Chapter 1
Liv
Plot Twist:
The female main character suddenly finds herself packing her bags in the unholy hours of the morning so her overprotective brother can spirit her away from the villain.
I didn’t normally narrate my day in third person.
It was just…sometimes fiction could seem so convoluted.
So unrealistic. Until you found yourself living a life more in tune to the pages of an overly clichéd screenplay.
So, the third-person narration seemed fitting.
It helped me imagine that I was some cool, tough-as-nails main character about to set out on her hero’s journey.
That sounded better, didn’t it?
Nobody wanted to imagine themselves as the twitchy side character with the pale skin and squishy arms, who backed away from danger instead of picking up a sword.
To be fair, in my twenty-seven years of life, I’d never had to fight anyone, so I was still holding out hope that if it did come to that, I’d surprise myself with a few moves that could rival any low-budget Hollywood movie.
I dumped the basket of clean laundry onto my bed and began fishing through the pile for matching socks.
I wasn’t sure which was worse: the fact that I was in enough danger to have to leave, or the fact that I could only take one bag.
Not that I had much to pack. One of the perks of having a stalker was that I did a lot of sitting at home in yoga pants, stained t-shirts, and fluffy, air-dried hair.
Will didn’t even have the guts to call and ask me himself.
His buddy from the police station, Officer Rogers, called me just before bed last night.
He used words like ‘official order’ and ‘police business,’ so here I was, packing a go bag at four in the morning while the rest of Montpelier, Vermont was sleeping.
I wasn’t even sure Will could actually force me to leave, but I went along with it for one reason I would never admit to my brother.
I was terrified.
If my life were a movie, people would be glued to their TVs.
It had started slowly, just like any good stalker thread.
A random date. Then he showed up, creepy and unannounced, at a wedding he shouldn’t have known the location of.
Tate Walker running him off. Me assuming it was over.
And then…eighteen months later…the café.
An anonymous bouquet of flowers sent to my door.
Notes taped to my car in the grocery store parking lot.
And then the voicemails. That soft, nasally voice that gave me chills. The letters, telling me about our future wedding, with no trace of DNA. Knick-knacks sent to me from anonymous places. More voicemails, this time telling me how much he loved the blue shirt he’d seen me wearing that day.
But as blundering as he’d seemed at the wedding and on our date, he was a good stalker. Always careful to be where there were no cameras to catch him. We still didn’t even have his real name. Will had checked the Vermont database for Leroys, and they had all come back middle-aged and not our guy.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly. Focus became a joke.
My brain felt like a spinning hamster wheel, with me unable to jump off.
I went on the hunt for my shoes piled by the door before I remembered I needed to grab the makeup bag off my counter.
Doing that reminded me that I hadn’t packed the sweatshirt I had hanging in the back of my closet.
I stopped, hands trembling, and took in a deep breath.
I had five minutes before Will arrived. I needed to pull it together and finish packing.
I would never dare to write a heroine with such nervous tendencies. It was too human. Too weak. When we all wanted to imagine ourselves as something different.
That was the irony of it all. I wrote storylines just like this.
Throwing in a stalker who so casually disrupted the lives of my characters was a specialty of mine.
They were a great dose of tension for crime dramas on TV.
Along with stalkers, I also loved an assassin—the good kind, where they were morally gray throughout the entire show before they saved the day at the end.
People went crazy for that stuff. A good old-fashioned whodunit (almost always the spouse) kind of tension never got old.
At least, that was what I used to write.
Six months ago, my production company, Plot Twist, Inc.
, went through a severe change. One too many high-profile scandals from their actors and directors resulted in plunging ratings and complete public mistrust of the entire company.
As a last-ditch effort to save their brand, the owners decided to do a complete one-eighty, going in a “new direction” and moving from crime dramas to one of the fastest rising genres in the game… family-friendly romance.
Whipped cream.
Airy and light.
Low calories.
Zero substance.
