Page 126 of The Story Between Us

Then three years of grief and guilt and silence rattled through him, began to rush out in waves he couldn’t control. He closed the Bible, pressed it to his chest, and let himself break.

Seventeen

She didn’t have Nate’s manuscript.

That was the thought circling Livvie’s mind as she pushed through the revolving doors of Pemberton & Associates, past the security desk with its bored guard, toward the elevator bank that would carry her to whatever judgment waited upstairs. She’d left Maple Lake to save her job, but she’d come back empty-handed. No pages. No ending. No proof that her two weeks in Minnesota had accomplished anything except shattering her heart into pieces she wasn’t sure she’d ever find again.

She should probably start packing her desk.

But she’d dressed for battle anyway.

Sharpest blazer—the charcoal one she saved for client meetings and days when she needed to feel like someone who mattered. Heels that meant business, even though they pinched her toes and made her calves ache. Hair blown out, makeup precise, armor assembled with the care of a soldier preparing for a war she’d already lost.

Livvie Fox walked into the elevator looking like a woman who had everything under control.

The lie held until the doors opened on the fourteenth floor.

Something was wrong.

She felt it immediately—a charge in the air, a hush. The entire staff had assembled, some of them in work attire, others in Sunday-morning casual, all of them holding coffee cups and looking at her, their expressions complicated in ways she couldn’t read.

Pity? Guilt? Something else?

Her stomach tightened.

When she reached the conference room—the glass-walled fishbowl where the all-hands meeting should have been assembling—she found half her colleagues hunched over laptops and printed pages, reading with expressions that made her heart stutter.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Priya looked up first. Her dark eyes held sympathy and something else—dread, maybe. Or warning.

“Livvie.” She stood, moving toward her. “I tried to call you. I⁠—”

“What’s happening?”

Derek Huang glanced up from his tablet. His expression was harder to read—was that satisfaction? Discomfort? Both?

“Ian Rivers turned in his manuscript,” he said. “This morning. The whole thing. Delivered directly to Richard’s inbox.”

The floor shifted under Livvie’s feet.

He’d finished it.

Nate had actually finished it.

She should feel happy—triumphant, even. He’d done the impossible. He’d broken through his block, faced his grief, finished the story his sister had started. Everything she’d hoped for him, everything she’d been working toward⁠—

But he hadn’t told her.

Hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. Hadn’t even sent a single word since she’d left the notebook on the porch yesterday with her heart folded inside.

She’d found out from Derek Huang. Of course. Because she didn’t matter.

“That’s—” She swallowed. Tried to find words that weren’t pathetic. “That’s great news. That’s wonderful.”

“Is it?” someone muttered from the back of the room.

Livvie turned. A junior editor she barely knew—Marcus? Martin?—was scrolling through his tablet with a frown.