Page 123 of The Story Between Us

He’d written the same sentence forty-seven times.

Aldric stood at the threshold, and⁠—

Delete.

Aldric stood at the threshold, knowing that if he⁠—

Delete.

Aldric stood at the threshold. The woman waited on the other side. All he had to do was⁠—

Delete. Delete. Delete.

The cursor blinked. Patient. Mocking. Waiting for him to figure out what came next.

He didn’t know. That was the problem. He’d been able to write everything else—the action, the world-building, the grief. But this? The moment where the broken man steps into his happy ending?

He had no idea how to write that.

Because clearly he had no idea how to do it.

The lake house was too quiet. Not empty quiet—he was used to that. This was different. This was the quiet of something missing. The space where her coffee cup should be clinking against the counter. The absence of her humming in the kitchen. The void where her voice used to fill the afternoon with questions about his characters, his plot, his life.

Her mug sat on the counter. The blue one with the chip. She’d claimed it two weeks ago, and now it sat there with a coffee ring inside, untouched since yesterday. Her sweater was draped over the couch arm. Her handwriting covered the Post-it wall—yellow squares mapping a story they’d built together.

He hadn’t touched any of it. Couldn’t bring himself to wash the mug, fold the sweater, take down the notes. That would make it real.

Huck lay by the cold fireplace, watching him with worried eyes. Finn kept going to the front door, sniffing at the crack, whining softly, then padding back to lie at Nate’s feet. They knew something was wrong. They just didn’t understand what.

He pushed back from the desk. The chair scraped against the floor. Outside, the lake was gray under a sky that had turned overcast. No gold, no blue. Just flat, colorless water reflecting flat, colorless clouds.

The dock was wet with morning dew. He’d forgotten shoes, and the cold soaked through his socks as he walked to the end. The two Adirondack chairs sat empty, the way they’d been empty since Emma.

He closed his eyes. Breathed in the lake air—mineral, green, the smell of decay from fallen leaves along the shore.

Where are you?

He was talking to the mist. To the gray water. To the ghost he’d been conjuring for three years.

Why won’t you help me? You always had the answers.

A loon called from somewhere across the lake. Mournful. Distant. The water lapped against the dock posts.

Nothing else.

She wasn’t here. Maybe she’d never been here—just him, talking to himself, giving himself permission to feel things he couldn’t feel alone. The conversations he’d thought he was having with Emma were just his own voice, speaking in the cadence she’d taught him.

And now even that was gone.

He stood there until his feet went numb. Until the clouds thinned and the gray sky showed patches of blue. Until he accepted what he already knew:

Emma was gone. And she wasn’t coming back. Not today. Not ever.

And now he didn’t have Livvie either.

He walked back inside.

The couch still smelled like her shampoo.