The refrigerator door swung slowly shut as she brushed her finger over the screen and clicked to view the list of messages. She rushed back to the living room, where Colin was still sprawled out on the sofa. He held an arm out to her and she slid down beside him, scrolling hurriedly through the list of texts. Almost all of them were from Reese and Nina. Guess it wasn’t such a great idea to turn the sound off. She couldn’t muster up any real remorse though. It had been fantastic to shut out the world for once, to cease the constant interruptions that had plagued her relationship with Colin from the start.
She clicked on Reese’s name and watched as the long string of texts filled the screen. Her eyes lit on the most recent one: “DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.” What the hell? She did some mental calculating. Reese would have just made it back in town from her honeymoon. How does she even know where I am?
A slow feeling of dread washed over her, pounded in her ears. She gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Colin sat up straighter, grabbed her hand.
She turned her eyes slowly in his direction.
They knew.
The press, the paparazzi. They must have gotten wind that Colin was in Memphis. In her hometown. Based on the contents of Reese’s texts, in her house.
She clicked the button at the base of her phone’s screen again to wake it back up and held it out to him so he could read the message. He stared at it in confusion for several seconds before his crystal eyes lit with understanding. His head swung toward the front entry.
“Shit.”
Amelia let her gaze travel slowly around the room, studying every window, every potential opening into the tiny, shared world they occupied. Suddenly her cozy little cocoon felt more like a bunker. At least she’d had the good sense last night to close the window treatments. The tiny gaps and spaces around the edges of her shutters and curtains were too tight for the smallest lens to penetrate—there was no way anyone could reach them inside.
She glanced down at her phone again, realizing she’d better let Reese and Nina know she’d gotten the messages. She dashed off texts to both of them.
Colin had been sitting beside her on the sofa, frozen, but now he stood, glancing between her and the front windows.
“Do you think…”
She nodded furiously. “I think. Don’t even look.”
She’d been scrolling through more messages to get an idea of what they were facing, but she quickly grew impatient with text and switched to email. The latest one from Nina contained a link to a celebrity-watch blog. She clicked the link and felt her throat constrict with panic. The post came complete with a photo of her house—wasn’t there a privacy law or something that protected her here?—beneath a headline that seared itself into her brain: “Love Nest.” She struggled for air. Oh my God. They’re keeping vigil outside my house.
Her next thought: Mom and Henry are going to see this.
She gawked at Colin. “Definitely don’t look.”
With growing desperation, she kept clicking, searching. Another link led to photos of her and Colin with the river in the background—the two of them cuddled together on a blanket, the two of them kissing…shit, shit, shit…the two of them moving hand-in-hand back to her car.
Suddenly those moms with strollers at the park yesterday didn’t seem so benign.
Colin had his own phone now and was tapping furiously at its screen. She stood, numb, and crossed the room to stand beside him. He dropped his phone to his side, pulled her to his chest. After several silent seconds, he tipped her chin up to make her look at him. Before she could stop it, a tear escaped the corner of her eye and trickled down her cheek. He brushed it away with his thumb.
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head slowly. “It’s not your fault, Colin.”
No, it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. Why had she insisted on taking him out? Why had she gone someplace so public? Another tear and then another rushed down her cheeks. Here they’d finally gotten a chance to be alone together, and it had been amazing. But she’d screwed it all up.
Amelia reached up to swipe her cheeks with one hand and then met Colin’s worried gaze. He put his hands on her shoulders.
“Breathe, Mel. It’ll be fine. We’re fine in here. We’re not going anywhere, and they can’t get to us.”
She forced herself to pull it together. He was right. Of course he was right.
But she’d make sure of it.
“We need a plan.”
* * *
Two hours later, she blasted her horn, three quick beeps, and slowly nudged into her drive with the front end of her Civic. Why, oh why, hadn’t she bought a house with a garage?
She skimmed the remaining crowd of onlookers—a few worried-looking neighbors who seemed to be trying to effect crowd control, some wanna-be paparazzi, and at least a couple of guys whose expensive-looking cameras pegged them as part of the real, scarier paparazzi.
Her eyes narrowed as she studied them.
Had they really flown all the way here just for this? Just to snag a few shots of her and Colin? Holy crap, there must be a lot of money riding on this. Horrified, she realized that was probably true. Tabloids had been tripping over themselves for news about her and Colin for nearly three weeks now. They must be salivating for fresh pictures, something to revive the story.
And had they ever gotten them.
After discovering the messages, she’d pulled out her laptop and surfed around to learn the extent of the damage. Somebody at the park yesterday had obviously had a camera—and an agenda. None of the images were perfect. Most of them were pretty grainy, like they’d been taken from a distance with a low-tech zoom lens. But they were good enough to leave no doubt about who was in them.
She felt so violated. This, in her cozy little bubble of a city. Unbelievable.
