“Not good?” Mrs. Gerald asked.
“Oh no, it is good.” Not really true. Well, not for her. She was a coffee person. But no part of her wanted to break this little old lady’s heart. “Just hot.”
Her smile returned. “I’m so pleased you like it. Sing out if you need anything else.”
Aspen smiled at the woman, but the smile immediately dropped when she looked back to her page. Still empty. No magical writing fairies wrote the chapter in the few seconds she’d been turned away.
All right, time to type. She wasnotgoing to accept another no-word day. She was going to get words down, dammit.
She pulled out her AirPods, pushed them into her ears, and played her favorite instrumental playlist. It was her go-to when she had to get writing done.
She scrolled back and deleted her last five sentences then rewrote them, forcing more words out.
It was an hour and one thousand rewritten words later when she sat back and decided to read what she had.
It was crap. A full thousand words of crap that no one would want to read.
She wanted to drop her forehead to the table and ask whatever higher power was watching her—why? Why was writing something good suddenly impossible?
Her phone rang. When she saw her mother’s name flashing on the screen, she cringed. If there was anyone who could make a bad day worse, it was her mentally unstable mother. She was pretty sure her mom had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder…and maybe bipolar disorder.
She answered the call, knowing if she didn’t, her mother might spiral. “Hi, Mom.”
“When are you coming home?”
Well, hello to you too. I missed you as well. Thank you so much for checking in.
All words that would likelynotenter the conversation.
“I told you, I’m not sure.”
“You’ve deserted me. Did you think of me at all during this move? Or Dylan?”
Her fingers tightened around her phone, her stomach doing a nauseous roll at his name. Aspen hadn’t told her why they’d separated—she hadn’t told anyone. But her mothercertainlyknew Aspen wanted nothing to do with him.
“Dylan and I broke up.”
“I know. But if you’d stayed, he might have taken you back.”
Taken her back? “I left him, Mom.”
“I know. You said that.”
Saidthat? Did her mother not believe her?
She sighed. “I need to go, Mom. I’m working.”
“Wait. I need your address so I can send you some of your things.”
“What things?”
“A ring you left here. A T-shirt. A—”
“Keep them.”
“I don’t want them. What the hell am I supposed to do with things that aren’t mine?”
She scrubbed her face. Her mother had always hated clutter. She had the most clutter-free house Aspen had ever seen. “Then throw them out.”
