Page 79 of The Story Between Us

She retreated to the living room with her laptop and the stack of printed pages he’d left for her—chapters six and seven, fresh off the printer, marked with his cramped handwriting in the margins.

Huck lifted his head from his bed and wagged his tail. Finn didn’t even bother waking up. She settled into the corner of the couch, tucked her feet under a throw blanket, and started to read.

An hour later, she set down the pages and pressed her hand to her chest.

It was good.

Not just competent. Not just professional. The prose sang. The world breathed. And the characters—Aldric the grief-stricken protégé, the kingdom teetering on the edge of ruin—they felt real in a way that made her throat tight.

He’d found his voice. Somewhere in the past week, between the walks and the conversations and the slow unlocking of whatever had been blocking him, Nate Rivers had found the thing that made his writing his own.

She couldn’t wait to tell him.

She made lunch—grilled cheese and tomato soup, simple and warm—and carried it to his office. He emerged twenty minutes later, rubbing his eyes, and sat across from her at the kitchen table.

“How bad is it?” he asked, nodding toward the manuscript pages.

“It’s not bad at all.”

“You’re being kind.”

“I’m being honest.” She pushed a fresh bowl toward him. “Chapter seven, where Aldric confronts the council? I got chills. Actual chills. And the protégé’s scene at the grave—” She stopped, because his face had changed. Closed off. Guarded. “What?”

“The protégé.” He said it like the word tasted bitter. “I keep trying to write the scene where he has to face the one who killed his mentor. I’ve started it six times.”

“And?”

“And I can’t do it.” He stared at his soup, not eating. “Every time I try, I just…freeze. The grief feels too big. I don’t know how to write him through it.”

Livvie was quiet for a moment.

She thought about the story. The protégé who’d lost everything, who had to pick up his mentor’s sword and keep fighting, who was paralyzed by a grief too enormous to name.

She thought about Nate. Three years of silence. Three years of staring at a blank page. Three years of carrying Emma’s legacy on shoulders that were never meant to bear it alone.

“You know what his problem is,” she said quietly. “Don’t you?”

Nate looked up.

“He doesn’t think there’s anything on the other side,” she continued. “Of the grief. He thinks if he faces the loss of Morvain, if he really lets himself feel what he lost, it’ll destroy him. So he keeps dancing around it. Avoiding the POV that matters most.”

“That’s the character.”

“Is it?”

The question hung between them. Nate’s jaw tightened.

“I felt the same way when my mom died,” Livvie said.

He went still.

“I didn’t really talk about it when I was here that last summer. I couldn’t. But the cancer…it was fast. Four months from diagnosis to funeral. One minute she was there, and then she wasn’t.” She looked down at her hands. “That summer, I was supposed to be getting work experience. Instead, I just…fell apart. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t imagine feeling anything but that weight on my chest.”

“Livvie—”

“And then I met you—really met you for the first time.” She looked up, met his eyes. “Emma and I were at the coffee shop, remember? You came to find her for some reason, and Emma spilled her latte all over my artbook. She was so horrified, and you just stood there and laughed at her, and she threw a napkin at your head⁠—”

“I remember.” His voice was rough.