Page 60 of Not a Strong Enough Word

At least, it was the best week of my life until this disaster landed in my inbox.

“Hello? Earth to Scarlett?” Trina’s tinny voice cuts through my thoughts.

“What? Sorry. I was distracted.”

“You don’t say,” she deadpans. “I was just saying I’ll call who I can, but you might have better luck going straight to Ryan. Unless you want me to contact him for you?”

I can tell from her tone that she’s fishing for information. I haven’t told her we’ve been spending time together again, but she knew he brought me food, so she probably has an idea.

Groaning, I rest my forehead on my palm. I do not need an existential crisis on top of a design one today.

“I’ll call him,” I say simply.

“Uh-huh,” Trina intones.

“I don’t know what that means, but I’m hanging up now.” Even though I can hear her spewing off a string of words, I end the call. I’ll deal with that later.

There’s still a giddy feeling about seeing Ryan’s name in my phone. I never deleted his contact information even though I blocked him, but I didn’t go looking for it, either. Honestly, I hardly even touched my phone after everything happened. There was no one calling me anyway, and every time I logged into my social media accounts, there were more and more angry messages from fans who had tickets to meet me and wanted their money back, as if I had anything to do with their ticket purchase. Once I deleted those accounts, blocked Ryan, and lost most of my friends, there wasn’t much for me to look at on there, so I just…didn’t. After a year or so, I noticed messages disappearing. One by one, they all vanished into technological oblivion. Not that I had been pining over old messages or anything.

Sighing, I push Ryan’s name and put him on speaker so I can wring my hands as I stare at the blue bicycle on my computer screen. He answers on the third ring.

“Hey, beautiful.” There is such tenderness in those two words that I almost do an about-face on the spot. They can have whatever cover they want if it means I get to be greeted like that when I call my editor.

No. Nope. This cover is bad, and I have to deal with it. “Did you see it?”

“See what? I’ve been knee-deep in your gorgeous book all morning. I should be sending it back to you tomorrow at the latest.”

“Well, this gorgeous book has a cover…” I trail off, hoping he can put two and two together.

“Oh no,” he groans. “Hang on.”

There’s some clicking and then silence.

Out of nowhere, he practically growls. “I will fix this.”

The sound is so out of character for him that I devolve into a fit of giggles. I’m laughing so hard that I fold in half at the waist, and my head hits the table.

“This isn’t funny, Scarlett. This is awful,” he says, but I can hear the edge of laughter in his voice. It’s so easy, the way we fall in sync. The way he knows exactly why I’m calling without me having to say it. The way we make each other laugh.

He always could make even the most serious problems seem lighter. It occurs to me that he could maybe make sense of everything that has been circling in my head since my last therapy session. I want him to.

But…one disaster at a time.

“It’s pretty bad.” I wipe at the corners of my eyes where tears have started to leak out.

“Pretty bad? The bike in the story isn’t even blue!”

I take a few calming breaths to stop myself from cracking up again. “I guess I should feel vindicated about fighting for the bike to stay in if they thought it important enough to put on the cover.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the only thing they thought to put on the cover,” Ryan grumbles, which draws a snort out of me. My shoulders shake with restrained humor.

“Okay. I’ll leave you to take care of it.” I close out of the image on my computer so I don’t have to look at it anymore as I try to get ahold of myself again. “You said you’re almost done with edits?”

“Yes.” His voice softens. “Scarlett, I don’t have words for how wonderful this book is. You have captured something so important—so universal. I know Meri’s publicity is targeted to a mostly female demographic because of the subject matter, but…damn.” He sounds almost reverent.

“So I won’t have much to do?” I tease.

He chuckles. “I didn’t say that. There are definitely a few passages that could use some work. A few things I’d like to see added, too, just to flesh out some of your themes a bit. Now that we’ve kept that godforsaken bicycle, we should do even more with it.”