Chapter 1
Brilliant orange flames separated inside the decades-old furnace as Stella stared, mesmerized. The fire burned hot at its
core, blackening the edges of the paper and ravenously consuming everything within its steel walls. Stella, frustrated and
tired of her own heartache, waited for the pressure to release from her solar plexus—that spot just below her rib cage that
ached every time something was wrong. But so far, the discomfort had only intensified.
Even as she watched her journal burn, along with every word she’d written over the past few months, her fingers itched to
record this event, to detail the way the ink-stained pages writhed in the flames, the way flecks of paper lifted on pops of
air and danced before shriveling.
Guilt planted a seed deep in her belly and started to grow something thorny and tangled. Her stomach clenched when three golden,
shimmering words rose from the flames and slid out the open mouth of the furnace. They glittered against the black metal like
stars in a midnight sky. Surrender. Anew. Forgiveness.
Was the journal forgiving her? Or were the words telling her she needed to extend forgiveness?
But to whom? Not him. No way did he deserve her forgiveness.
The lines between Stella’s brows deepened.
Didn’t surrender mean giving up? What was left to give up?
As if life hadn’t asked her to give up too much already. The glowing words dissipated into the
darkness of the basement.
There would always be another journal to fill. Because there would never be enough paper, enough space, to release all the words clawing, springing, secreting their way out of her. There would never be an end to smears of ink
on her fingers or the phrases that trailed up the walls. She would forever see words slinking across floors and slipping into
her room at night like best friends intent on keeping her company.
For as long as she could remember, Stella had seen words the same way someone might spot a bird or watch a dragonfly zipping
through cattails. She saw words everywhere. Ever since she’d received her first pack of crayons, she’d been crowding white
spaces with all the words pressing in on her heart. Stella captured words and poems and cataloged them in journals. She drew
word maps in colored ink in her diaries and added special captions to photographs when words floated over images in a family
album. She jotted down people’s names and the words that followed them like beloved pets. She made notes about places around
town and all the words living there, even the haunted ones she sometimes saw ghosting around. Words like eerie, bewitched, and phantasmic.
When Stella was a child, her mother had encouraged her to share the words, insisting her talent was a fantastical gift that would guide Stella toward her dreams. Desiring the special attention and wanting to please her mother, Stella kept, wrote, and cherished the words.
But after her mother was gone, the idea that the words could lead Stella to her dreams seemed like a terrible joke.
In what dreams did mothers leave? She tried to ignore the words.
She wanted to refuse their neediness to be caught and loved.
But Stella quickly realized she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t neglect the words. She couldn’t stop their appearance or
keep them housed inside her. Some days the words felt like a swarm of agitated bees living in her body, and to release their
fury, she had to write. She worried she might implode if she didn’t free them, if she didn’t give them new life on the page.
What if she kept them trapped inside and then suffocated beneath their creative weight?
Some days the words were delicate and soft like goose feathers floating through her. On those days she felt light and joyful,
and her pen flowed across the pages like water easing down a river. She learned to pay just enough attention to the words
to catalog them with the hope that they would eventually stop showing up when she grew up.
That had yet to happen, and today irritation stung her. Why hadn’t setting fire to her past—literally—soothed her? Why couldn’t
she burn the words, the emotions, as easily as the flames destroyed the paper?
Maybe she was being dramatic. That was what her older brother, Percy, would say in his easy teasing way, but there was probably
a whole lot of truth laced through his jokes. Where Stella was emotional, Percy was even-keeled. Where she was paralyzed some
days by the frantic beating of her own heart, Percy appeared perpetually calm and peaceful.
The fire crackled, and Wade Haynes’s smiling face lurked in her mind. Her jaw clenched. The last time she’d seen him was when
he walked out of her apartment six months ago, leaving behind a stifling feeling of failure, a fast-food receipt stained with
the greasy fingerprints of his children, and two simple, charred-black words: passing time.
She’d been all-in with that relationship, believing they were both in love.
