After Levi left, the hotel felt bigger in the wrong ways.
He’d kissed me once more in the breezeway, balancing the paper bag of soup in one hand and the compass in the other, and I’d had the insane urge to tell him not to go.
Don’t step into the street. Don’t leave my line of sight.
Instead, I’d let him. Because I was trying to be a functioning adult human and not the kind of woman who clung to a man.
I went back to my room, and the door clicked shut.
I put the soup in the little fridge, the yogurt next to it, the compass on the nightstand where I could see it.North, the tiny red needle insisted, even when it trembled.
“Me, too,” I muttered, because apparently, I talked to inanimate objects now.
Then I did the thing I’d been avoiding.
I opened my laptop.
The blank document stared back at me, cursor blinking like a metronome marking time. The memo I’d promised my editor hovered in my peripheral vision like a ghost—outlines of factsand non-facts, what I could say and what I refused to, words that would slot me into a narrative I wasn’t sure I believed anymore.
I typed a headline:
CHARLESTON – PRELIMINARY NOTES
Then deleted “PRELIMINARY.” Then all of it.
My fingers hovered. Dropped. Hovered again.
What was I doing?
Protecting Levi, my mind supplied.
Endangering the story, my training argued back.
I closed the laptop. The snap sounded too loud in the quiet room.
Ten minutes passed. Maybe twenty. Enough for me to pace the strip of carpet between bed and window, enough for me to check my phone twice to see if Levi had texted.
Nothing.
He’d said he’d be right back, I reminded myself. There was no reason to panic.
By the time the knock came, I’d finally settled onto the edge of the bed, fingers linked loosely between my knees. My heart jumped in relief.
Levi.
The thought put a stupid, automatic smile on my face as I crossed the room. I didn’t even look through the peephole. I just opened the door.
And froze.
It wasn’t Levi.
It was Derek. My editor. Here. In Charleston.
“Amelia,” he said.
His voice was the same—brisk, clipped, a little too fast—but the rest of him was wrong. He looked like he’d been poured into his clothes and forgotten to set. Shirt wrinkled from a long flight, tie loosened and hanging askew, his usually neat dark hair flattened on one side like he’d slept on a plane. There wereshadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him in person.
“Hey, Derek,” I said slowly. “What are you doing here?”
