Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ridge
The takeout bag sitting on my lap smells of lemon and garlic, which is the only reason I agreed to any of this.
“I still don’t understand why you need me to physically come with you to pick up food from this place every week,” I say for what is probably the third time tonight, slouched in the passenger seat. “You could just bring me my stuff.”
Derek doesn’t look away from the road. “Because if I don’t air you out regularly, your apartment starts growing things.”
“That’s not how apartments work.”
“It’s how your apartment works.” He signals at the junction with maddening calm, the picture of a man who has fully stopped being affected by my moods. “You sit in there like a mushroom, Ridge.”
“Mushrooms don’t require sunlight.”
“And yet, somehow, that’s your defense.”
I glance over my shoulder at Melanie in the back seat.
She’s sitting primly in her booster, holding a small white stone up in the light from the streetlamp as if she’s inspecting a diamond. She found it in the restaurant parking lot, studied it for a full twenty seconds, and then handed me one too—gray-green, smooth on one side, rough on the other.
I have more than fifty of them from the same parking lot lined up on my desk at home, one for every time Derek has dragged me out here.
I’ve been turning this one between my fingers ever since she pressed it into my palm.
She notices me watching her and beams. “You look scruffy, Uncle Ridge.”
“I’m distinguished.”
“Daddy says you need a haircut.” She tilts the stone left. Then right. “And that your beard is too long.”
I look at Derek, finding him pressing his lips together with visible effort.
“Daddy says a lot of things,” I say.
“But I’m not wrong,” Derek says. “You’re starting to look like someone who lives in the woods and warns hikers about the government.”
“Maybe I have things to warn them about.”
“Get a haircut, Ridge.”
The last of the daylight is gone. October dark always seems to arrive before you’ve agreed to it, and I hate the cold. Light slides past in the dark, lit windows and rustling leaves, and the emptiness of a Sunday evening.
“How are you doing?” Derek asks.
And there it is.
“Fine.”
“Actually, though.”
“Actually fine.”
He glances at me the way he always does, the look that means he’s identified a structural problem and is deciding whether to take the wall apart. “Sleeping?”
“Enough.”
“Writing?”
I look out the window.
“Ridge.”
“I heard you.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“I know.”
The silence stretches, which is the most aggravating thing about Derek. He doesn’t push. He patiently waits you out, which makes it impossible to fight without looking like an asshole. I resent it, but I also respect it, which is worse.
I don’t want to talk about it, even though I probably should. “I’m still working through something,” I say finally, because it’s true and tells him absolutely nothing.
“Okay.” The dashboard starts ringing, and Derek says, “It’s your mom.”
He answers before I can protest. “Hi, Vera. You’re on speaker. Melanie’s here. And your son.”
“Oh, wonderful!” My mother’s voice is warm and a half-beat too loud. “Hello, my darlings! Derek, are you eating? Melanie, honey, are you being good? Ridge, are you—”
“We just picked up food,” I cut in. “We’re all eating, Mom.”
“Oh, the cute little Chinese place you always go to?” A pause, and I can already picture her turning away from the phone to holler over her shoulder at my dad. “Sven! They’re at the lemon chicken place.”
My father’s voice drifts in, sounding amused, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.
“He says hello,” she says a few moments later. “And that he keeps meaning to call. Ridge, have you been getting outside?”
“I’m outside right now.”
“Besides sitting in a car to grab food.”
“Define besides.”
Derek stares at the road ahead with tremendous concentration.
“Ridge.” She says my name the way she’s been saying it for thirty-eight years. Two soft syllables that mean I love you. I’m worried. Please let me keep loving you.
And she does mean it, which is the problem.
I love my parents. I really do. But they poured everything they had into me, and the weight of being loved that completely is something I could never explain to them without it sounding like an accusation.
When my grandfather died, my dad inherited the house in Sweden and started talking about moving back, and I encouraged it so I could finally breathe without someone measuring the rhythm of it. They didn’t always look at me like I might break.
But now, they always do.
