“I’m going to show them that my success doesn’t hurt this town. It helps it.” I squeeze Mateo’s hand back.
Jess raises her teacup. “Now that’s my girl.”
Macy raises her coffee. “To Sadie Pierce, number one bestselling author and Sierra Rose Ridge’s biggest champion.”
Dean lifts his water. “To not letting the bastards win.”
Mateo raises his coffee with his free hand, the other still holding mine. “Totesoro.”
Our eyes meet.
And for the first time since this whole thing blew up, I feel like maybe—just maybe—everything is going to be okay.
CHAPTER 13
I need to get out of this house.
Not because of Mateo. He’s at the forge, and the place is quiet and comfortable and smells like coffee and him. But I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for an hour staring at my laptop screen, and the cursor hasn’t moved. I mean, it blinks at me like it’s counting down every second toward my demise, but it hasn’t actually moved across the page. The town hall speech draft is open in one tab. My KDP dashboard is open in another tab.My Sienna Saguaro social media accounts are open in the third, fourth, and fifth.
And I haven’t written a word of fiction in over two weeks.
Two weeks. That’s the longest I’ve gone without writing since I moved to Sierra Rose. Even when Owen was at his worst, I wrote. Late at night, after he’d fallen asleep. Early mornings before he woke up. Any moment where he wasn’t immediately there to criticize.
And now everyone knows it exists. Somehow, that’s made it harder, not easier.
I close the laptop, grab my notebook and a pen, and pick up my car keys from the counter.
I scribble a note before walking out the door, and take the thirty-minute drive. I don’t plan the route consciously, but my hands know where to turn, and when the dirt road narrows, and the desert scrub gives way to the rocky trail leading up to the Red Rock Cliffs overlook, I realize where I’ve been heading all along.
Of course. Where else would I go?
I park and climb out. The wind is sharper up here, carrying the kind of cold that bites through flannel and reminds you that the desert doesn’t care about your feelings. She’s a bitch like that, but I love her nonetheless. The sky is enormous. Pale blue streaked with white. It’s the kind of sky that makes you feel both insignificant and infinite at the same time.
The overlook is empty. It’s just me and the rocks and the view.
Sierra Rose Ridge sprawls below, small and perfect. I can see the town square from here, the cluster of adobe buildings along Main Street, the glint of the winery’s greenhouse on the eastern hillside. Thankfully, the boarded-up windows of Wildflower Books are blocked by other buildings, but I know they’re there. Two dark rectangles where light used to pour in.
I find a flat rock near the edge—not too close, I’m not that dramatic or brave—and settle against a larger boulder. The stoneis sun-warmed despite the cool air. I pull my knees up and open the notebook on my lap.
This is where Rosa Delgado stood.
I mean, not this exact rock, probably. But somewhere on this ridge, over a hundred years ago, a woman who loved someone so fiercely she couldn’t survive losing him made a choice I can’t ever imagine making. The town carries her name. The legend carries her grief. And I wrote about her in my book, sitting here without ever really considering what it meant.
Until now.
I’ve been coming up here since my first year in Sierra Rose Ridge. It’s where I outlinedWildfire Summerand where I figured out the ending of my second book. It’s where I come when the words won’t move, and I need the sky to be bigger than my problems.
The pen hovers over the blank page.
I’m here to write.
Book two. The one readers are already asking about. The one I promised myself I’d start drafting as soon asWildfire Summerlaunched, before everything went sideways.
The problem is, every time I try to start, I hear voices. Not the characters’ voices—those I’d welcome. No, I hear my mother’s. Owen’s. Judith’s. Karen Voss, David Torres, and every anonymous commenter who called me a whore for writing love stories.
Pornography.
Degrading.
