Page 23 of The Story Between Us

“I got them. The texts. I haven’t checked my voicemail.”

Oh. Um. The silence stretched. The dogs, having completed their investigation, returned to the porch and flopped down on either side of Nate like furry sentinels. Except their tails knocked against the boards.

She started toward the steps, not sure what to say.

He filled in the silence. “I don’t need a babysitter. Or a deadline enforcer. Or whatever it is they sent you to be.”

“I’m not⁠—”

“The answer is no.” He was already stepping back, hand on the door. “You can tell them I’ll send updates when there are updates. You can tell them pressuring me won’t make pages appear. And you can tell them that if they want to sue me, they’re welcome to try, but I don’t have anything left to take.”

The door started to close.

Three seconds. Maybe two. And then it would end—the pitch, her mission, her job, everything she’d built toward.

Livvie heard herself speak. “The Hollow Crown. Chapter twelve.”

The door stopped moving.

“When Aldric realizes the enemy he’s been fighting is his own fear,” she continued, the words coming from somewhere deeper than her rehearsed pitch. “When he’s standing at the edge of Thornwood and he understands that the monster isn’t in the forest—it’s the story he’s been telling himself about who he is. That moment⁠—”

Her voice cracked. She let it. “That moment changed my life, Nate. I turned twenty-three, and I carried so much certainty that I didn’t measure up, that I’d never measure up, and then I read that chapter and I thought—” She stopped. Swallowed. “I thought, Someone understands. Someone put words to the thing I couldn’t name.”

Nate’s hand stayed on the door. But he didn’t close it. Something flickered in those eyes. He swallowed.

“I’m not here to push you,” Livvie said. “I’m not here to threaten you or guilt you or give you some corporate pep talk about brand obligations. I’m here because your books matter. Because you matter. And because I think⁠—”

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. It’s too much, it’s too honest. He’s going to think you’re insane⁠—

“I think you still have stories to tell. Even if you don’t believe it yet.”

The silence shifted now. Charged. The dogs lifted their heads.

Nate stared at her for a long moment. His jaw worked like he was chewing on words he didn’t want to say.

Then, finally: “Chapter twelve?”

“Page two seventeen in the hardcover. Two thirty-one in the paperback.” She managed a small smile. “I’ve read it a few times.”

Another pause. She could see him fighting with himself—the part that wanted to send her away wrestling with the part that wanted…something else. Connection, maybe. Or just proof that all those years of work had meant something to someone.

“Huck. Finn. Inside.”

The dogs scrambled up and disappeared through the door.

Nate stepped back, not quite an invitation but not a refusal either. “I have coffee. It’s probably terrible.”

“I’d love some terrible coffee.”

She stepped past him into the lake house.

And immediately wished she hadn’t.

Emma. Everywhere.

The living room sprawled in chaos—books stacked everywhere, blankets piled on the couch where he clearly slept, coffee cups in various stages of abandonment. But threaded through the chaos, carefully maintained, lived Emma. Her things exactly where she’d left them. Untouched. Sacred.

Her photo on the mantel—the one from the last good summer, laughing at something off camera, alive in a way that made Livvie’s chest seize. Her cardigan draped over the back of a chair like she’d just stepped out to check the mail and would return any minute.