“She’s always had her head in the clouds,” he continued. “She’s clumsy. She gets distracted easily. She enjoys reading far too much, drawing even more, she lives in imaginary worlds most of the time, and she has far too many pets. If I allowed it, the place would be crawling with animals. As it is, she has six cats.”
Six?
Normally, that was a lot.
In a house with more than a hundred rooms that sat on more than five hundred acres, not so much.
I hoped I got to meet them before I left.
“As such, she was bullied at school,” Battle carried on, making my heart squeeze. “Brutally,” he added, making that squeeze tighten. “Our father thought it best not to intervene. He believed it would toughen her up. And therefore, it never stopped. As such, it went on for years.”
Again, with the getting madder, just this time, not at him.
“But instead, it made the interesting girl, the one who wasn’t like all the other girls, she was better, precisely because she wasn’t like all the other girls, feel weird, wrong,” I deduced, and I kept on deducing. “And to protect herself from a world that doesn’t understand her, she’s allowed her world to become one that does. This house and the village.”
He jutted his chin. “Precisely.”
“Has she seen a therapist?”
“And how, exactly, do we tell our sister we think she needs a therapist when we don’t want her to feel she’s strange, or worse, feel we think she is, when we don’t, but she’ll take it that way?” he retorted.
He had a point.
Slowly, I looked to the door again, my heart still hurting for Prudence, though, on the flipside, much of her behavior was now explained.
I went back to him when he ordered, “Stay the two weeks.”
“Without the book to work on, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable doing that. Although you might not feel my friendship with Prudence is real, it is. However, we still just met, and I don’t know any of the rest of you at all.”
“Then please explain further why you would take such a drastic step to scuttle this book you so wish to write when I’m simply asking to protect my family’s reputation.”
“I would think that’s obvious.”
“Since I’ve been clear it’s not, humor me.”
Okay, was it just me?
Or was this guy an arrogant ass?
“Because I can’t spend six months on a book you scupper within weeks of deadline,” I explained.
“You have an editor, yes?”
“Of course.”
“And you make changes he suggests.”
“She suggests, sure. But not all of them. Though I take them into account.”
“Is this not the same thing I’m requesting, however, likely with a much lighter hand?”
“I don’t know,” I returned. “Can you promise you’ll have a light hand?”
His natural purr was a scoff when he replied, “I don’t want to write the book for you, Ms. Dupree.”
“And I’m afraid you’re asking me to give you permission to do a version of that by giving you the power to decide if it’ll be published or not. By giving you the power to stamp it approved or denied after I’ve finished it. I don’t know you. Maybe you have a creative outlet. If you don’t, then allow me to educate you, just writing it knowing what might happen at the end will impede my creativity. Every writer has a different process. For me, my characters exist, not just the historical ones, the fictional ones too. The story is already there, real, even if the fictional part exists in my imagination. My part is to breathe life into the characters and their story. If I’m not free to breathe, how am I going to tell the story?”
“Perhaps we could come to a compromise?” he suggested.
