Chapter 3
Kassidy
Five hundred and twelve words.
That's what I managed yesterday—my first real output in three months—and they're not even good words.
They're serviceable, paint-by-numbers words that sound like a thousand other contemporary romances.
But they exist on the page instead of floating in the anxious soup of my brain, so I'm counting it as a victory.
Day two of the retreat begins with coffee strong enough to strip paint and a view of the Atlantic that makes my chest ache with its indifference.
The ocean doesn't care about my deadline.
It doesn't care that my protagonist has been standing in a doorway for six chapters refusing to do anything interesting.
It just keeps rolling in and pulling back, endlessly, patient in a way I will never be.
My phone lights up with a text from Mariana:
Mariana: Word count update?
Me: 512 words. Don't celebrate.
Mariana: I'm celebrating. That's 512 more than last week. What broke the dam?
I stare at the message. What broke the dam was a conversation on a beach with a man whose voice sounds like gravel wrapped in velvet, but I'm not telling my agent that.
Me: Change of scenery. The retreat is working.
Diana Hartwell's workshop starts at ten in the main parlor, which has been converted into a writing studio with armchairs arranged in a circle. Very therapy chic. Very let's excavate our deepest emotional wounds and turn them into prose.
The other writers file in with notebooks and laptops and the cautious optimism of people who still believe a two-hour session can fix whatever's wrong with them. I position myself near the window because natural light is good for creativity, or at least for staying awake.
Diana sweeps in at exactly ten, coffee in hand, reading glasses perched on her nose. She sits, crosses her legs, and surveys us with an attention so measured and deliberate that you feel simultaneously seen and dissected.
"Let's talk about emotion," she says. "Specifically, why most of you are faking it."
Silence. The poet shifts in her chair.
"Fiction is lying," Diana continues. "We all know that. But the best fiction is lying in a way that tells a deeper truth. And the worst fiction—the stuff that gets rejected, forgotten, shelved—is fiction that feels fake. Not in the plot. Not in the dialogue. In the emotion."
She looks directly at me. Or it feels like she does. Maybe she's looking at the thriller writer beside me. But the weight of it lands on my sternum like a brick.
"The question isn't what does your character feel. That's easy. Sad, angry, in love—we can all label emotions. The question is how does it live in their body. Where does it sit. What does it taste like. What do they do with their hands."
I think about my manuscript. My heroine, standing in that doorway, feeling... what? I've written her heart raced and she felt a pang of longing and all the other shortcuts that say emotion without ever making the reader feel it.
"I want you to write a scene," Diana says. "No plot. No dialogue. Just a character sitting with a feeling they can't name. Two hundred words. You have twenty minutes."
Laptops open. Keyboards click. I stare at my screen and try to think of a feeling I can't name.
What comes out isn't about my heroine.
The coffee is wrong. Not bad—just wrong.
Too smooth, too easy, missing the bitter edge that proves it's real.
She wraps her hands around the mug and focuses on the heat because the heat is simple and heat doesn't lie.
Outside, the ocean delivers its reliable performance—wave, crash, retreat—and she wants to hate it for being so predictable.
Predictable is what her ex called her. Predictable, and married to outlines, and too rigid to—
The mug burns. Good. Something that cuts through the film of numbness she's been wearing like a second skin. She puts it down, watches a red crescent bloom across her palm, and thinks: this is what feeling something looks like. Small and sharp and completely her own fault.
When Diana asks for volunteers to share, I keep my mouth shut. The poet reads something lovely about grief. The memoirist reads something raw about rage. The thriller writer reads a scene about paranoia that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Diana nods at each one, offering small, precise observations. Then her gaze finds me.
"Kassidy. Read yours."
It isn't a request. I clear my throat, read the passage, and watch Diana's expression shift from professional interest to something warmer.
"That," she says, "is the difference between telling us a character is struggling and making us struggle with her. The coffee. The burn. The completely her own fault. That's where the book lives."
My face is on fire, but the words glow inside me like a small, stubborn flame.
"The trick," Diana adds, leaning back, "is doing that for three hundred pages. Without letting it eat you alive."
Comforting.
The workshop breaks at noon, and I drift toward the veranda with my laptop, intending to ride this fragile momentum into actual manuscript pages. The air smells like salt and jasmine, and the wind has picked up since morning—not enough to be uncomfortable, but enough to flip pages and tangle hair.
Tucker Brennan appears at the edge of the veranda, and my body registers him before my brain does. A slight tightening in my core. A sharpening of focus, like the world just increased its resolution by ten percent.
