Page 9 of The Story Between Us

Write something. Anything.

His fingers hovered over the keys. The cursor blinked. The blank space stretched out.

He closed the document.

Opened email instead.

The inbox was its usual disaster—spam, newsletters, the weekly desperate email from his editor. But there was a notification badge on the browser, and he clicked on it, and⁠—

A review. New, posted this morning, featured on one of those fantasy blogs with reach. The headline:

The Thornwood Chronicles: Still Waiting for Book Five. Has Ian Rivers Lost His Magic?

He should close the tab.

He read it.

Rivers’s first four books carried a spark that his subsequent silence has only magnified in memory. Readers waited. Readers hoped. And readers have finally begun to ask the question no one wanted to voice: Where has he gone? And will we ever get book five?

His throat tightened.

The Thornwood Chronicles were published under a shared pen name—Rivers and his late sister, Emma, who passed three years ago. In her absence, Rivers has produced nothing. No short stories. No updates. Not a single word. One might argue grief requires time. But at some point, silence becomes an answer. And the answer seems increasingly clear: Emma was the story. Without her, maybe there is no story left to tell.

He closed the laptop.

Stood up.

Sat back down.

The dogs were watching him from the doorway. Huck lay on the floor, his brow furrowed, eyes deep with concern. Finn clamped a tennis ball in his mouth.

“I’m fine,” he told them.

Finn dropped the ball and whined.

He picked it up and headed back to the kitchen. The mail on the counter. The stack he’d been ignoring for two weeks, maybe three.

The envelope on top had an official seal. County of Maple Lake.

He opened it.

NOTICE OF TAX DELINQUENCY

Six months overdue. Failure to remit payment. Foreclosure proceedings.

Thirty days. They were giving him thirty days before they started the process of taking the house.

The house where they’d written the books, where she’d told him stories from her hospital bed over video call, where her room was still closed.

So, that was great.

He set the notice down. Picked it up and read it again.

The advance. The one-million-dollar advance for book five—he’d received the first five hundred thousand and spent it on Emma’s treatments. The experimental ones, the ones insurance wouldn’t cover. Every penny. And he hadn’t earned anything since because he hadn’t written anything since.

He needed to turn in the book to get the rest.

But no book meant no money. No money meant no house. No house meant losing the last piece of her.