Some of my colleagues promptly got jobs at other production companies where they could continue to write what they wanted, while others of us (ahem…
me) couldn’t afford the luxury of a job hunt or (even briefly) forgoing a steady income.
Having the funds to pack up and move when necessary was an important attribute when being stalked.
So I stayed.
Which did have its perks. Since I was one of the few writers kept on staff, I was promoted to a senior writer position. I’d already helped write dozens of screenplays, but now, I’d finally get to write my own. This move alone advanced my career by at least seven years.
So I signed the over-the-top contracts and morality clauses with this newly formed company. The kind of clauses that basically meant that my company owned me—at least, where I lived and how I slept. I’d heard of morality clauses before, but I’d never signed one.
But hey, a girl’s got to eat.
So I put away the double-homicide screenplay I’d been working on for two months and agreed to pen a sweet romance set in the fall in New England.
Because…of course.
Obviously, no other setting could come close to providing the correct fall backdrop for a couple falling in love. My home state of Vermont and I had this in the bag.
I’d spent the last couple of months working on a romance outline painfully inspired by all the cheesy romance films on TV.
I made notes of popular plot points, what four-letter words could or couldn’t be said, and made myself familiar with the beats—the push and pull of a romance.
The outline had been laughably easy. I’d been so proud of my efforts, so sure this genre shift would be a breeze.
After all, it’s just…fake.
Crime dramas had believability. Good guys, bad guys.
The hunt for justice. A jail sentence. There were too many romances where I didn’t believe that the couple could make it all the way.
There were too many variables in life affecting a happy outcome.
It was that happily ever after that romance always insisted on that lost me.
And then…Leroy.
Since his presence in my life, I’d gone from being someone with an active social existence to a first-class hermit. The kind of hermit that gets toilet paper, milk, and fingernail clippers delivered to my apartment.
Years ago, I could have used some of this personal experience with stalkers to layer more depth into my stories.
I could have learned something useful from all of this.
But now, I was trapped in a cave, hiding from a madman while attempting to conjure up a screenplay full of enough romance to make a person swoon.
Swoon.
That was the word my boss, Elaine, told me to hit on the head with a hammer in my screenplay.
The story must be full of enough swoon to charm someone’s socks off.
(Just their socks.) But it was difficult to imagine the naive and the excessively sweet while cowering behind locked doors and bolted windows.
Sunshine was what yielded creativity, and that had been tough to find these days.
The bedside lamp in my darkened room was the only light source I allotted myself at four in the morning.
It was unlikely that Leroy was watching my apartment at this time of night, but there had been a lot of things I’d been wrong about regarding him, so I took extra precautions.
But that didn’t keep my heart from lurching out of my chest anytime the long shadows stretching out across my room from the yellow lamp took me by surprise.
My phone buzzed against the table.
“I’m here. You ready?” Will’s baritone voice barreled through the speaker as I threw a pair of tennis shoes into my duffel bag.
I couldn’t relay my fears to him, because he’d only worry more. So I often went into annoyed-little-sister mode, which, naturally, wasn’t hard to pull off.
“Where am I going, and why can I only bring one bag? The beach? The desert? A cabin in a dark forest? It’s hard to pack when I know nothing.”
“You can bring two bags if you have to. But don’t pack too much. Make it look like you’re still living there.”
“How much stuff do you think I take when I go on a trip?”
“You never go anywhere, so if he’s monitoring your apartment in some way we’re not aware of, he’ll probably notice if you’ve packed for a week. I mean it. Leave some of your makeup on the counter. Dishes out. That kind of thing.”
“And you’re sure I can’t take my car?”
Will sighed, and I already knew what he was about to tell me.
But I couldn’t help it. The thought of leaving it behind was almost a dealbreaker for me.
Whenever I did venture outside, my car was the one thing that brought me a measure of security.
Something mobile with walls that I could hide behind.
Or escape to. I didn’t know where Will was taking me, but it sounded like I was going to be dropped off somewhere without a way to leave. The whole idea of it was unnerving.