Chapter 5
Noah
Ninth day.
I knew that because I had counted—not obsessively, just the way you count things when you've spent fourteen months not counting anything because counting requires believing that days are different from each other, and for a long time they weren't.
Ninth day in Wren Falls.
Eleven thousand, two hundred and forty words.
Eleven thousand.
I needed to call Dana. I knew that. She had probably already left three voicemails I hadn't checked because checking would require acknowledging that the outside world existed, and I wasn't ready to do that yet in any sustained way.
In Wren Falls, the concept of the outside world applied loosely.
This was a place where people knew each other by name.
Where the woman at the diner—Carol, I had learned, because everyone called her Carol and she remembered everyone's order without writing it down—had called me hon on my first day and continued to do so, and I had decided that I liked it.
I had rarely been addressed as hon in my life.
Downstairs, the bookshop opened every morning with a certain rhythm—lights section by section, Jo's voice greeting people, Ellie's quieter efficiency that became faster when she was busy.
I had identified the pattern clearly enough that I could tell, without looking, who was downstairs and approximately what they were doing just by listening.
That was slightly concerning.
I had thought about it and decided it was simply writer's observation.
Pattern recognition.
Occupational habit.
Then I had considered the fact that I wasn't particularly convincing, even to myself.
This morning, after three hours of work—good work, real work, the kind that surprised me by existing—I stood up from my laptop, stretched, and realized two things simultaneously:
My coffee mug had been empty since breakfast.
And something different was happening downstairs.
Different meaning: quiet.
Not Jo quiet, the kind that happened when there were no customers.
A different kind.
The kind that happened when someone was there but not moving.
I tried to ignore it for three minutes.
Then I went downstairs.
She was behind the counter.
That alone wasn't unusual—she was always behind the counter, or shelving books, or discussing some display Jo wanted to rearrange.
But Jo wasn't there this morning. I had noticed that earlier. Her car wasn't in the parking lot.
And Ellie wasn't doing any of those things.
She was writing.
A spiral notebook. Blue pen.
Her hand moved so quickly that I had previously only seen it in one thing: real writing.
The kind that happens when the thing you're trying to say is moving faster than your ability to say it and you're simply trying to keep up.
She wasn't looking at me.
She wasn't looking at anything.
It was specifically that expression—I had once tried to describe it for a character years ago and failed.
Absence.
When the body is in one place and everything else is somewhere else, where the actual work is happening.
I stopped in the doorway.
Direct opinion:
I shouldn't have walked in.
This was a moment that shouldn't be interrupted.
I knew that because I was a writer, and I had experienced those moments being stolen by a ringing phone or a knock at the door and the specific devastation of feeling the thread go slack in your hands—
My phone buzzed.
Ellie looked up.
We both froze for a second.
Then she closed the notebook—quickly, automatically, the way you close something you weren't expecting anyone to see—and set the pen on the counter and straightened as though nothing had happened.
"The coffee maker's free," she said.
I looked at my phone.
Dana.
I declined the call.
"Sorry," I said. "I wasn't trying to sneak up on you."
"If you're coming downstairs, you should make noise," she said pleasantly. "It's a basic concept of personal space."
"You're in a bookshop."
"Which technically isn't open for another three minutes."
She opened a drawer and slipped the notebook inside—a shallow drawer beneath the counter, the one I had assumed was for pens and rubber bands.
"But yes. Coffee."
I walked inside.
Grabbed a mug—second shelf, which was now established territory.
Made coffee.
Stayed in the doorway because there was no reason to sit in the kitchen, and walking into the shop would mean passing her, which required a particular kind of casualness I hadn't decided on yet.
"You were writing," I said.
"I was taking notes."
"Notes."
"For inventory. Jo wants some display changes."
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
We both knew she was lying.
We both knew that we both knew.
It was that kind of situation.
"Okay," I said.
A flicker of relief.
Quick. Almost invisible.
Then her usual expression returned—composed, slightly guarded, the look of someone who had decided exactly how much of themselves was available for inspection and arranged everything accordingly.
"Jo will be here in an hour," she said. "To take actual notes about displays, which is my actual job."
"I'll be upstairs."
"Appreciated."
I was about to turn away when she spoke.
Quietly.
Almost to herself.
But the room was small enough that I heard it.
"Nine years."
I stopped.
"What?"
She was looking at the counter.
At the pen.
Considering something.
I could see it—the moment when someone decides whether speaking is actually the right choice.
"You asked," she said. "How long. The manuscript. I said three years."
Pause.
"I wrote it in three years. But I started it nine years ago. Technically."
I didn't say anything.
"The first draft was three pages."
A short sound.
Almost a laugh.
Not exactly.
"I was seventeen. I thought I would write a novel because everything I felt didn't fit anywhere else and I needed somewhere to put it.
So I wrote. Then I stopped because there was school and work and Jo's bookshop.
Then I started again and stopped and started again.
And eventually there came a point when it actually... "
She stopped.
"It actually became something. At least it felt like it. So I finished it and submitted it."
I waited.
"And then the form letter came," she said. "And I decided I had been right about myself. That this wasn't for me. That I was better with other people's books than trying to write my own."
She was looking at the notebook drawer.
"And that's true. I actually am better at that. I know books. I know what works. I—"
"Ellie."
She looked up.
"You were writing just now," I said. "I saw you."
Something shifted across her face.
"I was taking notes," she said.
Softer this time.
Not convincing anyone else.
Not convincing herself.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
A long silence.
Outside, a truck passed by—heavy, rumbling, the kind of vibration old buildings feel through the floor.
A book shifted slightly on a shelf.
Then settled again.
"What was in the notebook?" I asked.
"Nothing worth reading."
"In your opinion."
"In anyone's opinion."
"Have you ever shown it to anyone?"
Pause.
Long enough to mean something.
"No," she said.
"Then you don't actually know."
She gave me a look that communicated very clearly that she did not appreciate this line of reasoning.
Which, honestly, was expected.
"I know," she said firmly.
"Okay."
"You're agreeing with me?"
"I'm saying okay."
"That's not the same thing."
"I know."
She continued staring at me.
I drank my coffee.
It was good coffee—she somehow always made it slightly better with this coffee maker for reasons I couldn't identify.
Maybe timing.
Maybe ratio.
Maybe whatever exact method she used that I had observed but failed to replicate.
"You're annoying," she said without much heat.
"I've been told."
"I can believe that."
I set my mug in the sink.
Rinsed it.
A detail I had maintained since the first day because some things matter, and this was one of them.
"Nine years is a long commitment," I said, "for something that was only notes."
Then I went back upstairs before she could respond.
Third step.
Creak.
Upstairs, I sat at my desk.
Opened the laptop.
The cursor was exactly where I had left it.
I didn't think about her.
I started a new scene.
A character.
A woman.
Standing behind a counter.
Closing a notebook as though she had been caught protecting something worth protecting.
I wrote.
Wrote for hours.
When I finally stopped and checked the word count, it was three thousand, two hundred and twenty-two, and outside it had gone dark.
I looked down through the window.
The bookshop was closed.
Lights off.
She was gone.
But the drawer—beneath the counter, the shallow drawer I had assumed was for pens—was closed.
The notebook was inside it.
Tomorrow she would come back.
I wondered whether she would open it again.
I hoped she would.