I hope he's right.
I open a blank document and stare at the white screen. The cursor blinks at me, like it's impatient. Waiting for me to give it a story.
But what story do I want to tell?
The answer comes to me almost immediately, rising up from the same dark place that had driven me to that field. A woman who thinks she's going crazy. A husband who's gaslighting her. A truth that's worse than she could have imagined.
My fingers start moving before I can second-guess myself.
The first time I found the photograph, I thought I was losing my mind.
The words pour out of me. One sentence becomes a paragraph, which turns into a page. Before I know it, I'm lost in the story.
It's playing out in my head like a movie. Emma is married to a man named David who seems perfect on the surface but is slowly, methodically destroying her sanity. Little things at first like moving her keys, denying conversations they had, telling her she's remembering wrong. Then bigger things. More dangerous things. Much like the way Stanley made me feel like I had everything wrong, when I really had it all right. I shouldn't have trusted him after we filed for divorce.
I write about a photograph she finds hidden in their attic. A photograph of a woman who looks exactly like her, but it was taken twenty years before Emma was born. I throw myself into paragraphs about her questions, his dismissals, the way she starts to doubt everything she knows. Even when she knows she's right, he insists she's wrong.
I'm writing notes, ahead about when I think she discovers the truth. That David has done this before. With other women who look like Emma. Women who are all gone.
I'm so absorbed in finishing the outline that I don't hear Chase come back in. Don't realize he's there until he speaks.
"Hey."
I jump, my hand flying to my chest. "Jesus, you scared me."
"Sorry." He grins, snow dusting his shoulders and his cheeks red from the cold. He shakes his clothes out and puts everything in its proper place. "You were really focused, I had to speak a few times before you acknowledged me. What are you working on?"
I glance back at the screen, where I'm outlining that Emma is going to discover a box of IDs in David's study, each with a different name but what appears to be the same face. "I'm, um. I'm writing."
His whole face lights up. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I feel shy, and exposed, but I want to be honest with him. "You said I should try, so. I'm trying."
He crosses the room, and I instinctively angle the screen away. I'm not ready for him to read it yet. Maybe I'll never be ready. But he doesn't ask to see it. Instead, he leans down and kisses the top of my head.
"I'm proud of you."
And the way he says it with the pride in his voice makes my chest warm. "It might be terrible."
"It won't be."
"You haven't read it," I argue, trying to temper expectations.
"Don't need to. I told you," he leans down again, putting his forehead on my shoulder. "I know you."
I reach up and run my fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp affectionately. "Thank you. For pushing me to do this."
"You don't have to thank me. This is all you." He straightens up. "How much have you written?"
I check the word count at the bottom of the screen. "About fifteen hundred words. A couple pages, so I'm going to have to be writing a lot to get a full book. I don't even know how long regular books are, I'll have to do some research."
"That's amazing. For your first day?" He reaches forward, grabbing my chin, and pulling it back so that we can look at each other. His dark eyes shine brightly. "That's really amazing."
"I don't know if it's any good," I shrug, trying to play down the accomplishment.
"Doesn't matter right now. Right now, you're just getting it out. You can worry about good later. Don't authors have editors and stuff? I'm sure there's a whole process, and you'll figure it out." He pauses. "Listen, I was thinking. When you're done writing for the day, we could decorate for Christmas. If you want to. I've got a tree we could cut down, and there are decorations in the crawl space in my ceiling."
Christmas. I haven't celebrated Christmas in years, not really. Stanley always said it was a waste of money, a commercial holiday designed to make people spend beyond their means. We had a tree and exchanged gifts exactly twice in our marriage. I stopped thinking of it as anything but another day a long time ago. I'd had plans on spending it with our baby this year, but it wasn't meant to be.
