Me:See you then.
Scott:Okay. Thank you.
Scott:Jessica?
Me:Yeah?
Scott:I’m sorry. For all of it.
I put my phone in my purse and head upstairs to read next month’s Bookaholic’s Anonymous pick.
FOURTEEN
SCOTT
Ihaven’t slept in three days. Not because I’m anxious—because I’m writing.
The words won’t stop. Every time I close my eyes, sentences appear, fully formed, demanding to be put on the page. I’ve written more in seventy-two hours than I have in the past six months. My manuscript is almost finished, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever created.
It’s also unmistakably about her.
The heroine runs a bookstore. She has auburn hair and a cat named after a dead author. She reads romance novels like other people breathe oxygen. She makes the hero want to be someone worth loving.
My publisher wants the book. My agent keeps calling it “your best work” and “a complete departure” and “finally, finally, the vulnerability readers have been waiting for.”
I haven’t told them I can’t publish it without permission from the woman I based it on, who won’t look at me. The same person I’m about to spend an hour in a room with, pretending we’re just two professionals planning an event.
I arrive at Hazel’s house fifteen minutes early because I’m a coward and I need time to compose myself before Jessica walks in.
Hazel answers the door with a knowing look. “Scott. You’re early.”
“Traffic.”
“There’s no traffic in Twin Waves.”
“Then I’m just early.”
She lets me in without further comment. The living room is set up with folding chairs around a coffee table covered in papers and binders. The author reveal event. The one Jessica pitched to my publisher months ago, before any of this happened.
The irony still hasn’t worn off. She’s been planning my unmasking without knowing it.
And now she knows. And we still have to go through with it.
Mrs. Sanders is already there, arranging slices of something dense and dark on a china plate she clearly brought from home. She’s wearing coral capris, a blouse with small anchors on it, and earrings that look expensive but probably came from the Belk clearance rack. Her hair is perfectly highlighted. Apparently she drives to Wilmington for it because “the local girls just don’t understand dimension.”
“There he is,” she says, looking up at me with eyes that miss nothing. “Scott Avery. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“Just busy.”
“Mmhmm.” She slides a slice of cake onto a small plate and holds it out to me. “My great-great-grandmother’s fig cake recipe. Straight from a tree she planted in 1902.”
I take the plate because refusing isn’t an option.
“That tree has survived countless hurricanes,” she continues, settling into her story like it’s a well-worn chair. “The one in ’54 took the east branches clean off, but my mama’s mama, she just pruned it back and it came in fuller than ever. Then there was?—”
“Diana in ’84,” Hazel says from the kitchen, mouthing along. “And Floyd. And Florence.”
“That’s right. Florence nearly got her, but I covered the roots with mulch and talked to her every day and she pulled through.” Mrs. Sanders nods at the cake in my hand. “That’s five generations of women in that recipe. I keep it in a lockbox at the bank.”
