Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
AVERY
My sister stares at me, slack-jawed.
Slowly, I close the laptop. I read to her for nearly three hours, pausing once to get water, and a second time for the bathroom.
“That’s it.” My shoulders reach up to my ears, then drop heavily. “That’s all I have so far.”
Cam gnaws on her lower lip. “I…I don’t know what to say.”
“You’ve been stunned into silence? I should be recording this.”
Cam smirks. “Just kidding. My words are back.” She reaches for my hand. “Avery, I didn’t realize everything you went through. You never told me about St. Lucia.”
“I couldn’t bring myself to.”
“I get it. If Dani was the one struggling, I don’t know if I’d be able to tell people either.”
“Apparently I’m ready to tell people.” I gesture at the computer on my lap as trepidation washes over me. “I don’t know. We’ll see. Sometimes when I think about telling our story, it feels like I’m betraying Gabriel.”
“He told you to use your story.”
“He was in an emotional place when he wrote that letter. What if he doesn’t mean it anymore?”
“I guess you could ask him.”
I shake my head. “I think it would be better if I stayed away from him.” Better for me. My mental, and emotional, health.
“Whatever you say, Baxter.” Cam drops my hand and climbs off the bed. “I need to get going back to Phoenix. Come on.”
I drive Camryn to Intricate Wood Works, where she abandoned her car to whisk me away from the sudden appearance of my past. She gives me one long look before she leaves, and hugs me hard.
“Are you going to be ok?” Her forehead creases in concern. “I can stay overnight. Cuddle in bed with you. Tell spooky stories and scare the crap out of each other.”
I laugh softly. “No, I’m ok. I promise.” I look over at Intricate Wood Works. Is Gabriel in there? Probably not. It’s late in the day, and there aren’t other cars in the parking lot, and even if there were, I wouldn’t know if it belonged to him. Does he still have his truck?
Camryn follows my gaze. “You can always come home,” she says, looking back at me. “You don’t have to stay here.”
I shake my head. “I want to stay. When else will I get an opportunity like this? To sit in the woods and focus on my book? Besides, you saw where I’m staying. There are only a few other places nearby. I’m not going to run into Gabriel again, and I’m not going to go looking for him.”
Cam believes me, or at least she accepts my words. I tell her she’s welcome up here at any point in the next couple weeks, and remind her to check my mail. She gives me a mock salute and takes off.
I don’t have plans to go looking for Gabriel, but it’d be a lie to say I haven’t thought about it. How good would it feel to look him in his eyes and demand answers? Or an explanation.
I find a grocery store and stock up on food. I’m treating this like a writers’ retreat, not a trip, which means I need non-perishables. I don’t want to run out for fresh produce every other day.
The cashier doesn’t say much. I don’t think Sugar Creek is so small everyone knows everyone else. If she recognizes me as new, she’s not giving it away. I pay her and she tells me to have a good night.
On my way back to the cabin, I drive through the middle of town. It’s adorable. Quaint. And crowded. People walking down the sidewalk, coming in and out of shops, eating dinner on restaurant patios.
I tell myself I’m not scanning the faces for Gabriel, but of course I am. How could I not?
A man on the sidewalk pretends to bite into an oversized muffin painted on a glass window, and a woman stands back to take his picture. I study the map app on my phone at a red light, and marvel at how much new construction surrounds the town.
It’s dark by the time I arrive at my cabin, and when I step outside my car and pause in the open door, I hear nothing. The birds have gone home for the night, it’s too early in the year for the steady thrum of cicadas, and there isn’t anything more than sweet silence.
Ruby’s keening whine pierces the peace. She must be going crazy inside a place that feels unfamiliar.
I unload the groceries, feed her, and search for a light to illuminate the back of the house so I can take her outside. When I find it, I flip it on and step outside with her.
Ruby sniffs around for the right spot. She goes from tree to tree, bush to bush, inspecting her surroundings. I’m turning around to go inside for a sweatshirt when I hear a sound.
At first, it’s a twang reaching me through the trees. Moments pass and the notes build and it becomes a song. I peer into the darkness, looking for its source, but find nothing. That’s a good thing, I suppose, because if someone were close enough for me to see, it would mean they were pretty damn close. The best, and most likely, guess is that it’s coming from the nearest cabin.
The music gets louder, and I listen closely. I know this song.
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.
Music makes me think of Gabriel. I rarely listen anymore, but now I’m letting myself. I sink down on the bottom stair and close my eyes. I see Gabriel, sitting across from me on our first date. His eyes glimmer with excitement, and he doesn’t attempt to hide it. I loved that about him, how he didn’t play games when it came to how he felt about me.
The song ends and the musical notes back off, returning through the trees to their source. Gabriel’s image recedes with them. Ruby joins me at the bottom of the stairs, and she gets up when I do, scampering up the steps ahead of me.
I rearrange what Camryn unpacked, and set up the dining room table as my office. I lay out my laptop, my notebook containing my outline, and a blank poster board with sticky notes. Perhaps I need to see the story visually in order to breathe life into the second half.
The last item I lay out is the printed manuscript. Maybe having the words in physical form will be good for creativity.
