Chapter Two
Now
THE SOUND OF THE TYPEWRITER ECHOES OFF the walls.
She’s finally getting the hang of the keys, with their deep indents.
She still can’t go as fast as she would like, but it’s miles better than when she started, and there’s something deeply satisfying about the volume of the clack-clack-clack.
Her own keyboard is nearly silent, but with this one, you really feel the story being brought into the world.
She slows to a stop, rereading the last few paragraphs.
In some ways, it feels like the first time.
The words pour out of her so fast, she hardly knows what she’s written until she goes back and reads.
She knows some people like to plan ahead, but she’s always believed in letting the story surprise her, getting to know the characters as they come into the world, discovering the plot twists as they do—more than once she’s gasped in shock, or been genuinely mad at the characters for misbehaving.
She goes back over it, of course, finds and cinches all the threads, but the first draft is for dreaming.
And, apparently, for processing trauma.
She’s written the love interest, Harlow, at the edge of the cliff, a bloody dagger hanging at his side. He looks into the heroine’s eyes and says, “Cassia, I didn’t do it.” He comes toward her, knife in hand. “I didn’t do it.” The tip angled toward her heart as he steps closer still, and—
Yeah. There are definitely parallels.
Millie rubs her eyes and lets herself look at the window.
The weather has gone from bad to worse, the wind up and the rain coming in jagged bursts, but even through the storm, she can see the stone bench at the end of the drive, and the jagged line of cliff beyond.
She knows what she saw. Jaxon, rushing up toward Malcolm.
Malcolm, going back over the edge, arms flailing in surprise as Jaxon pushed him over.
Are you sure? Priscilla’s voice echoes through her head, paired with that look, the one that says I don’t believe you.
Millie slams her hands down on the desk. Fine, okay, so she didn’t technically see Jaxon’s hands on Malcolm’s body, didn’t see him physically force the man over the edge, but you don’t need to see every moment in a scene to piece the story together.
And if she’s not entirely sure that that is how it happened, she’s not not sure either. Experience is subjective, after all. She can only tell her own version of the truth.
Which, as far as anyone is concerned, is now the truth, since whoever was up there in that room clearly isn’t coming forward to say otherwise. Which is as good as confirmation. And Millie has no reason to feel guilty for doing the right—or at least, the responsible—thing and warning the group.
Unless you remembered wrong.
This time the voice is Freya’s, the words said during one of their first fights, when Millie explained why she couldn’t—wouldn’t—come home, when she tried to make her sister understand what her parents had been like. And instead of believing her, Freya had said those words.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad.
Maybe you just remembered wrong.
At the time, Mille had hung up in frustration. Now she shakes her head, imagines hitting END on the call in her head.
“I know what I saw,” she says aloud, and the voice—her voice—is enough to make her feel steady, feel sane, feel heard.
She drags her gaze from the window to the words on the page, to the world that she’s made.
Her fingers fly as fast as they can across the heavy keys as she pounds out the remainder of the scene, has Cassia draw her own blade at the last moment, parry Harlow’s murderous thrust. As it’s revealed that he wasn’t her love interest, after all, but the villain enchanted to deceive her.
She slides the paper out, adds it to the stack of pages already on the desk. There are actually two stacks, her own work on the right, and the ending for Fletch’s novel on the left.
She gathers the pages she’s just written and starts to count the words.
This is the downside of working on a typewriter instead of a computer.
No shortcut for tallying the work. She knows there’s a way to calculate a ballpark, but a rough estimate won’t do.
She needs to know exactly how many words she’s written.
Three thousand—that’s the magic number.
She tallies softly as her finger slides along the words.
And yes, okay, maybe it’s weird to work so hard, given all that’s happening, but rain or shine means rain or shine, and besides, she’s on deadline.
A book a year, that’s what it takes, just to stay afloat, to keep her readers satisfied.
She was hoping this new trilogy would be the one that helped her break out of the midlist, but so far—not really.
Which sucks, because it’s the best thing she’s written, not that that seems to matter as much as whether it’s on trend.
