Page 102 of The Story Between Us

The lake was glass.

No wind. No sound except the soft lap of water against the wooden posts. The sky was just beginning to lighten—that blue-gray hour before sunrise when the world felt suspended between night and day, between sleeping and waking.

Maybe even between the person he was and the one he might become.

Mist rose from the surface in slow, ghostly curls. Knee-high fog that would burn off once the sun cleared the tree line, but for now hung suspended over the water like something from one of his books. Like the barrier between worlds. Like the veil between the living and the dead.

He dragged the kayak from its rack—just the one now, the green one. Emma’s yellow one sat unused in the boathouse. The scrape of fiberglass on wood was too loud in the silence. Huck had followed him down and now sat at the end of the dock, watching with that patient, knowing expression dogs got when they understood more than they should.

“I’ll be back,” Nate told him.

Huck’s tail thumped once.

He settled into the cockpit. Pushed off. The kayak wobbled for a moment, then steadied as he found his balance. The paddle dipped into the water—cold, so cold it made his bare hands ache—and he pulled, and the dock fell away behind him.

The mist parted around the bow like curtains opening on an empty stage.

He paddled toward Writer’s Point. Emma’s spot. He hadn’t been out here at this hour since before she died. Hadn’t trusted himself to sit in the silence and not shatter.

But something had shifted in the last three days. The writing, maybe. Or Livvie. Or both.

And for a delicious second, she was back in his arms, kissing him.

Not now. Not yet.

And yes, he still felt fragile. Not ready. Still held together with tape and hope and the stubborn refusal to fall apart. But the edges didn’t feel quite so sharp anymore.

So maybe there could be a happy ending for him too.

The eastern sky banded with color now, pink and gold bleeding up from the horizon.

He stopped paddling. Let the kayak drift.

The emptiness around him was so loud it drowned out the silence.

“I’m stuck,” he said.

His voice sounded strange out here. Too small. Too human.

“The romance,” he continued. “You always understood that part.”

Silence. The mist curling. The water barely rippling.

And then—not a voice, exactly. More like a memory with weight. The shape of what Emma would have said, filling the space where she should have been.

What’s the problem?

“Aldric doesn’t know what to say to Elara. The moment where he admits how he feels—I’ve written it six different ways, and they all sound wrong.”

What does he feel?

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I can write the action. I can write the grief. But when it comes to the part where he opens up, where he makes himself vulnerable, where he says the thing that risks everything—” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to do that.”

You’ve never tried.

“I’ve tried. Six drafts, remember?”

That’s not what I mean.