Page 25 of The Story Between Us

Of course she had.

He nodded, then walked over to a chair and cleared it of a pile of books.

She shook her head. “Let’s just—” She sighed. “The manuscript. Can we talk about where you are with it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“The agency needs something, Nate. Even an outline. Even a new chapter. Even⁠—”

“There is no new chapter.”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

He walked past her, down the hall, into his office. She followed—of course she followed—and he heard her sharp intake of breath when she saw the maps, the notebooks, the walls covered in years of work.

But he didn’t stop at the walls.

He sat down at his desk. Opened the laptop. The document appeared, faithful as a curse.

Six

And beneath it: nothing. A blank page. A cursor blinking with infinite patience.

“This is it.” He gestured at the screen. “This is what I have. Two chapters I wrote three years ago. Nothing since.”

Livvie stared at the laptop. Then at him. Then back at the laptop.

He could see her processing it—and of course, as she stood there, for the briefest moment, she was the girl sitting at the firepit, looking at the stars, listening to him tell her about the stories he and Emma were writing.

The irony.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Okay, that’s—we can work with that. What if we just brainstormed? I could take notes, you could talk through ideas⁠—”

“There are no ideas.”

“There are always ideas. You just have to—” She turned, scanning the office, and her eyes landed on the corkboard. The index cards in three different styles of handwriting. “Emma’s notebooks. We could look at where she left off, see what threads she developed⁠—”

Emma’s name hit him like a fist to the sternum.

“—and the maps are incredible. Nate, there’s so much material here. If we could just find the through line, the thing she was building toward⁠—”

She moved around the office now, touching things. His things. Emma’s things. Picking up a notebook, flipping through it, her eyes scanning pages he hadn’t looked at in three years.

“This is her handwriting, right? And this is yours. I can tell by the⁠—”

The walls crept closer.

“—and if we cross-reference with the plot outline from book four, we might see where she⁠—”

He couldn’t breathe.

It was happening again. That thing his body did sometimes, when everything became too much and the world started narrowing to a pinpoint. His chest tightened. His hands tingled. The air in the room had turned to syrup and he tried to breathe through it but nothing got in.

“—the structure is all here, really, it’s just a matter of finding the emotional core, and Emma always said that represented your strength, the way you could take her ideas and⁠—”

“Stop!”

The word came out strangled. Wrong. Something desperate in it.