22. Cat
— ? —
Cat
The words are finally flowing.
Three days of false starts and deleted paragraphs, and now, finally, the scene is working. My heroine has cornered her brooding crime lord in the study, demanded answers, and he’s just said the thing that’s going to break the whole story open.
I type faster, chasing the momentum.
His hand found her jaw, tilting her face up to meet his gaze. “I spent every night of those six months dreaming of you,” he said, his voice rough with something she was afraid to name. “Dreaming of this. Of you looking at me like you’re looking at me now.”
I read the line back under my breath, testing the rhythm the way I always do. “Dreaming of this. Of you looking at me like you’re looking at me now.”
“Better than the version you were muttering ten minutes ago,” a voice says from the doorway. “That one had ‘gaze’ in it twice.”
I do not scream. I learned my lesson the last time he crept up on me. I throw the apple.
It’s sitting right there beside my laptop, left over from breakfast, and it leaves my hand before I’ve finished turning.
He ducks, laughing, and the dodge costs him his footing on the rag rug, and the don of the Moretti family goes down on his ass on my grandmother’s kitchen floor with a tray of food sliding off his forearm like a bad magic trick.
“Your aim,” he manages between gasps. “Your aim has improved since the lamp.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to bring you lunch. Long enough to hear three drafts of the same sentence.”
“You listened to me talk to myself!”
“You talk to yourself at a volume, Cat. The goats know your subplot.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Obviously not.” He’s still laughing, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “For the record, I stood in the doorway like a civilized person this time. I didn’t put my mouth anywhere near your ear.”
“I hate you.”
“You threw produce at a man with a bandaged shoulder.”
“It’s a scrape, and you were eavesdropping! You can’t just-” I gesture wildly at my laptop, at the sentence still glowing on the screen. “You can’t just listen to people’s drafts without permission!”
“You’re right.” He holds up his hands. “I should have asked. I’m sorry.”
The apology takes the wind out of my sails. “Well. Good. Just, don’t do it again.”
“It is a very romantic sentence, though.”
“Shut up.”
“‘Dreaming of this.’ Very evocative.”
“I will end you.”
He finally gets himself under control, sitting up and surveying the damage to his lunch delivery. The sandwich is mostly intact, though the chips have scattered across the floor. The apple rolled under the table.
“I’m going to need you to help me up,” he says. “My dignity has been fatally wounded.”
“Your dignity deserved it.”
“Probably true.” He extends a hand anyway, and I take it, hauling him to his feet. He’s still grinning, that infuriating grin that makes me want to kiss him and kill him in equal measure. “For the record, I really was trying to bring you food. You’ve been in here for four hours.”
“I was working.”
“I noticed. Very intensely.” He starts picking up scattered chips. “Is the book going well?”
“It was going well. Before you turned it into a live reading.”
“I’m sure the humiliation will add emotional depth to your writing.”
“I’m sure your funeral will add emotional depth to my writing.”
He laughs again, softer this time, and sets the reassembled lunch tray on the table beside my laptop. “Eat something. Your baby needs nutrients.”
“My baby needs a father who doesn’t lurk in doorways like a professionally trained assassin.”
“I’m not professionally trained. I’m just quiet.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Also probably true.” He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down, watching as I reluctantly pick up half the sandwich. “So. ‘Dreaming of this.’ Tell me about this scene.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s private. Because it’s work in progress. Because you already violated my creative boundaries by listening at doorways like some kind of literary stalker.”
“Literary stalker. That’s a new one.”
“I’m a writer. I have a lot of words at my disposal.”
“I’ve noticed.” He’s still watching me with that amused expression, like he knows something I don’t. “You know, I’ve read your other books. All of them.”
I freeze mid-bite.
“What?”
“Your books. The Lena Amara ones.” He says it casually, like he’s commenting on the weather. “I’ve read every single one.”
The sandwich suddenly feels like cardboard in my mouth. I set it down carefully, trying to process what he’s telling me.
“How did you-” I stop, start again. “How do you even know about Lena Amara?”
“I figured it out during the marriage. Second book. The don in the story drinks his coffee black with two sugars out of a cup his grandfather left him. Mine’s been on my desk since the day you moved in.
He buries his father with the Sicilian prayers I was raised on.
