either.
He walked back inside.
The couch still smelled like her shampoo.
He sat in the spot where Livvie used to sit, where she’d curled up with his manuscript pages and her red pen, where she’d fallen asleep that one night and he’d covered her with a blanket and stood there too long, watching her breathe.
The phone rang.
Margaret Rivers.
His mother. They didn’t do this—didn’t call unexpectedly, didn’t check in outside of scheduled quarterly conversations. Since Emma died, the family had operated at a careful distance. Three people who’d lost their center, orbiting each other in the dark.
He almost let it go to voicemail.
Something made him answer.
“Nathaniel.” Her voice was careful. Guarded. The same voice she’d used for three years—the one that was always braced for bad news. “How are you? How’s the weather there?”
The weather. Three years of grief, and they talked about the weather.
“Gray,” he said. “Cold. How’s Florida?”
“Warm. Your father’s golfing.” A pause. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. They didn’t do this either—didn’t admit to thinking about each other, to missing each other, to any of the messy emotions that lived underneath the surface conversations.
“The book,” she said. “How’s it going?”
He laughed, except it came out bitter. “I don’t know how to finish it.”
Silence on the line.
“I keep trying,” he continued, and he didn’t know why he was telling her this, why the words were spilling out after three years of keeping everything locked down.
“But I’m stuck on the ending. The final scene.
Aldric made it through the forest, saved Elara, found the woman he loves, and now he just has to claim the kingdom.
Step into his role as king. I’ve written it forty-seven times, and it’s wrong every time.
Okay, forty-seven is an exaggeration. Maybe ten times. Still.”
“Oh, Nate.”
“I don’t know how to do this alone.” And he wasn’t talking about Emma, was he?