They gave the apartment building to Derek to look after, a task he somehow interpreted as looking after me as well.
Almost no one to measure my breathing, I correct.
I practically packed their bags for them because I needed to prove something, and I did. But it still costs me every single day in ways I don’t have words for yet.
Story of my life.
Turns out, you can be right about needing something and grieve it at the same time.
“I’m doing fine, Mom.”
They call Derek because I only pick up about every third call, more or less, which I know makes me terrible. But if I answered each and every one, I’d spend the rest of my life being loved from a distance without ever figuring out how to stand without it. Metaphorically.
“How’s Sweden?” I ask, trying to make her talk, and she does.
She tells us at length about the neighbors, a new walking route, and a restaurant that reminded her of somewhere we went when I was nine. I listen and turn the pebble between my fingers, letting her talk because it costs me nothing, and she needs it.
When she finally says goodbye, it’s full of enough declarations of love to warm the car.
“Grandma Vera talks a lot,” Melanie mumbles from the back seat the moment Derek ends the call.
“Yes,” I agree.
“I like her.”
“Me, too, Princess.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket, so I pull it out, already ready to ask my mother what she could possibly have forgotten to tell me in the last four minutes, when I see Miller’s name lighting up the screen instead.
“F-U-C-K,” I spell under my breath.
“What’s that spell, Uncle Ridge?”
“I spelled nothing. Mind your stone.”
“What’s wrong?” Derek asks.
Ah, fuck it.
“My agent.” I decline the call and put the phone face down on my knee. “Again.”
“What’s going on with Miller?”
“He wants an outline.”
“And you don’t have one.”
I look out the window at the dark street sliding past.
This is the one thing I can actually talk about. Not Lennon, the dreamscape, or the deal we made. This at least sounds like a normal problem. Professional. A problem that has a solution in theory, even if I don’t currently have one.
“I have nothing to give him,” I say. “The publisher wants something to read. A chapter, a scene, a napkin with three words on it.”
“And you don—”
“I have nothing.” I shift the takeout bag on my lap. The lemon chicken is going cold. That’s the most concrete problem I have right now, and even that I can’t fix. “I’m past the deadline. Considerably.”
The thing Miller doesn’t understand, and I can’t explain to him without sounding insane, is that the writing and the dreams are the same thing. Always have been.
My first horror book hit the bestseller list. Miller acted as though he’d predicted it, which he hadn’t, and I acted like I wasn’t shocked, which I was.
The second did better. The third went into four printings, got optioned, and had Miller leaving me voicemails at hours that should be illegal.
By the fourth, we weren’t talking about whether it would sell anymore.
We were talking about how much, and to whom, and in how many languages, and that was the book that got me the contract we’d spent years building toward.
I wrote all of them the same way. Go under.
Build the thing. Walk around inside it until I understood what made it true rather than just dark, what made the fear recognizable rather than just loud.
Come back. Put it on paper. No outline, no notes, nothing Miller would recognize as a process if he saw it.
Just the dreamscape and whatever I could bring back from it.
It was getting better every time. I knew what I was doing in a way I hadn’t after the first one, or the second. By the fourth, I could feel what I was capable of, could see exactly where the next one was supposed to go.
And then my subconscious has gotten stuck in the forest, and I’ve been sitting at a desk with nothing ever since.
I can’t tell him any of that. So instead, I don’t answer his calls.
Derek exhales. I can hear him reorganizing his approach, the quiet mental shuffle of a man who has been doing this long enough to know which angle works on me, which is none of them, but he keeps trying anyway.
“Maybe we should do this more often,” he says. “Get you out. Different air, new places, something to work—”
“No.”
“Ridge—”
“It’s not that,” I say flatly, because it isn’t. “Outside isn’t the problem.”
The problem is inside.
The problem is that the place where I do my best work has been locked out of reach for months.
The first time the lock came loose, it was a blonde woman with citrus nails who did it, and I have no idea what to do with that information except keep showing up, hoping she doesn’t notice how much I need it.
