Page 42 of The Story Between Us

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For the walk. The cinnamon roll. Whatever you did.”

“I didn’t do anything. You did.”

“You made me leave my office.”

“A revolutionary technique. I call it ‘touching grass.’”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. But close.

“I should keep going,” he said, already turning back toward the hall. “While it’s still…”

“Go. Write. I’ll be here.”

“Can I ask you something?” He lingered in the doorway, one hand on the frame, like he might bolt at any moment.

“You just did.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “What do you create?”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You spend all your time championing other people’s stories. Reading other people’s words. Fighting for other people’s dreams.” He tilted his head, studying her with that quiet intensity that made her feel like a manuscript he was reading too closely. “What’s yours?”

The question landed somewhere soft and unprotected. She turned her coffee mug in her hands. “I used to paint. Watercolors, mostly. Nothing serious.”

“Used to.”

“Life got busy. Work got busy. It’s hard to justify spending time on something that’s just”—she waved her hand—“for me.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, without inflection, without judgment: “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week.”

She opened her mouth to argue—to say she was fine, she had plenty of creative fulfillment through her work, thank you very much—but he was already continuing.

“Emma used to draw. Terribly. Stick figures with crowns. She’d illustrate entire battle scenes with what looked like a kindergartner’s fever dream.” A ghost of something crossed his face. “But she loved it. She never once cared that she was bad at it. She just made things. Because making things made her happy.”

He held her gaze for one beat longer than comfortable. “Not everything you make has to be good, Livvie. Some things you make just because you need to make them.”

Then he turned and walked back down the hall. The office door clicked shut. The typing resumed.

Livvie sat on the couch, coffee cooling in her hands, and felt something she couldn’t quite name pressing against the backs of her eyes.

Four pages. A breakthrough. Exactly what she’d come here for.

But her mind wasn’t on the manuscript.

It rested on a notebook full of watercolor dreams. A children’s room never built. A sister’s vision, waiting in the dust for someone to bring it to life.

The Storybook Corner.

She stared at the book in her lap without seeing it, her thoughts already spinning ahead. The library? Emma had worked there for years, since a teenager.

There lived more here than a deadline. More than a manuscript. More than her job.

There lived a ghost who’d left something unfinished.

And maybe—just maybe—more than one way to help Nate Rivers find his way back to himself.

The breakthrough had lasted exactly one hour and fourteen minutes.