Page 50 of The Story Between Us

Livvie smiled but stayed silent.

“They were these wild, impossible stories.” His voice was alive suddenly. “Dragons and kingdoms and heroes who didn’t know they were heroes yet.”

A pause.

“That’s how the first book started. I was just…transcribing her. Trying to keep her alive on the page.”

She waited. More words came—slow, halting, but there.

“After she got better that time, we kept going. It became our thing. She’d imagine and I’d write. Every summer, every visit when she was well enough, we’d work on it together. By the time I was in college, we had enough for a book. Your Aunt Lila—she was the one who told me to submit it.”

Aunt Lila. Another thread connecting them all.

“I never thought anyone would want it,” he said. “But they did. And then they wanted more. And for a while, it was the best thing in my life. This world we’d built together.”

His voice cracked slightly on the last word. She still didn’t turn around.

An idea was forming in her head. A theory.

He can’t talk face-to-face. Eye contact feels like exposure. But if we’re not looking at each other—that works.

She walked to the coat hooks by the door. Grabbed his jacket, her jacket. Turned around and tossed his at him.

He caught it reflexively. “What⁠—”

“We’re going for a walk. Bring the dogs.”

He was almost—dangerously close to—enjoying himself.

The September air had a bite to it, sharp and clean, carrying the smell of fallen leaves and woodsmoke from somewhere down the shore.

They’d been walking for an hour, maybe more.

Huck and Finn bounded ahead on the path that wound along the lake’s edge, noses to the ground, tails high.

He should have hated it. He didn’t.

Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped bracing for the conversation to go wrong. Stopped waiting for her to ask something he couldn’t answer. Stopped counting the minutes until he could escape back to his silent house.

Livvie walked beside him in her rust-colored coat, the wind catching her hair and blowing strands across her face. She kept tucking them back behind her ear.

He kept noticing.

Fact was, he had a hard time not noticing her, ever since the day they’d met, all the way back when she was sixteen.

But now, now she wasn’t sixteen. Wasn’t even twenty and his sister’s best summer friend.

And Emma wasn’t here to give him the side-eye.

Well, sorta.

“So what happened after the first book?” Livvie asked.

“We wrote three more. Always the same way—her ideas, my words. She’d call me in the middle of the night with some breakthrough, and I’d have to scramble for a pen.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “She used to say I was her translator. That she spoke in color and I wrote in black and white.”

“That’s not true.”

“What?”