He's carrying two mugs. One he sets on the table beside a security colleague—a stocky guy with a buzz cut who nods thanks—and the other he brings to the opposite end of the veranda. Near me. Not to me. Just near.
"Coffee?" he asks, like it's a coincidence, like he didn't walk the length of the porch to end up within conversation distance.
"I had coffee."
"That was three hours ago."
"You're tracking my caffeine intake?"
"I'm trained to observe." He sets the mug on the railing. "It's just coffee, Kassidy."
My name in his mouth does something I refuse to examine. I take the mug.
"Thank you."
"How was the workshop?"
"Enlightening. Diana told us we're all emotionally faking it."
"Are you?"
The question lands sideways—half casual, half sniper shot. His eyes are steady. Green with flecks of brown, or brown with flecks of green. I can't decide, which is annoying, because I notice details for a living.
"Maybe," I say. "Are you?"
Something passes across his face—quick, barely visible, like a cloud's shadow on water. "Maybe."
He takes a sip from his own mug, which I now notice he's been holding this whole time. He didn't just bring me coffee. He came to have coffee. With me.
This is not helping.
He leans against the railing, and the fabric of his shirt pulls across his shoulders. His forearms are tanned, ropy with muscle, and there's a scar on his left wrist—thin, white, old. Training or combat. Either way, a history written on skin.
I am noticing his forearms. This retreat is supposed to fix my writing, not give me new distractions.
"Storm coming in," he says, nodding toward the horizon.
I follow his gaze. The sky to the south has gone dark—not the soft gray of a passing shower, but the bruised, greenish black that means business.
"How bad?"
"They're watching a system in the Atlantic. Tropical storm, potentially upgrading." He says this with the same calm he uses for everything, like hurricanes and coffee orders exist on the same emotional register. "If it tracks this way, they'll evacuate the coast."
"Evacuate? We just got here."
"Hurricanes don't check retreat schedules."
"I know that. I just—" I grip my mug tighter. "I need this time. I need to be here. I have a deadline and a book that's falling apart and this is the first place I've been able to write in months. I can't just—"
I stop myself. Because I'm monologuing at a security professional about my manuscript crisis, and that's a new low even for me.
Tucker watches me with an expression I can't decipher. Not pity—I'd shut down if it were pity. Something more like recognition. Like he understands what it means to need something you can't control.
"Nothing's decided yet," he says. "Just stay flexible."
"I don't do flexible. Flexible is for people who don't have outlines and deadlines."
His mouth twitches. "You outline hurricanes?"
"I outline everything. My books, my weeks, my meals. My ex said—" I catch myself again. Stop quoting Ryan. Stop letting Ryan's voice narrate your life. "Never mind."
The radio on Tucker's hip crackles. A voice—different from last night's—cuts through: "Brennan, Calder wants you on the call at 1400. Storm tracking update."
Tucker straightens, and the casual man leaning on the railing vanishes. In his place is someone sharper, more contained, like a blade slipping back into its sheath. "Copy. On my way."
He looks at me. "Try not to outline the hurricane."
"Try not to tell me what to do."
That almost-smile again, and then he's gone, moving toward the house with the quiet, ground-eating stride that I am absolutely not watching.
My phone buzzes.
Weather alert: Tropical Storm Helena upgraded to Category 1 hurricane. Coastal evacuation advisories in effect for Charleston County.
My stomach drops.
No. No, no, no. I just got here. I just found something—a thread, a voice, a reason to sit at the keyboard. Diana's workshop cracked something open, and the words were starting to move, and now a hurricane is going to sweep in and scatter everything.
Around me, the other writers are checking phones, murmuring, gathering belongings. Renee appears on the veranda with a forced smile and a clipboard.
"Everyone, we're monitoring the situation. If evacuation becomes necessary, we'll move to an inland location. Please pack a bag with essentials, just in case."
"Just in case," the memoirist repeats. "That's the most Southern way I've ever heard someone say we're definitely evacuating."
She's not wrong. I retreat to my room and stare at my suitcase, which I unpacked with meticulous care twenty-four hours ago. Clothes sorted by outfit, shoes lined up, toiletries in labeled pouches. My system. My control.
I start repacking and make myself a deal: if the hurricane comes, I write through it. Wherever they send us, I find a corner and a power outlet and I keep going. The block is cracking and nothing—not weather, not relocation, not the distracting existence of Tucker Brennan—is going to stop me.
The wind rattles my window, and the ocean has turned the color of steel. Rain starts—not gentle coastal rain but fat, aggressive drops that hit the glass like they're auditioning for a disaster movie.
A hurricane. Of course there's a hurricane. The universe really doesn't want me finishing this book.