Page 53 of Based on You

"It wasn't hopeful, it was lazy," she told me. "The whole book she's going, the world's broken, nobody gets saved, that's just how it is. And then she gets to the end and saves everybody anyway. You can't do that. You can't promise me one thing for four hundred pages and then chicken out."

I should have agreed and left it alone. Instead I heard myself say, "An ending has to cost something. If she'd made the hope expensive, you'd have let her have it. She just didn't want to pay for it."

Olivia stopped walking. "Yes," she said. "That. That's exactly it."

We kept on. She told me about the books she loved and the ones she only said she loved, and then, because she was always going to get there, she got to V.M. Ashby.

My stomach turned over at the name, and I showed her none of it.

"She's my favorite," Olivia said. "Which sounds so basic, everyone says that. But she posted this thing once, it wasn't even part of a book, it was just something she wrote one night about losing somebody. And I swear it was like she'd been inside my actual head. Like she went into the worst night I ever had and wrote it down so I'd know it wasn't only me in there." She tugged the towel up around her neck. "I read it so many times I knew parts of it by heart. That was right after my mom."

I kept my eyes on the path and kept my breathing even.

I knew the post. I remembered writing it. The green chair, the kettle gone cold at my elbow, the two in the morning when I gave up trying to make it a chapter and just told the truth into the dark and put it up before I could lose my nerve.

There was a view count under it, like under everything I posted. I'd never once turned that figure into faces. Into a fourteen-year-old down the hall from an uncle who loved her and couldn't find the door, holding onto the only person who'd ever said the thing out loud.

I'd been with her on the worst night of her life. She just didn't know it was me.

"The grief one," I said, before I could stop myself. "She didn't write that to make anyone feel better. That's why it works. She wrote it like she'd stopped expecting to feel better herself and only wanted some company in it. You can feel the difference. A writer leaning over to pat your hand reads nothing like one who's just sitting in the dark beside you."

Olivia turned her head and looked at me.

"You talk about her like you know her," she said.

My pulse tripped, once, hard.

"I've read a lot of her," I said. "And she answers her readers sometimes, so you start to feel like you do." I made myself shrug. "Read enough of anybody and you think you've met them."

She held my eyes a second longer than I was comfortable with, then let it go and moved on, off into a theory that nobody could write a certain character that well without having lived some piece of it themselves. I told her it was a good theory and left it there.

By the time the porch came into view she was still going, bright and shivering and happy, and my hands had gone from cold into something numb and far off. I was grateful for it. It was the only part of me that matched.

I spent the rest of the day hiding in the guest room.

Not because anything was wrong, at least not on the surface. Simon and Olivia were downstairs, the house was warm, and I could hear them moving through it. But Olivia had spent the walk up telling me what those books had done for her, and I'd had to take every word of it like a stranger.

I couldn't be near her or Simon for a while after that without something showing on my face. So I did the only thing I'd ever known to do with a truth I couldn't say out loud: I carried my laptop to the small desk by the window and made myself write.

I wrote the chapter that had been giving me trouble. The chapter where the assistant finally makes the first move. The scene I'd been circling for weeks, coming at it from every angle except the true one, because the true one meant admitting something I'd been performing uncertainty about. She wants him. She has always wanted him. She is terrified of what that want costs.

I kept stopping and starting. I deleted three versions. The problem was the same one it had always been: I couldn't write the romance from the outside anymore. The scene kept pulling me toward the real shape of it, the texture of standing in a dark kitchen, resting your hand on a man's crisp shirt while the rest of the house slept, and every time I got too close to that, my hands froze.

I wanted to write it. I also didn't, because writing it meant admitting that what I felt wasn't research. It was something that had started up in the kitchen and wouldn't quiet down, getting louder every day since.

I finally forced myself to write it all the way through, then sat back, stared at the words on the screen, and understood that I'd stopped writing about Sandra.

The guest room had gone dark around me without my noticing the sunset. I picked up the laptop and moved to the living room, because the bedroom desk was too small, the lamp was wrong, and I couldn't spend the whole evening trapped in four walls without coming out of my own spiraling head.

I sat cross-legged on the plush couch. I opened the laptop back up and started typing.

His heavy footsteps came from the hallway.

I glanced up. Simon stood in the entrance to the living room in his house clothes, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, just looking at me.

"You've been locked in your room all day. Is something wrong?"

I looked back at him. There was an overwhelming amount I couldn't say.