Page 129 of The Story Between Us

Derek Huang caught her eye as she passed. His expression was unreadable, but he gave her a small nod. Acknowledgment. Maybe even respect.

She didn’t nod back. She just walked.

The elevator doors opened the moment she pressed the button—small mercy, that. She stepped inside, turned to face the closing doors, and watched the fourteenth floor disappear.

Then she was alone.

Her reflection stared back at her from the mirrored walls. Armor still intact. Blazer sharp. Heels painful. But something different in her eyes—something that hadn’t been there when she’d walked in this morning.

Respect.

Except her hands shook.

She looked down at them—the laptop bag clutched in white-knuckled fingers, the sad plant balanced precariously, the fox ring catching the fluorescent light. Her mother’s ring. Her mother’s faith. He will rejoice over you with singing.

“Wow,” she whispered to her reflection. “I just did that.”

The elevator descended. Floor thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.

She’d just told off the most powerful man in the building. Then she’d walked out with her head high and her dignity intact and absolutely no idea what happened next.

She was unemployed. She was possibly blacklisted. She had no plan, no safety net, no backup.

But she’d said the truth. Out loud. To his face.

Her whole body was trembling now—adrenaline crash, fear, the delayed reaction to blowing up her entire life. Tears pricked at her eyes, and she blinked them back. Not yet. Not here. She could fall apart later, in her apartment, alone.

Right now, she just needed to get out of this building.

Floor six. Five. Four.

She should call Aunt Lila. Meg. They would tell her she’d done the right thing, that she wasn’t crazy, that the terrifying lightness in her chest was freedom and not free fall.

But there was only one person she really wanted to talk to.

And he hadn’t called.

Floor three. Two.

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.

Livvie walked through the lobby, past the security desk, through the revolving doors, out into the gray September morning. The cold hit her face like a slap—sharp, bracing, real.

She stood on the sidewalk, sad plant in one hand, laptop bag over her shoulder, the entire city rushing past her like she was a stone in a river.

What now?

She didn’t know. She had no idea.

But she knew one thing—she needed to read Nate’s manuscript. She needed to know what Nate had written. She needed to understand what “the ending is terrible” meant, and why he’d turned it in without telling her.

And despite herself, she had to help him fix it.

Yeah, pitiful, but it was what Emma would want her to do.

And that, more than anything, was what had driven her out to Maple Lake in the first place. The realization sifted through her, found her bones.

She’d done the right thing.