Page 25 of Not a Strong Enough Word

“He’s worried about you,” she says as if telling me is against her better judgment. “In his defense, you should not have emailed him your second draft at two in the morning.”

“But that’s when I finished it.”

The silence on her end of the line stretches for so long that I think she might have actually hung up on me. “Trina?”

“Dumb, I tell you. Like…you can’t even see it?”

“See what?”

“That you should not be up working at two in the morning. It is not good for you to pull those late nights, Scarlett. Not sleeping is part of what got you into this mess in the first place. What would Dianne say?”

She must be serious if she’s referencing my therapist by her first name.

“She’d probably tell me to set better work-life boundaries,” I begrudgingly admit. “But I don’t have a life anymore, so I don’t think those boundaries apply.”

I mean that to be cute and self-deprecating and not as sad and lonely as I fear it came across. Luckily, Trina laughs. “They do if it means the difference between you being able to continue this work sustainably or having another breakdown.” Leave it to her not to mince words. But it’s good. I need to hear this.

“I’m not going to have another breakdown.”

“Oh yeah?” She clearly doesn’t believe me. “Then why did you call me and ask me to tell you not to delete everything you wrote today?”

Touché.

“It was a moment of weakness.”

“And how many moments of weakness have you had since you started writing this one?” she asks pointedly, but she doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Listen, we negotiated better deadlines for you this time around. There is no reason why you need to be doing edits and drafting simultaneously anymore.”

“I’m not. My edits still haven’t come back.”

“They will,” she presses. “Take a break, Scarlett. Your problem right now is that you’re not thinking past this next book. You’re thirty-two years old, for fuck’s sake. You need to figure out how you’re going to do this for thirty-some more years until you can retire, because whatever is happening over there is not it.”

“Boundaries,” I mumble.

“Boundaries,” she repeats triumphantly, as if she’s so excited I’m finally catching on.

Maybe I do need to sleep more. I’m not really going to argue that, even with myself. Better sleep leads to better mental health. I found that out the hard way. But there are other boundaries that could protect me, too. Here I am, thinking I need to do everything all the time. Thinking I need to work with Ryan again just because he said a few nice things. As if five years apart was long enough to forget enough of what we had together to make a work relationship plausible. As if the memory of his touch, his smile, his words didn’t come crashing right back into me the moment I laid eyes on him in that conference room.

As if I haven’t been burying myself in a new manuscript at least partially to avoid thinking about him. When he’ll send edits back, what he thinks of my revisions, whether or not he’ll stop by again. Why he hasn’t stopped by again.

Why hasn’t he stopped by again?

No. I’m not going there. And honestly, I need to eliminate all the reasons I’ve found for my mind to keep coming back to him.

I swallow hard. The last of the dry cereal scrapes against my throat. “Can you see if there’s maybe someone else who could take over edits?”

Trina pauses for a moment. “Is that really what you want?”

“It’s what I need.”

“Those are not the same thing, I take it.”

No, they are not the same at all. But boundaries are about what you need, right? And I need to separate myself from Ryan, no matter how hard it’s going to be now that I’ve seen him again.

I drag my hand through my hair. My fingers get stuck on a knot. “Everything is starting to feel really fucked up again,” I say honestly. “I’m not sure how much his involvement is tangled up in my mind, but I think removing him from the equation might be the best way to find out.”

She pauses again, then sighs. “I’ll see what I can do. But…take a break, too, okay? If he’s not working with you, I can’t guarantee the next editor will care as much about your well-being.”

When we hang up, I expect a load to be lifted off my shoulders. At the very least, I expect to feel moderately better. I’ve eaten something, resolved to step away without deleting thousands of words, and made a decision about my editorial team that I know is in my best interests.