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“I am,” I insisted. “Tell them to give me until the end of November. I’ll…I’ll be here a while.”

Silence greeted me. And then, “How long is a while?”

“I rented the place for two months.”

“Two months!” she screeched. “Avery. Avery. Is this a mental health crisis? Do I need to come out there?”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. New York is smothering me. I feel like I can’t breathe there.” I unzipped my jacket, cold air kissing my throat. “I need space. I need silence.”

“New York is made of dreams!” she spluttered. “People come here for inspiration. They don’t leave it!”

“Maybe my dreams aren’t there,” I responded quietly. “Maybe it’s taken everything that it can from me.”

Marissa sighed and I imagined her manicured hand pressed to her brow.

“They won’t give you another extension after this,” she warned. “If you don’t have something to me by the time you’re done…”

I knew. She didn’t need to say it.

Everything I’d been working toward would unravel. I’d lose my contract, my standing with the publishing house, and the readers who flooded my social media with messages about the next book would go without.

The vise around me pulled tighter and somewhere inside me, I thought I felt a bone crack.

“I will,” I promised. I had to. I had to have something. This dream couldn’t be over so soon. “I swear I will.”

Marissa harrumphed. “I know you can do it, Av. Take a walk. Drink a beer or two.”

I had plans for that and more. I wanted to explore. See the cliffs. Find my way back to the person that was locked away within me now.

Leaving the city was easy. I was an only child with parents who were wholly dedicated to their law firm. We were as close as an estranged family could be. Stilted holidays, perfunctory birthday calls—or emails, if you were my mother—and promises to catch each other next time. It’d been like this for as long as I could remember. I was raised by nannies who were paid handsomely to take care of me and be my friend.

It made me a loner by nature. Someone more content to skulk on the outside of things and observe rather than partake. As I grew, I was forced to attend charity functions and gatherings. Seats at the opera and the ballet. Well-to-do connections that put my parents in the right places.

The moment I turned eighteen I left. When I moved into my dorm room at college, my roommate was beside herself. She’d said something that had stuck with me—that she wouldn’t be sleeping under the same roof as her parents for a long time. The words had brought me up short, because I had never considered it. I’d been sleeping under my roof alone for years.

There was nothing to miss.

They were proud to be sure. Riddled me with book favors for their friends, extra signed copies, advanced copies when available, but I was a bargaining chip, a means to an end.

I wanted to find myself.

As a person.

As a writer.

Staring up at the castle before me, I thought that maybe this just might be it.

“I’ll have pages for you,” I heard myself say. “I just know it.”

Marissa made me swear an oath in blood before she let me go.

I stared down at my phone, fingernails crooked and bleeding from where I’d bitten them.

“I hope this isn’t a mistake,” I murmured. “Please don’t let this be a mistake.”

I slipped the key into the lock and let myself into Kilmorran Castle.

Chapter 2