The thought gave her the surge of anger she needed to face what she had to do. She cut the car’s engine, scooped up the grocery bags from the seat beside her, and fumbled for her house key, holding it at the ready as she reached for the door handle. She took a deep breath and held it, closing her eyes. Rip the Band-Aid off. Just do it.
She flung open the door, slid out of the car, and made a beeline for her back entry. A couple members of her audience called out to her from the sidewalk, but they didn’t venture beyond it. She was thankful…and surprised. She hadn’t known there was a line the paparazzi wouldn’t cross.
She turned toward the group as she slid the key into the lock.
“He’s. Not. Here.” Her voice was dry but authoritative, her throat tight. “You missed the story. Go home.”
The crowd was smaller than it had been when she’d left the house half an hour earlier. At least somebody had bought the story she’d spun.
“We know he was here.”
The words came from one of the professionals, a bulky middle-aged guy whose complicated-looking camera had a long, dark lens attached. He leered at her and shook it in her direction, his black, long-sleeved T-shirt straining over his protruding belly. A man behind him on the sidewalk had a camera on a tripod, aimed and ready.
Amelia was heartened by the big-bellied photographer’s use of past tense—”He was here”—but infuriated by the rounds of clicks that followed it. Her mind advanced torturously to the new images she could already envision on next week’s newsstands.
She glanced down at her thrown-together ensemble: yoga pants, a purple tank top, and a thin, heather-gray hoodie. Great. Fabulous. She’d rushed out of the house so fast, she hadn’t put any thought into how she looked—she’d just grabbed the first things she saw in her closet. No makeup. Messy ponytail.
Obviously those days were over.
This is how he’s going to see me. The split-second flash of Noah’s face sent a paralyzing shockwave through her body. But it vanished just as quickly as a new round of clicks issued from the sidewalk. She stood up straighter, spun to face their unapologetic source.
“Colin was here yesterday, and he left yeste
rday.” She enunciated each syllable slowly, loudly to leave no room for misinterpretation. “You missed him. Now go home. And leave me alone or I will call the police.”
She winced inwardly at the shrillness of her voice and prayed nobody would call her bluff—the last thing she wanted was an even bigger scene. She twisted the key in the lock and opened the door, limp with relief that her part was played. She slid inside without a backward glance and slumped against the laundry room wall. They’d either leave now or they wouldn’t. She’d done her best.
She rushed down the back hallway, not even stopping to drop the Fresh Market bags, which were really just a ploy to show she was alone and running mundane errands, in the kitchen. When she got to her room, Colin was on her bed hovering over her laptop—the same position she’d left him in thirty minutes earlier. His eyes were tight with contrition as he surveyed her trembling form. He held his arms out to her, and she crossed the room and fell into them with relief.
“I’m sorry.”
Her lips twisted. “Please stop saying that. What do you have to be sorry about? Sorry for being here? Sorry for being who you are? You didn’t do anything wrong.” She buried her head in his chest. “You can’t help this bullshit.”
“I’m sorry you had to deal with it.”
She looked up at him. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine. I’m just not used to this.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
She shuddered. Somehow that thought didn’t make her feel better.
“I don’t know how in the world we’re going to get you out of here.”
He tightened his arms around her. “Don’t worry about that. I’m not leaving for another two days—they’ll be gone by then. Just try to forget they’re here.”
He leaned over to shut the laptop screen and gently pried the handles of the plastic bags from her clenched fist. He dropped them on the floor beside the bed and then reached for her, slowly unzipping her jacket.
Another shiver ran through her, this one not from fear.
One thing about Colin, he knew how to redirect attention.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It’s Complicated
“The End.”
Amelia typed the words with a flourish and dropped her head into her hands. She felt like she was in a fog, her eyes clouded over from staring at the fourteen-inch, rectangular screen so hard for so long.
She sat and waited, but the great sense of relief—of release—she’d expected to feel when she typed those six long-awaited letters didn’t come. Maybe it was because she was exhausted. She’d spent the past two weeks doing almost nothing but writing, from first thing in the morning till very late at night. She had two reasons for that: the obvious one, her deadline, and the actual one, her deep need for escape.
The world didn’t feel like a friendly place these days. Since Colin had left, her life in Memphis hadn’t been the same. The pictures (the ones by the river—thankfully Colin had been right, and no one had caught him sneaking out of her house) were everywhere, and they were awful. She couldn’t go out in public without people stopping to stare at her and whisper. Even her friends were treating her differently. And always, always, there was somebody around with a camera ready to aim in her direction. The last straw had been when it had happened at Otherlands—her place, the place she’d always escaped to when the walls of her office started to feel oppressive.
The place where nobody ever noticed anybody.
She heaved a long, slow sigh. At least her refusal to leave the house meant she’d found time to finish the book.
Except…the book didn’t feel finished. And that, she knew, was why the relief she’d anticipated eluded her. What she didn’t know was why the book didn’t feel finished. She’d written a complete draft. She’d followed her outlines to the letter.