” Max shrugs. “You must have overheard me mention those things during our first months together. Seen the cup on my desk. But you wove them into the story so naturally I didn’t notice at first.”
“You never said anything.”
“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”
“I was never going to be ready. I was never going to tell anyone.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t push.” He picks up a chip from the tray and eats it, completely relaxed while my entire worldview rearranges itself.
“For what it’s worth, you’re incredibly talented.
The way you write relationships, the tension, the wanting, the way two people can hurt each other and still find their way back, it’s extraordinary. ”
“You’re just saying that.”
“I’m not. You don’t have to take a compliment on faith. Ask me about any scene.”
He has given me reason to question his words before. But this is something I can ask him to show me, and for once he looks eager to be questioned.
“Which one’s your favorite?” I hear myself ask.
“The third one. Dark Inheritance.”
“That’s the one everyone hates.”
“I loved the way you wrote what came after the reveal. She understands what he meant to do and still makes him face what he actually did-” He shakes his head. “I’ve never read anything like it.”
“That was the hardest book to write.”
“I can tell. It shows on every page.” He’s quiet for a moment. “After you left, I reread all of them. Looking for clues about where you might go, at first. But then I started seeing other things.”
“What things?”
“Parallels. The hero in Dark Inheritance, the way he shuts his wife out, convinces himself distance is protection.” He shakes his head. “Reading it after everything happened, I finally understood what you’d written about. What that kind of silence does to someone.”
“You didn’t see it before?”
“I wasn’t paying attention the right way before. I was just reading a good story.” He holds my gaze. “After you were gone, I read it like a warning I’d ignored.”
“You really read them all?” I ask.
“Every one. Multiple times, for some of them.”
“Which scenes interested you most?”
“That’s a loaded question.”
“Answer it anyway.”
He smiles, slow and knowing. “The quiet ones. The moments after the drama, when your characters are just… together. Talking. Being real with each other.”
“That’s not what most readers say.”
“I’m not most readers.” He leans forward slightly.
“There’s this scene in your fourth book.
After the library confrontation, when they’re sitting on the floor surrounded by all those knocked-over books, and she’s laughing even though she was crying two pages earlier.
That felt true. Like you’d lived something close to it. ”
My face is burning. I can actually feel the heat spreading across my cheeks.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to embarrass me.”
“I’m trying to tell you how much your writing affected me. If that happens to embarrass you, that’s not my fault.”
“It’s absolutely your fault.”
“Fine. It’s my fault.” He doesn’t look remotely sorry. “But I’m not going to apologize for being moved by your work. Or for wanting you to know that someone who cares about you has read every word you’ve published and thinks you’re brilliant.”
“That’s… a lot.”
“It’s true.” He reaches across the table and takes my hand briefly, then lets go. “You should know where I stand. I want to support this. Whatever you need to keep writing, space, time, someone to bring you lunch and get screamed at, I’m here.”
I pick up my sandwich again because I need something to do with my hands. He watches me eat, that soft expression still on his face.
“Ask me something,” I say.
“About what?”
“About my books. Since you’ve apparently read them all, you must have questions.”
“I do, actually.” He settles back in his chair, thinking. “The endings. They’re always hopeful. The couples always work things out, no matter how badly they’ve hurt each other. Do you actually believe that? That forgiveness is always possible?”
“I believe it’s possible. I don’t know if it’s always earned.”
“What makes it earned?”
“Time. Honesty. Change that’s real, not just performed.” I shrug. “And probably some amount of luck. Being in the right place at the right time, saying the right thing when it matters.”
“And if someone doesn’t earn it? If they try and try and it’s still not enough?”
“Then it’s not enough. Forgiveness can’t be forced. The other person has to get there on their own.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Yes. It is.”
We sit in silence for a moment, and I can see him processing, thinking about us, about his mistakes, about whether he’s done enough or could ever do enough.
“I have another question,” he says eventually.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you base your characters on real people?”
“Sometimes. Not always intentionally. Things seep in.”
“Is the hero in your current book based on me?”
I don’t answer, which is answer enough.
“That’s interesting,” he says. “Does he make a lot of mistakes?”
“He makes catastrophic mistakes. He nearly loses everything.”
“Does he get her back?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“But not impossible?”