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Even the room looks glad he’s back.

There’s a pot of brewed coffee in the corner, full of sweet, dark caffeine, and I refill my mug. Take a sip. Grab the lighter and light the candle.

Stand back and admire its glow.

Not everything is right right now.

In fact, a lot is wrong.

But even so, I can’t help but feel a little glow as I sit on my beanbag and get to work on the long, long trek that has only begun of writing my own book proposal. All the while, the room glows around me.

And in that moment, I pause to look around, appreciating the journey.

Chapter 23

As it turns out, everyone—me included—in the publishing industry is evil.

I open yet another automated rejection email from the twelfth literary agent this week, and with everything I have left resist banging my head on the table.

Do these people realize how much work goes into a proposal? Much less a manuscript? Honestly, I think of all the times I’ve flippantly written rejection letters to hopeful writers and their respective agents, and I cringe.

I’m horrible. A horrible, horrible person, and I never even knew it.

Forget about the manuscript. Just the amount of time it takes to figure out how to make a website, get a website host, find and buy a domain name, create a newsletter mailing list, create a newsletter mailing-list template, and figure out how to “create a brand” when you don’t yet have anything to sell . . . It’s enough to make your brain explode. I’m halfway into the “Become an Influencer in Thirty Days!” class led by some peppy seventeen-year-old girl who wears a lot of shiny pink lipstick and talks excessively with her hands, and I’m still lost.

And the question running through my mind in all of this is, How on earth am I supposed to be able to manage a website, run a bimonthly newsletter, talk daily on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, and still have time to actually write books? What are these insane expectations?

I blame it on those rejection letters.

Now, mind you, 99 percent of the rejections are just automated emails. But the rare ones, the ones where the agent has actually taken the time to leave a sentence or two as to why you are being rejected . . . Well, those say the same thing. Nice story here but need to have a more stable social platform for consideration.

So, I took the advice and tried a few things.

But for goodness’ sake, it’s like getting a college degree just to figure out how to get anyone to follow you on social media. For two weeks I’ve given it all I’ve got, and so far I have one homemade-looking website with broken links, one Twitter account with zero posts because I always get lost on the home page, and thirty-two followers on my Instagram page. And for the record, before all of this I had thirty-four. I have actually lost two family members in the process.

And worse, it’s been radio silence in the ARC room. That brief spot of brightness from his presence—gone.

So, I’ve forged on alone. Working late into the evenings, taking breaks during lunch to try to figure out some other mind-numbing technological skill for which I’m ill equipped but that I’m apparently supposed to have to be an author in the current industry.

I don’t see Will much. As is usual now, he’s gone half the time, and when he’s back he always seems busy, mysterious conversations going on behind his closed door. Sometimes on the phone. Sometimes when the accountant steps in. Sometimes—and that’s when things get loud—with his mother.

I yearn to see him, to talk to him, but whatever glimpse of hope I had back on the staircase was a blip, and he’s no more interested in making something happen with me than Sam is in patching things up.

Seems I was quite off with both of my interpretations of the situation that day.

Still, I have Olivia back, in a new way I haven’t felt since we were girls. She even went out of her way to drag me to our parents’ house the previous week, all but holding the antithetical version of an intervention to declare she was very, very sorry for all the ways she hurt me the past few years—particularly with Ferris—and all but insisting Mom and Dad apologize too. It was domineering, in her usual way. But also . . . touching. Sweet.

So I have her and a positive lifestyle shift with my family. And Lyla.

And they all have been a balm to my soul these days.

I have much to be thankful for.

I see the time and click out of my in-box.

“Ready to go?” I say, standing from my chair.

Lyla, deep inside that genius mind of hers, is drawing a line on a new design she’s working on. She’s working so intently she doesn’t seem to hear me.