The skin crawled at the back of her neck as intuition flashed. That’s the problem. The draft felt flat, like the story had lost its magic. With the first three books, she’d been inspired by something bigger than herself, something bigger than any goal or outline—some feeling within her that had forced her to keep writing until she’d pushed the story out. She’d tried to wait for that inspiration to hit this time, but her deadline kept sprinting ahead of it.
Still, the deadline couldn’t be the problem, could it? She’d written the last two books on even tighter deadlines. So what made this book different from the others? She lifted her head and squinted at the words on the screen, the final paragraphs of the story that had been her obsession for more than four years.
She scrolled back through the document, stopping to scan passages in random chapters. It needed hefty revisions—first drafts always did, but the problems went deeper than that. Twenty minutes went by, then thirty. Then an hour. Then two.
She’d skimmed at least two-thirds of the manuscript when, finally, the tears that had been threatening to fill her eyes brimmed over, blurring the words on the screen.
She knew.
She’d been trying like hell to deny it, but she knew what was wrong with the book. Her head sank back into her hands.
She’d always thought this book would be her ticket to getting past Noah—to substituting the misery that had made up her last eight years with something better, something happier. Something like what she had with Colin.
She’d written the book with Colin’s face behind her eyes, his voice in her ears, his presence and the memory of his warm arms in her thoughts. She’d pushed Noah out of the process completely, denied his insistent presence behind the words.
And she’d finished the draft. She’d typed “The End.”
Fear spread through the pit of her stomach, thick and cold. She couldn’t turn the book in like this. She knew instinctively it was a failure, and this series was as real, as vital, as her own life at this point. She couldn’t fail herself, couldn’t fail her fans.
Not with the whole world watching.
“Aaaarrrgh.” She pressed her hands against the sides of her head. “No pressure, right? No, Amelia, no pressure at all.”
Great. Now she was talking to herself. Maybe I really am crazy. Lord knew this wasn’t normal. Normal people didn’t feel unseen forces pushing them to write, didn’t hear made-up voices chattering in their heads. Normal people could let go of the past, move on. The world was full of people with past lives, past loves, broken hearts, and they moved on. Every day, they put one foot in front of the other and walked away without a backward glance. Why was she always walking in the wrong direction?
Amelia massaged her temples with both hands and closed her eyes, an image of Colin’s face behind them. She smiled even as a new tear escaped the corner of her left eye and trickled down her cheek. Colin made her happy. Or at least happier. Was that the problem? Could she only produce good work when she was mired in depression, filled with angst?
Was that why she couldn’t let Noah go?
She shook her head, hard, sending a spray of tears onto the letters of her keyboard as Noah replaced Colin in her thoughts. She didn’t want him there, but that didn’t seem to matter—she needed him. Without Noah, there was no series. He was the series.
That unseen force that had pushed her writing forward, that was him.
Noah was her muse.
Amelia moaned aloud. How could she have missed that fact? How could she have thought she could write a single word of this story without him? Her subconscious had been trying to tell her for months that she couldn’t. Even after Colin’s visit, even with her every waking thought filled with Colin and the memory of their time together, she hadn’t been able to shake Noah’s presence. When she closed her eyes at night, his face was still the one appearing in her dreams, deep blue eyes following her every movement—ocean, not sky.
She could see them now.
No! Stop this.
She didn’t want to need Noah. She didn’t want this feeling that could only be described as…guilt. Guilt for needing Noah while Colin loved her. Guilt for being with Colin while sh
e still loved Noah.
Oh, God.
Had she really just thought that? How could she still love Noah? She didn’t even know him—she’d stopped knowing him the day she’d walked in on him with someone else. But it was even worse than that, worse than the fact that he’d betrayed her. All these years later, she truly didn’t know him anymore…didn’t know the first thing about his life, his work, his friends. Didn’t know what music he listened to, what books he read, what made him tick. All she knew was this image she’d formed of him, this idealized version she’d created in her head and transferred to the page.
The Noah she loved didn’t even exist.
And yet, somehow, he was the most real thing in her life.
She gazed miserably at the words on the screen, at the happy ending that felt forced, contrived. She’d have to scrap it, find new words. She grasped at the lingering image of Colin even as her heart and her head pulled her in a different direction.
She scrolled to the end of the document and tapped the backspace key seven slow, agonizing times, each tap pushing her own chance at happiness further away.
Why couldn’t she just let herself be happy?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Connections
By the day Nina and her team arrived in Memphis for the web conference, Amelia was feeling a little better. She’d stopped working obsessively on the book, so she had more hours to give Colin, and they were spending them on the phone. He thought he’d be able to break away again soon, and this time they were planning to meet someplace. Someplace very, very isolated. Where, they hadn’t figured out quite yet.
She was also feeling better about her breakdown—that was the only word she could think of to describe it. The night she’d made her revelations about Noah, she’d cried herself to sleep. The next morning, though, she’d awakened to the buzz of her phone and then the sound of Colin’s voice. It was almost as if he’d sensed that she needed him—he’d never called so early before.
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