A local writer who joined the program six months ago and whose letters I’ve been dutifully forwarding to a PO box in the next town over.
I’ve been corresponding with Coastal Quill myself through the “Between the Lines” pen name—anonymity on both sides. His letters are thoughtful, vulnerable, asking questions aboutcraft and courage and how to write honestly when you’ve spent years hiding behind walls.
I like him. Whoever he is.
This morning’s letter is heavier than usual. Multiple pages, maybe. I hold it up to the light—not reading, just curious—and carry it to the back room to add to my outgoing mail pile.
But something makes me pause, break my own rule about privacy.
Makes me carefully, guiltily, open the envelope.
Dear Between the Lines,
I’ve been thinking about your last letter—about authors who lose their way. You mentioned being removed from someone’s ARC team and how personal it felt, like rejection of not just your opinion but your connection to the work itself.
What if the author removed you not from anger but from shame? What if your honesty held up a mirror to everything they’d been too afraid to face? What if losing you felt like losing the one voice that mattered most?
You asked whether readers would give an author another chance if they tried to write authentically again. I need you to know: that question has kept me awake for weeks. Because the author you described—the one who lost his way—might be trying to find it again.
But what if it’s too late? What if the readers who once loved his work have moved on? What if the one voice that mattered most will never trust him again?
Do you believe people can change? Or are we all just writing the same stories we’ve always written, hoping eventually the words will feel true?
Yours in perpetual uncertainty,
Coastal Quill
Whoever Coastal Quill is, he writes like someone who understands disappointment intimately. Like someone who’sbuilt walls so high he’s forgotten the view from anywhere else. Like someone who desperately wants to be seen but is terrified of what that visibility might reveal.
I pull out my phone and type a response in my notes app, planning to write it properly later on nice stationery.
I’ll write it out properly tonight.
For now, I have a bookstore to run, rent I probably can’t afford to pay, and sixty days to figure out how to save the one place in the world that feels like home.
I look at the V. Langley display one more time. At my handwritten recommendation card with its too-honest assessment.
“Find your way back,” I whisper to an author who’ll never hear me. “Remember what it felt like when your words were true.”
Outside, Twin Waves wakes up to another morning. Tourists will start arriving soon, looking for beach reads and local charm. Regulars will stop by for recommendations and my brand of literary therapy.
And somewhere in this town, Scott Avery is probably calculating property values. And I’m standing in a bookstore that might not be mine in sixty days, believing—despite all evidence to the contrary—that love is worth fighting for.
Even when it’s just love for stories.
Even when the numbers say I should quit.
Even when the handsome man in the expensive suit is both my enemy and somehow, impossibly, the person who makes my heart race when he looks at me like I matter.
Even then.
Especially then.
I peel another stray book off my cardigan—when did that happen?—and go open the shop for the day.
Austen watches me from his counter throne, tail swishing, as if to say:This is going to be interesting.
“Shut up.”