I gaze down at the table, and a sense of readiness settles over me. Jill and I are scheduled to have a call tomorrow midday. Seeing everything laid out this way makes me feel a little more ready for her.
I place Ruby’s bed next to my own. She falls asleep first, blowing out heavy breaths and making noises while she dreams. I stare at the dark ceiling and relive every second of seeing Gabriel earlier today. Putting myself in the moment, I allow the emotions to wash over me. I even feel the rain.
But, of course, that is not rain.
Those are my tears.
She hates it.
I think.
Jill sits, silent, chewing on the side of her pinky fingernail. Somewhere beyond her office, a car horn blasts.
One side of her mouth turns down. Would she have the heart to tell me my manuscript reeks? I’m certain she would. She’s my agent. It’s part of her job. I get the feeling she enjoys that particular aspect.
Jill flips through the pages. She must’ve printed them out like I did, instead of reading the electronic version I sent her. Maybe she plans to use my words, my story, to line her cat’s litter box.
She frowns at a page, running her chewed up pinky nail down its length.
She hates it. I knew it.
The structure of the story is unconventional. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she hates the way I’ve separated it into parts.
Or the therapist. She hates the therapist.
I wipe my palms on my tattered sweatpants and flick a fallen piece of tortilla chip off my thigh. I’m wearing a crisp white button-down blouse and three varying length gold necklaces. My computer screen only shows my top half, so I still have on my pajama bottoms. As Camryn would say, I’m fancy lady on the top, couch potato on the bottom.
The longer I stare at Jill’s blunt-cut asymmetrical bob, the more my self-doubt grows from a liquid into a block of concrete.
Jill continues to page through the spiral bound stack, stopping somewhere near the end. She folds her hands on top of the open pages and finally looks at me.
“I love it,” she says simply.
All the breath I’d been holding whooshes out of me. My shoulders lower from where they’ve been stuck at my earlobes and return to the place where they should be.
“You really know how to terrify a girl,” I joke, adjusting the gold ‘A’ charm on one of my necklaces. “I thought you were about to tell me you hated it.”
“Not at all. I loved the way you involved the therapist. I’m a big fan of normalizing therapy.” Jill’s hair shifts around her face as she speaks, and she brushes it back with her hands. “It’s a solid book, so far. Engaging. I read it all the way through in one sitting. I needed to know what was going to happen next.” She holds up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, there are some spots where I see room for improvement. I’m not sure about the ending.”
My brows furrow. “The ending?”
Jill clears her throat. “Yeah. I see the ending coming a mile away.”
An uncertain smile bends my lips. “Can you tell me what it is? Because even I don’t know the ending yet.”
Jill grins. I think she likes me, but it’s hard to know. She’s not an easy read. Her happiness with me could just as easily be amusement. Her long pauses are probably just her giving herself space to contemplate what she was thinking the day she took a chance on a debut author. I’m positive if she weren’t Dani’s aunt, she wouldn’t have given me the time of day.
“Right now,” Jill says, looking directly at me. I swear I feel it in my soul. “It looks like she’s going to skip off into the sunset with the new guy. Do you really think it should be that easy for her? Where’s the conflict? You don’t want it venturing into All Dogs Go To Heaven territory.”
I haven’t seen that movie since I was a kid, but I understand the reference and what she’s really saying. “It’s a romance,” I remind her cautiously. “If I don’t supply a happily ever after, I’ll get burned at the stake.” There’s also the small part that I haven’t figured out the ending yet. But no matter, because Jill seems game to argue the hypothetical.
Jill’s head metronomes. “It’s also women’s fiction. So you don’t necessarily have to have an HEA.”
In normal life, not everybody gets a happily ever after. I know that all too well. But in fictional life? I’d love to send my characters off into cotton candy clouds and bliss personified.
“What would a different ending look like?” I’m curious.
Jill ticks off ideas on her hands. “Nobody gets the girl. She saves herself. She rides off into the sunset on her own white horse.”
I like that idea. Love it, actually. But I’m not sure if I love it in theory because it sounds boss bitch and girl power and all that, or if it’s really the path I want my character to take. There’s also the matter that I haven’t been completely truthful with Jill. She doesn’t know how closely this book follows my journey.
I push that thought away and focus on the here and now. If I dig my heels in about the ending, I might take away my chance to tell it at all. I lift my hands in surrender. “Let’s leave it open-ended for now while I work through the second half of the story.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jill says. She looks down at her watch. “I have to jump. Another meeting starts in ten and my bladder is about to explode.”
We hang up after I promise to keep chugging along on the second half of my book.
The problem is, I’m not sure what to write.
Because I’m currently living it. How do you write an ending to a story based on your life experience when you haven’t reached it yet?
Maybe Jill is right. Maybe the ending is me riding off on a white horse by myself. It wouldn’t be a bad ending. There’s just this part of me, tiny but mighty, a holdover from all my years pining for the life I envisioned for myself, that’s having a hard time jumping on that white horse. Maybe it’s because I had that life, the one I dreamed about. Maybe it’s because it was all it was cracked up to be. Before it was marred by pain, resentment, and the just plain ugly, it was glorious. Or, maybe it’s because I saw Gabriel again.
The happily ever after has claws. Imagine that.