Page 40 of Where Roads Lead

I’d given him far too much screen time in Ellie’s thoughts and in her heart.

In one swift round of edits, I reduced him to a footnote, back into the background—a briefly mentioned blip in her past where he belonged.

He wasn’t her story. He was merely the catalyst.

By comparison, he made Will’s character seem almost redeemable, which I was fine with. Over the course of the first few chapters, I’d suNow, an almost reluctant friendship was forming between him and Ellie, which actually was working a lot better than I thought it might.

But I still hadn’t figured out his character yet, probably because I hadn’t fully figured out Will yet.

Characters aren’t always simply created, as much as they’re found. It was as if they existed in some other dimension, just waiting for the right writer to discover them.

That’s how it worked for me, at least.

Sometimes they screamed out to me, telling me when I was writing them wrong. And yeah, technically I could override them. Force my fingers to type words I knew my characters would never get behind, but it would just create a hole that I’d have to rewrite myself out of later, so I’d learned to trust the process.

Trust my characters to tell me their story.

Just as I was deliberating what type of dry remark I could write Hugh saying to an Ellie that was very much pushing his buttons, a knock at the door jolted me from my work.

“Damn it,” I muttered, clenching my eyes shut, trying to remember the genius line that had been in my brain just half a second ago.

Ellie had made a cutting comment about his perpetually broody demeanor.

And Hugh had responded—

The knock sounded again.

“Damn it!” I yelled again, slamming my laptop shut as the words were lost to me forever.

“I’m coming!” I said, sliding across the floor in my socked feet in my haste to get to the door.

Apparently, whatever I was needed for was absolutely urgent, based on the force of the knock.

With a huff, I threw the door open, finding none other than my brooding muse himself standing on the other side.

“Will.” My eyes widened. “Hi.”

“Are you okay?” were the first words out of his mouth, his eyes scanning me up and down skeptically.

“Did you come all this way to ask me that?” I questioned, hyper-aware that my hair was coming out of its clip and one of my sweatpants legs was riding halfway up my calf.

“All this way, meaning the three-minute drive from the café to here?”

I rolled my eyes.

“And no. I came to see if you had installed the carbon monoxide detector like you told me you would.”

“Oh,” I said, shifting. “That. Right. Yeah, I got it handled.”

“You did?” he asked skeptically.

“Yup. It’s in my kitchen.”

“Can I see?” he asked, calling my bluff.

“See what?” I stalled for time.

“The carbon monoxide detector that you installed.”