But his walking away and never contacting her again proved she couldn’t have been more wrong.
The truth that he’d simply been passing time with her filled her with shame and fury.
The rejection still pricked like she’d eaten stinging nettles. Stella had filled a journal full of letters and poems she would
never send, couldn’t send to Wade. Now, months later, on the anniversary of their first date, two cups of overly sweet coffee churned in her belly.
She knelt in front of the wood-burning furnace in the library’s basement and tested Ray Bradbury’s temperature hypothesis.
Did paper catch fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit? How could she even prove the author’s statement? The antique thermometer gauge
didn’t register above 250 degrees. The more important hypothesis was: Would setting fire to words inspired by Wade set her
free?
The answer was no.
She wanted to burn Wade’s memory from her heart, turn it all to ashes she could sweep up and dump into the garbage. But instead,
a memory of Wade and her laughing surfaced. Followed by the memory of the afternoon she met him at the state park and he’d
taken her in his arms and spun her around. Then the day he’d tried to waltz with her in the art gallery and they’d almost
knocked over a porcelain vase. Next, the time they went to the movies, sat in the back row like teenagers, and he couldn’t
stop kissing her. Then the day he’d texted her ten different haikus about his love for her and how they’d be connected forever.
“Enough!” she spat and squeezed her eyes closed as if that would stop the barrage. Her shoulders slumped. She and Wade had
been happy. Really happy—until they weren’t.
Stella glanced at the furnace. Words and books were some of the few things that understood her. How many times had she wished
to disappear into a novel? Would the thousands of books in the library above her now chant murderer?
Would she walk the gauntlet of their disapproval, their condemnation?
Warm tears of frustration left wet tracks on her cheeks.
Tears heavy with sorrow splattered on the floor, and the ground trembled beneath her feet, sending out waves of disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as the thin journal cover shriveled in the furnace.
A sheet of paper, charred and brittle around the edges, lifted on a wave of heat and floated out of the furnace opening. Stella
pinched it between two fingers. Burns like bullet holes marred some of the words, but she had memorized the poem.
The sky was endless,
the silence deep.
The sun dropped into the trees
and I never once tried to stop it,
only watched and shivered
in the wind,
in the absence of you.
I love you with a love
that wounds.
Reckless, stubborn, willful.
I hug my ribs,
thank them for caging my heart
or else I’d never have control of it,
if I ever do.
I love you with a love
that overcomes me
like the tide,
rushing away,
stealing everything from my grasp,
even you.
Stella sighed. Blackened paper crumbled around the edges and fell toward the floor like dying butterflies. She knelt in front of the furnace, sailed the poem back into the flames, and watched it burn to ash.
The basement door at the top of the stairs opened, sending golden light down the steps, highlighting the worn treads. “Stella?”
She jumped to her feet, swiped at her wet cheeks, and slammed the furnace door shut, singeing the skin on her fingertips.
The fire hissed and swelled inside its metal cage. She shook out her hand, trying to cool her fingers, and winced. “Be right
up,” she called.
The first few steps creaked as Arnold Cohen, the head librarian, descended halfway. “Should I ask why you’re using the furnace?
Don’t look so shocked. A few of the windows are open, and it looks like I have a fog machine going upstairs in the historical
stacks.”
Stella glanced over her shoulder at the furnace before meeting Arnie at the staircase. She cleared her throat. “I was testing
hypotheses.”
His thick, graying eyebrows lifted. “And?”
Stella gripped the handrail and tugged herself up the first few steps. The old wood groaned in resonance with her heart. “The
results are disappointing.”
Behind his glasses, Arnie’s dark, deep-set eyes watched her, studied her. “You can’t burn away the past.”
She squeezed the railing harder. The nape of her neck tingled as though embers clung to her skin. Her exhalation shuddered
in the space between them, rippling through the air. “I wish I had a shovel to dig it out then.”
“If you could have taken the easy way, what would you have learned? Nothing.”
Stella scowled. “And what have I learned, Arnie?”