Page 21 of The Story Between Us

Then he stood there, phone in hand, looking at Lila’s cottage through the trees, wondering if it was too late to become the kind of person Livvie remembered.

Probably.

Huck nudged his hand with his cold nose, and Nate scratched behind his ears automatically, the motion hollow, distant.

The lake lapped against the shore. The leaves continued their slow spiral down. Somewhere in the distance, a loon called—that eerie, laughing-crying sound that was the unofficial anthem of everything he’d lost.

She was coming.

And he had nothing to give her.

Nothing.

Five

That last summer Livvie had driven to Maple Lake, Emma had been sitting in the passenger seat, on her way home from the hospital in Duluth.

They’d had the windows down. Emma’s hair whipping everywhere, some terrible pop song on the radio, both of them singing lyrics they didn’t actually know. Emma rode the wave of her latest treatment, energy crackling through her for once, and Livvie had cast her own troubles aside and allowed herself to be swept up in their reunion. The summer yawned ahead of them, possibility stretching in every direction. The world glowed golden and infinite and theirs.

Seven years ago.

Now the passenger seat held a messenger bag full of submissions she was supposed to read and a protein bar she’d bought at a gas station because nerves had stolen her appetite for actual food. The radio sat silent. The windows stayed up. And Emma occupied a headstone in a cemetery Livvie still couldn’t bring herself to visit.

Focus, she told herself. This is a work trip. A professional obligation. You are a professional doing professional things in a professional manner.

Her GPS chose that moment to die.

“In eight hundred meters, turn—” The confident British voice cut out mid-sentence. The screen froze, then went dark, then displayed a spinning wheel of digital uncertainty that seemed like a personal judgment on her life choices.

“Great,” Livvie muttered. “Perfect. Thank you so much.”

But her hands were already turning the wheel, taking the left onto County Road 7 without needing to be told. Past the farm stand with the hand-painted sign (still there, still crooked). Past the bend where Emma had made her pull over for wildflowers. Past the old church with the cemetery she refused to think about.

She knew this road. It lived in her bones like muscle memory, like lyrics to a song she hadn’t sung in years but could still hum in her sleep. Every curve, every landmark, every sun-dappled stretch of pavement led to the same place it had always led.

To him.

Which brought the panic.

She’d written the perfect pitch. Professional but warm. Clear but not pushy. Acknowledging the difficulty while emphasizing the opportunity. She’d practiced it on the plane, in the rental car line, and all during the drive to Maple Lake.

I understand what you’re going through, she’d planned to say. Empathetic. Relatable. A bridge between corporate obligation and human connection.

The words had sounded reasonable in New York. Persuasive, even. Now, bumping down a road she’d traveled a dozen times, with a ghost in the passenger seat, the perfect pitch seemed to belong to someone else. Someone who hadn’t spent three years not quite thinking about the man she planned to ambush. Someone who hadn’t stood in the back of a funeral home waiting to be seen by someone who’d never looked.

She didn’t understand what he’d gone through. She understood her own version—the Emma-shaped hole, the texts she still almost sent, the dreams where they turned twenty again and nothing hurt. But his version? The blank page. The shared pen name. The book that wouldn’t write itself because half its author lay in the ground.

Honestly, who was she fooling? She had no idea.

Another hand-painted sign appeared around a bend: Maple Lake – 3 mi. Weathered white paint, a carved wooden loon, slightly less crooked than the farm stand’s sign.

Three miles. Maybe four minutes.

Livvie pulled over.

The shoulder barely fit her rental car, and a branch scraped against the passenger window like fingernails on a chalkboard, but she needed a minute. Just one minute to remember how to breathe like a normal human being who stood on the edge of making the biggest mistake of her professional and personal life simultaneously.

She flipped down the visor mirror. Her reflection stared back—mascara intact (miracle), hair doing that thing where it couldn’t decide between wavy and chaotic (inevitable), blazer wrinkled from three hours of stress-gripping the steering wheel (unfortunate but fixable).