Page 52 of The Story Between Us

She carried a wistfulness in her expression and seemed to watch the lake like it held something she’d lost.

He recognized that look. He saw it in the mirror every day.

“You’re not how I remember you,” she said quietly.

He stopped walking. “What?”

“From the summers. When I used to come visit.” She kept her eyes forward. “You were different.” She glanced at him then. “Not bad different. Just…different.”

He held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Something flickered in her expression. Recognition, maybe. Memory.

“You’re not how I remember you either,” he said quietly.

She lifted an eyebrow, but he didn’t explain—how the girl who’d painted watercolors on Lila’s porch had become this woman with steel beneath her softness, how seven years had made her vibrant while he’d slipped into the shadows.

“What happened after you left?” he asked. “That summer. I always wondered.”

“I went back to New York. Finished my internship. Got hired at the agency.” She tucked her hair back again, her necklace catching the light. “Spent the next six years trying to prove I belonged there. Climbing. Achieving. Waiting for someone to finally see me.”

“And did they?”

“No.” A small, rueful smile. “That’s the thing about being invisible. You can work yourself to the bone, and people still look right through you.”

They’d reached a bench at the edge of the boardwalk. The lake stretched out before them, flat and silver, the trees reflected in its surface.

“What about you?” Livvie asked quietly. “What happened after I left?”

The question landed hard in his chest, a weight, almost cutting off his breathing.

He could deflect. But she went over, sat on a bench, as if waiting for his answer. The dogs flopped at her feet, panting.

She leaned over, rubbed Finn behind his ear.

He could change the subject. Give her the polished version, the one he’d perfected for interviews and fan events.

But the urge to tell her the truth pulsed inside him, filled his chest, his throat. Okay, fine. He sat next to her on the bench.

“Emma got worse,” he said. “That fall after you were here. Another round of treatments. More time in the hospital.”

Livvie waited. Patient. Not pushing.

He paused. The memory was so clear—Emma’s face on the pillow, pale but fierce, her eyes bright with something that wasn’t fever.

“Those last weeks, she never could sleep, and she asked me to finish the story.”

He stopped. “And I had nothing to give her. Again.”

He stared at the lake. The light was changing, the afternoon sun dropping lower, turning everything gold.

“She was the spark. I was just…” He trailed off. The old words wanted to come—the typist, the translator, the one who made her ideas pretty—but they felt wrong now. Incomplete.

“She said we were two halves of the same brain,” he continued. “She saw the big picture. I saw the details. Apart, we were just…people with ideas. Together, we made something real.”

A loon called somewhere in the distance.

“We published the first book when I was twenty-three. Emma was twenty-one. The aplastic anemia had been in remission for three years. We thought—” His voice caught. “We thought we’d have time. We thought we’d write a hundred books together.”

“But you didn’t.”