Derek doesn’t push, but his jaw shifts as we pass the Vaughn mansion at the end of the street.
Neither of us looks at it directly, but his eyes track it the same way they always do—a split-second pull, like a compass needle that can’t help itself—then he’s looking at the road again, and his hands are easy on the wheel, as if nothing happened.
Yeah. We both notice things about each other.
Two months ago, he showed up at my door with a six-pack, wanting to cheer me up. Since I don’t drink, he did it alone, slowly and thoroughly, until somewhere around the fourth beer, he stopped pretending he’d come over for my benefit.
He told me he still loved her, that he never stopped.
Not that he needed to tell me. I know.
But one thing he definitely doesn’t know is that Paul and I tried.
We tried fucking hard.
For months, Paul and I built theory after theory, chasing every half-credible thing we could find about what happens when someone goes so deep into their subconscious that they don’t come back.
We did everything we could think of to bring back the woman Derek quietly fell apart over for more than a decade.
But even with the trauma of what happened, he’s still the most infuriatingly functional person I’ve ever met, smiling easily and taking care of his daughter.
I glance over my shoulder at Melanie, whose blinks are getting slower and longer, her rock clutched in her fist.
She is probably his why. Why he pulled himself up and moved on.
But I haven’t, even if I stopped trying after Paul and I stopped talking. The guilt of that has been sitting in my chest like something wedged under a door that won’t close properly.
Then there’s Lennon.
She might be the key we needed all along.
We have a deal, after all, so either way, I have to try again, even if I have no clear idea of where to start, and even less of an idea what it means that This Man is involved. Even thinking about him in the context of Tessa turns something cold in my stomach.
I’m not going to tell Derek. Not yet. Not until I know whether it means something, and whether what happened in the dreamscape with her is the door I think it might be.
I won’t hand him hope until I know it holds weight.
Derek has been carrying the weightless kind for long enough, and I’ve watched what that does to a person.
He deserves the real thing or nothing.
The Vaughn mansion disappears behind us in the dark, and Derek doesn’t look back.
Neither do I.
A soft sound from the back seat tells me Melanie has finally given in to sleep. I glance back to find her head tilted against the car seat, mouth slightly open, and her right hand has fallen open in her lap, the little white stone resting in her palm.
I hope her dreams are only the good kind. That they’re soft, strange, and full of things that make no sense in the best way, the way dreams are supposed to be before life gives you nightmare fuel, and you learn dreams can cost you.
“Hey,” I whisper when I turn back to Derek. “Have you heard anything from the bitch?”
“Ridge.”
“What? Princess is asleep.”
Derek glances in the rearview mirror, then back at the road. “You still can’t call her mother a bitch.”
“I call her as she is.”
“Mm.”
“Well? Have you?”
“No.” He signals for our street. “Her parents said she’s in India. Finding herself, apparently.”
“She can get thoroughly lost while she does it.”
“Then why are you asking?”
I look back at Melanie. The stone is still in her palm, and she has a small red crayon smudge on her thumb that I didn’t notice earlier.
“Still can’t believe she made you that,” I say.
Derek is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, it’s dry, fond, and a little tired. “I’d love to regret that one-night stand. I genuinely would.”
“But?”
He looks in the rearview mirror at his daughter. “But I really can’t.”
We turn onto our street. Shadowed buildings slide past, and I’m already thinking about getting back upstairs, about heating up the lemon chicken and eating it while thinking about next steps with Lennon.
But then a black pick-up truck moves through the intersection ahead of us with “Bennett Logging” written in white letters on the side.
Paul Bennett is in the driver’s seat, and before I even think about it, I flip him off.
He doesn’t see it, of course, already driving down the street, but it gives me a little thrill.
Derek looks at me. Then at the intersection. Then back at me. “Really?”
“What?”
“Very mature.”
“Thank you.”
He pulls into the parking lot, and I look down at the pebble in my hand.
I don’t know why I keep holding onto these, why I don’t toss them into the bushes every time she gives me one.
That’s a lie.
I know exactly why.