Which it was, back when she sold it, but the publisher’s excitement has dwindled in the time it’s taken her to write the second book, and the headline on the latest marketing plan they sent her started and ended with “Millie’s social media?
”—they had the nerve to write it just like that, down to the goddamn question mark—and the industry is so saturated with Courts of Blood and Blades of Stone and Crowns of blah blah blah that it seems like the only way to stand out is to have a promo post go viral, and even then, the comments instantly fill up with trolls, and who knows if any of it even leads to sales, or if they’re all just performing for each other while some random book by a lady in Iowa about selkies is somehow taking the YA world by storm, even though there’s nothing sexy about seals.
Aaannnd she’s lost count of the number.
Millie groans, and starts again.
The counted pages gather on the desk, but she’s careful not to let them mingle with the other stack.
She’s not sure what to do with the new pages, since the editor took off.
But Rufus Beaumont will come back—he has to—and when he does, she’ll just explain the situation.
And if he hasn’t read her ending yet, even better; she can just tell him to swap the pages out, say she wanted to deliver a more polished draft.
Maybe he’ll even appreciate that she went the extra mile, see it as proof that she’s willing to do the work.
It was actually pretty fun, getting to climb into Julia Petrarch’s head, figure a way out of the corner Fletch had forced her into, find out what—or really, who—was waiting behind that tunnel door.
It was the kind of high-stakes, held-breath drama that Millie Mitchell understood, the kind of place she thrived, and before she knew it, she’d crashed into the finish line, those two glorious words printed on the pale-blue paper:
The End.
She couldn’t wait to turn it in, and when Rufus showed up last night, it took all her strength not to ask if he’d gotten any entries yet, even before Sienna went and spoiled the mystery. Millie was mad about that, but also a tiny bit relieved.
It wasn’t until later, when she was pleasantly buzzed and drifting off to sleep, that it hit her with a sudden, sinking horror: She’d written the ending in first person.
It was just habit, really, muscle memory, and it hadn’t helped that the last line Fletch had written was I should have known—I, not she, thanks to the fact it was an internal thought—but oh god, Rufus was going to think she was a fucking idiot, and she’s not.
There was nothing to do but start over, rewrite it all in the third person POV.
Luckily, her memory has always been good, and even if she couldn’t re-create what she’d written word for word, that was fine, it came out even better the second time around. She pulled the last page from the typewriter and stood, buzzing with excitement.
From the window, she could see that the lights were on down in the editor’s cottage, which meant he was still up, even though it was late. If she wanted to, she could knock, explain the whole situation, and hand him her new ending.
Of course that would be breaking the rules.
But maybe, if she made enough noise putting the pages through the door, he’d hear and come out, and then it wouldn’t be her fault.
Millie was still weighing this option when the cottage door opened, and who should come swanning out in pink pajamas? Priscilla.
Confession: When it came to Priscilla, Millie was not a fan.
It had nothing to do with the fact she wrote romance, and obviously nothing to do with the fact she was Black (Millie had literally donated to two separate fundraisers for diverse books and called out a panel one time for having no writers of color).
However, it did have everything to do with Priscilla’s unshakable holier-than-thou attitude.
The way she radiated disapproval, eyeing Millie with a kind of teacher’s scorn.
The way she jumped at the chance to take control of every single situation, like she was the only designated adult in the room, and went out of her way to always remind everyone about the rules.
(Millie’s therapist has told her that she has a problem with “parental figures,” that people with complex childhood trauma either go around looking for replacements or distrust them, and Millie admittedly falls squarely into the I-don’t-need-your-mothering camp.)
(But also, what kind of psychopath uses a red pen???)
So she experienced a private spike of outrage at seeing Priscilla herself breaking the cardinal rule, striding right out of the editor’s cottage in the middle of the night, bold as you like, as if the rules she cared so much about didn’t apply to her.
And Millie was not about to let her get away with it.
She didn’t bother with a jacket or shoes, bolted out of her room and down the stairs, making it to the front door just in time for Priscilla to walk through it.
“Well!”