I open the folder on my phone marked “Property Documents.”
It does not contain property documents.
It contains screenshots of J.A. Reads Romance’s Instagram. Her profile picture is a blurry photo of a bookshelf, carefully anonymous, but I’d know that shelf anywhere. I’ve studied every spine in that image, trying to decode her taste, trying to understand her better.
This is not stalking. Its…research.
Into a woman whose identity I’ve already figured out but am pretending I haven’t because acknowledging it would require dealing with the implications, and I’ve already met my emotional processing quota for the decade.
Her latest post from this morning shows The Fiction Nook’s staff picks table. My books—V. Langley’s books—prominently displayed.
I zoom in on the handwritten recommendation card.
V. Langley’s early work is required reading... His recent releases, however, have lost what made him special... watching a gifted author hide behind his own walls.
She wrote that on a recommendation card in her shop. Where customers can see it.
She’s literally warning people away from my recent books with handwritten notes.
I should be offended.
Instead, I’m reluctantly charmed, because she’s right, and because the fact that she cares enough to be disappointed means she cared in the first place.
My phone buzzes with a different notification.
New letter in the Letters to Local Authors drop box. From Between the Lines.
I should wait. Should go to the PO box tomorrow during business hours like a person with boundaries and self-control and a functional relationship with patience.
Instead, I grab my keys, knock over my drink in the process, spend five minutes cleaning whiskey off my manuscript pages, and then grab my keys again.
Twenty minutes later,I’m at the post office in the next town over at the PO Box I rent under Coastal Quill’s LLC so no one in Twin Waves connects it to me.
A cream colored envelope is there, sealed with a small sticker of stacked books.
I wait until I’m back in my car to open it, hands shaking like a teenager with his first love letter.
Which, in a way, this is.
She doesn’t know I’m V. Langley, the author whose recent work she’s publicly mourning. I didn’t know she was J.A. Reads Romance until three months ago, when a reference in one of her letters matched a detail from one of her reviews.
I should have stopped writing then, but I didn’t because I’m an idiot.
I unfold the letter.
Dear Coastal Quill,
You asked if readers would give an author another chance. The answer is yes—but only if that author is brave enough to be vulnerable. To write from the wound instead of around it.
As for whether people can change: I have to believe they can. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories, of hope?
The author who lost his way is still the same person who wrote those early books that mattered. The heart that created that work didn’t disappear. It just got scared and built walls.
But walls can come down if someone’s brave enough to risk it.
Tell your author friend that the readers who loved his early work are still here. Still hoping he’ll remember what made those stories sing. Still believing in second chances.
Even the ones he kicked off his ARC team.
