“I’ll be finished by October fifteenth.”
Her heart smiled that evening as she returned to Verity’s story on the train.
While she desperately missed Graham, things were getting better in her world.
6:Harper
A train wreck.
With her dreams on one rail and reality on the other, the collision today had been spectacular.
Harper collapsed on the stained cushions in the shack’s living room–kitchen space and stared up at the yellow plaster.
She wasn’t mad at Kelsey—she’d spent the past decade trying to support Harper’s writing, not harm it—but she was furious at herself. Why hadn’t she been ready to pitch her script to a producer willing to listen? For years, she’d dreamed about the opportunity to present a story, but when given the opportunity, in the perfect time and place, she’d bombed.
An ocean breeze ushered its salty self through the window, clanging her mom’s suncatcher against the glass. The scene from Evan’s living room an hour ago, the producers staring at her like she’d lost her mind, looped through her head. The cloud of kitchen smoke, acrid and gray. The poor pigs, blackened to a crisp, their croissant blankets covered with foam.
If only the wind would blow away every bit of this debacle. Or, at least, her memory of it.
How was she supposed to face Evan and his rats again this afternoon?
The smoke had goaded Evan and Marlo from the master suite, clearly unprepared to encounter the team. When Wendi arrived with a tray of drinks, the glasses swimming in a spilled puddle, she’d deployed the fire extinguisher.
As Kelsey tried to explain what happened, leaving out the parts of Harper’s forlorn pitch, Evan looked like he might blow.
“Make yourself scarce,” Kelsey had whispered in her ear.
“I’m not going to—”
“Now!”
So she’d run like a coward back to her cave, abandoning Kelsey to Evan’s blast.
As much as she appreciated her friend’s efforts, Harper should have insisted that she wasn’t ready to pitch the story. And she should have set a timer for the blanketed pigs.
Should have. Could have. Wished she would have. Her roving mind was a disaster in the making, the cyclone of stories destroying her everyday life. If only she could wiggle deep into her own rabbit hole so no one in the outside world could find her.
Then again, maybe that’s what got her into trouble in the first place. Chasing the elusive rabbit through her imaginary wonderland until she collided with reality.
Their shack had been a happy place when her mom was alive, Angeline Rayne handling the greatest catastrophes on Evan’s estate with dignity and grace. But her death last year, no surprise, changed everything. Harper had already been working her mom’s job for months, and after her mom died, Wendi asked if Harper could take over full-time. Temporarily—they’d all agreed—until Evan found a new housekeeper or Harper was hired for production work.
Caring for Evan’s property was a round-the-clock job. Her mom had thrived in her work, but Harper found little joy in it. She was happiest sitting out on the cliff, lost in one of her stories.
Closing her eyes, Harper listened to the waves rolling in from someplace exotic like Papua New Guinea or Japan and crashing against the cliff, their journey ending abruptly on the shore.
If only those same waves would sweep her away.
The clock above the TV ticked a slow rhythm. Seconds then minutes. Finally, she tossed the pillow onto the rug and inched herself up. The couch shared space with a kitchenette, table, two chairs, and a bookcase. Near the kitchenette, one door led into the bedroom and another into a tiny bathroom. With her father long gone, moving to Albuquerque with his wife soon after Harper was born, she and her mom had made a happy home out of this place for fifteen years.
Beyond the curtains and pillows, she didn’t have much decor. She’d framed a picture with her mom from earlier years, propping it up on the case that housed Harper’s DVD library and her mom’s collection of books.
Harper stared at the shelves, wishing for one more conversation between them. While her mother never did much writing, she loved to read squeaky-clean romance and watch old movies. They’d made biweekly trips to the Santa Barbara library to check out a trove of books.
Harper had loved reading as a child, but as she grew older, she preferred making up her own stories. Endings in the real world were all askew, but in the story world, she could control what happened to her characters. She could give the heroic ones—those who actually had courage—a happily ever after.
Every birthday since she turned eight, her mom had given her a fancy pen with a plume and a notebook to record her many ideas. She’d filled those notebooks with bits and pieces of characters and plots, often inventing characters and adding them to the plotline of her favorite book or movie.
But she couldn’t keep writing if she didn’t have a place to live. Wendi was probably on the telephone in the big house, calling local employment agencies. Evan would probably have a new housekeeper by the week’s end. One with no aspirations to become a screenwriter.
