So here’s what I’m going to try: I’m going to write the true story. The one I’ve been too afraid to tell. The one where the hero is flawed and scared and doesn’t know if he deserves the heroine but loves her anyway. The one where vulnerability is the point, not the plot twist.
And if it’s terrible, at least I’ll have tried.
Thank you for giving me the courage to try.
Yours in hope (and maybe something like love),
Coastal Quill
Maybe something like love.
He wrote that weeks ago. He’s been in love with me for weeks—months—and I had no idea. I was writing back about fictional love stories while he was living one, falling for a woman who thought he was her enemy.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I spent years as a romance reader and couldn’t recognize one happening right in front of my face.
All those letters I treasured, all those moments I felt seen by a stranger who somehow understood exactly what I needed to hear—it was Scott the whole time. Watching me from across rooms, falling for me in ways I couldn’t recognize, writing it all down because he couldn’t say it out loud.
The beach confession, Vera’s cottage, the manuscript—none of it was the beginning. He’s been telling me he loves me since we started corresponding, letter by letter, word by careful word, and I couldn’t hear it because I didn’t know who was speaking.
But I know now.
Scott Avery is in love with me. Has been since before I stopped hating him.
And I have absolutely no idea what to do with that—which feels very on-brand for someone who reads romance novels for a living but apparently can’t recognize one when she’s starring in it.
David said he loved me too, while slowly convincing me I wasn’t enough, until love became a word that meant conditions and compromises and becoming smaller. But Scott’s love isn’t asking me to be smaller. His love watched me from across a room and thoughtshe makes people believe stories matter.His love wrote letters about wanting to deserve me instead of demanding that I prove I deserved him.
That’s terrifying. If I believe it and I’m wrong again, I don’t know if I’d survive.
But if I let fear win, David wins too. And I refuse to give him that satisfaction.
I pick up my phone.
Me:I read it.
Three dots appear immediately. It’s after two in the morning, and he’s been waiting, awake this whole time, waiting for me to read the book where he confessed he’s in love with me. We’re quite the pair—both terrible at sleeping, excellent at emotional torment.
Scott:And?
I think about the manuscript. About Emma and James. About the hero who spent three hundred pages falling for awoman who was too scared to let him in. About the happy ending he wrote for them—the one he’s hoping we can have too.
Me:And I think we should talk. Tomorrow?
Scott:I’ll be at the coffee shop at 9. If you want.
I do. That’s the terrifying part. I want so much it scares me.
Me:I’ll be there.
I set down the phone and close my eyes. Austen’s purr rumbles through me, steady and warm. Outside, the waves keep their rhythm against the shore.
Scott Avery is in love with me, and tomorrow I have to figure out what to do about it.
Tonight, I’ll let myself feel the weight of being loved like that—wholly, honestly, in eighty thousand words he’s letting me read before he shows the rest of the world.
It’s not nothing. It might be everything.
I’m going to try. Because that’s what heroines in the best books do—they show up, even when they’re scared. Especially when they’re scared.
