Page 12 of The Story Between Us

And he had nothing.

Two

The thing about text messages was that you had no idea whether the recipient had read them. The little Delivered sat there, giving absolutely nothing away, leaving you to wonder: Had they not seen the message, or had your words been read and deemed unworthy of a response?

Livvie had sent her text to Nate Rivers six hours ago. Since then, nothing. Nil. Nada. Despite staring at her phone as though willpower alone would generate a response.

“You’re going to burn a hole through that screen.” Meg reached across Livvie’s tiny coffee table and flipped the phone face down. “Also, you’ve checked it eleven times in the last four minutes. Yes, I counted.”

Livvie flipped it back over. “What if he responds while it’s face down and I miss⁠—”

“The notification sound? That thing that exists specifically so you don’t have to stare at your phone?”

“What if I have it on silent?”

“Do you?”

Livvie checked. She did not.

“That’s what I thought.” Meg tucked her legs underneath her on Livvie’s secondhand couch—the one that had looked charming in the thrift store and revealed itself to be approximately as comfortable as a park bench within a week of purchase. She wore a pair of yoga pants and a red Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt (which Livvie, being a Minnesota Gopher, would forgive her for) and swirled her cabernet, the picture of calm, while Livvie’s nervous system staged a full revolt somewhere in her chest cavity.

This was why Meg was her person. They’d met five years ago at a publishing conference—two of the only women under thirty not schmoozing with senior editors or collecting business cards like Pokémon. Meg had been hiding in the corner with a plate of cheese cubes, muttering about how her marketing department kept asking her to “make books go viral” as if virality were something you could order on Amazon Prime. Livvie had laughed so hard she’d snorted rosé.

They’d been friends ever since. Meg worked at Starlight Publishing, in marketing, which meant she understood the industry well enough to sympathize but wasn’t close enough to Pemberton to be a conflict of interest. She was also the only person Livvie had told about the meeting.

Well. Parts of the meeting.

“Okay.” Meg set down her wine with the air of someone preparing for a serious conversation. “Walk me through it again. You stood up in a room full of people and said ‘I know him.’ And then what happened?”

Livvie groaned, dropping her head against the back of the couch. The ceiling of her studio apartment was cracked in the corner. She should probably call her landlord, but she didn’t like to make waves. Add it to the list of things she should probably do something about, right after “develop a spine” and “stop making career decisions based on unrequited love for unavailable men.”

“Nothing. Richard told me to text him. So I did.”

Meg cocked her head.

“Okay, fine. Then, after I’d texted, Richard tracked me down and asked me how I knew him. I said my aunt knew Nate, that she was the one who encouraged him to submit his first manuscript. That I’ve read all his books. That I understand what he’s going through.”

“Do you? Understand what he’s going through?”

“His sister was one of my best friends, so yeah, a little. And they wrote the books together, so…yes, I understand how devastated he is.”

Meg’s eyebrows lifted. “Together? The bio just says Ian Rivers.”

“Emma and Nate—EN, which they made into Ian, their pen name. They shared it.” Livvie pushed herself up, restless, and crossed to the window. Her view was a brick wall and a fire escape, but at least the light was nice this time of day. Golden. Forgiving. “Emma was the story crafter—she came up with the plots, the worlds, the characters. Nate was the wordsmith. He made it all beautiful. But without her…”

“He can’t write.”

“He hasn’t finished anything since she died.” Livvie pressed her forehead against the cool glass. “And everyone at that meeting talked about him like he…well, they just don’t know what he’s lost.”

A pause. Then, carefully: “But you do. Know him.”

Livvie’s stomach did something complicated. A twist and a drop, like missing a step on a staircase.

“Emma and I were the same age. She and I used to spend summers at my aunt’s place—Aunt Lila lives on Maple Lake, next door to their place.”

“Wait.” Meg sat up straighter. “You spent summers with this guy? Like, plural summers? And you’re only mentioning this now?”

“I spent summers with Emma. Nate was older than me—he wasn’t around much until that last summer…” Livvie turned, shook her head. “We only spent time together because of Emma.”