Page 19 of The Story Between Us

Walt rang him up slowly. Everything in Maple Lake happened slowly. Time moved differently here, which was poetic when you were on vacation but excruciating when you were trying to flee a conversation about the girl you’d been not thinking about for seven years.

“Good to see you, son.” Walt’s voice was quiet, kind. “Emma would be proud of you. Just for showing up.”

Nate’s throat closed. He nodded—he thought he nodded—and shoved some bills across the counter. He didn’t wait for change.

Twenty-two steps back to the truck.

He made it in fifteen.

The drive home was a blur of gravel and gold-tipped trees and the kind of focused not-thinking that had become his specialty.

By the time he pulled into the driveway, the adrenaline had started to flush, leaving that hollow exhaustion behind. He sat in the truck for a long moment, engine ticking as it cooled, watching Lila’s cottage through the windshield.

The studio light was still on. Of course it was. Because she didn’t crumple into herself, let her creativity wisp out in the face of grief.

He carried the groceries in.

The dogs went ballistic, as if he’d been gone a decade. Finn nearly knocked him over while Nate hauled the forty-pound bag into the kitchen and filled their bowls.

Coffee. He needed coffee.

The new beans went into the grinder—a variety he’d never tried, grabbed blind in his escape—and the sound filled the kitchen, loud and mechanical, drowning out the thoughts circling like vultures.

She still talks about that summer.

She worries about you.

Livvie called me yesterday. Said she might be coming up.

The coffee brewed. He drank it standing at the counter, staring at nothing, the caffeine hitting his bloodstream like it mattered.

He should do something. Read. Clean. Anything but what he was about to do.

But his feet were already carrying him toward the office, because apparently he was a glutton for punishment. Because Lila’s words thundered, echoing in his head—the bear who forgets how to hibernate, who can’t remember how to rest—and he was thinking about resting and he was thinking about writing and the two had become so tangled together that he couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

The laptop opened. The document appeared.

Three

The cursor blinked.

He typed a sentence. Read it. Hated it. Deleted it.

Typed another. It was worse. Deleted.

His hands hovered over the keys like he was trying to remember a language he used to speak fluently. The words were in there somewhere. He knew they were in there. But something had washed out the path between his brain and his fingers—overgrown now, impassable.

The blank page stared back at him.

Tell me about Thornwood again.

The thought came unbidden, in a voice that wasn’t his own. And before he could stop it, the memory pulled him under⁠—

The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and flowers—the lilies Mom kept bringing that Emma pretended to love. Machines beeped their steady rhythm. The light was always wrong in here—too harsh, too flat, making everyone look sicker than they were.

Emma sat propped against a stack of pillows, a notebook open on her lap, pen moving in slow circles. She’d been writing something, or trying to. The handwriting got shakier as she tired.

“Tell me about Thornwood again.” He’d asked her that, just to pull her out of her funk. “About the prophecy, and Aldric and Elara, the lost princess.”