Who’s going to buy books from the woman who wrote porn about their town?
SLUT.
WHORE.
WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE.
I press the pen to the page and write a sentence.
It’s bad. Stiff and self-conscious, like I’m writing with someone looking over my shoulder.
I cross it out and try again.
Worse.
I set the pen down and look out over the valley. The wind picks up, tugging at the pages of my notebook. Below me, Sierra Rose goes about its day. Cars are moving along Main Street. A truck pulls into the winery parking lot.
My town. The town that’s trying to decide if I belong here.
Except that’s not quite right anymore, is it? The town has already decided. The meeting hasn’t happened yet, but Carol’s on my side. Lin’s on my side. Mayor Benally doesn’t seem to be on Judith’s side.
Mateo, Jess, Macy, Isabel, Dean… they’ve all shown me where they stand.
The people who hate me are loud, but they’re not the majority. They never were. I just couldn’t hear anything else over the noise.
I pick up the pen again.
This time, I don’t think about who might read it or who might hate it. I think about the woman who sat at her desk two years ago and wrote the first line ofWildfire Summerbecause she’d fallen in love with a town and a man she didn’t realize she was falling for, too. And the only way to survive was to put it on the page.
That woman didn’t write for anyone’s approval. She wrote because the story was there and it needed to come out.
I write a line.
Then another.
They’re not perfect. The opening of book two is rough and probably wrong, and I’ll rewrite it six times before it sticks. But the words are moving. The pen is scratching across the page. And somewhere between the second paragraph and the third,the voices in my head go quiet, and the only voice left is the one telling the story.
I write for an hour. Maybe longer. I lose track of time, as I always do, when the writing is working. Those moments where the world narrows to the page, and everything else falls away. The cold. The wind. The town below. All of it disappears until it’s just me and the characters and the story unfolding in real time under my hand.
When I finally stop, my hand is cramped, and I’ve filled seven pages. Not all of it is good. Some of it is downright terrible. But it’s there. Words on a page. My words.
I look at what I’ve written. The new hero is a blacksmith. That wasn’t intentional—it just happened, the way the best writing decisions do. His hands are rough and careful. He works with fire. He’s patient in a way that seems still but is actually restraint.
I’m not even pretending it’s not Mateo.
The sun has shifted while I was writing. The light is warmer now, more gold than white, and the red rocks around me are starting to glow the way they do in late afternoon. That color made me fall in love with this place the first time I saw it.
I close the notebook and hold it against my chest. Seven pages. A beginning.
They didn’t silence me. I can still sit on the ridge where Rosa Delgado grieved and choose to write about love.
I drive back to Mateo’s house with the windows down despite the cold, letting the desert air whip through my hair.
I find him in the kitchen, pulling something out of the oven. He looks up when I come through the door, and his eyes do that thing, that quick scan, not cataloging flaws but checking that I’m okay. Making sure I came back in one piece.
“Hey.” He sets the dish on the counter. “I was starting to wonder where you went.”
“The cliffs.”
