Page 92 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
She should have stuck to the stands, if you know what I mean.
The first knife to the chest.
The third time I nearly abandon my quest and hightail it home is in Dad’s driveway. I sit with the engine running and my hands at ten and two, white-knuckled.
This shouldn’t be so hard.
I let out a breath, drop my head against the wheel, count to ten.
A text comes in.
Aw, he’s seen me. Probably. I don’t look at the text, but I turn off the engine.
My dad answers the door. Six foot two. More silver on his temples than gray. He looks bone weary, dark bags under his eyes. Three days of image management has really done a number on him.
But underneath the tired, there’s something else. An expression I don’t recognize from the sidelines or the game tape. It’s not a part of the Coach Hart archives.
“Come in, Evie.”
He leads me to the study. The old sanctuary. The place I’d find him night after night, diagramming plays after a practice. I used to love this room, used to love reading in that old leather chair with a juice box and the absolute certainty that the world was safe because my father was in it. At least, before he got the house in the divorce and Mom and I left to go live in a cramped apartment.
Same desk. Same leather chair. Same smell—coffee and paper.
But the desk is covered in something I don’t expect.
ARCs. Advance reader copies, bound and cover-design ready. Not just one—a stack. Dog-eared, spine-cracked, the wear pattern of books that have been loved, not displayed. I recognize the covers before the titles—simple, one solid color, title in Times New Roman.
My advanced reader copies.
My books. All of them. Every E.J. Hartley. Every Sutton Blake.
A copy of Breakaway lies open across the desk. And it’s covered—almost bleeding—in handwriting I would recognize from space.
My father’s handwriting, angular and only half legible, scrawled in the margins of my novel.
Hero needs to show vulnerability earlier—readers need the wound before the wall.
This villain is too smart for this mistake in Ch. 12. Revisit.
The letter scene is the best thing you’ve written. Don’t change a word.
“Where did you get these?” I ask, my heart suddenly racing.
My dad rounds his desk, leans against the sideboard behind his chair, hands stuffed into his pockets. His eyes seem to skim over the books, as though hoping to find the words somewhere inside them.
“I have something I need to tell you, and I don’t know how to other than just to…tell you.”
He turns his computer screen toward me. And the room tilts.
The screen is open to his email, set to a folder titled S. Anderson. The contents extend down, every email filed from the last three years.
S. Anderson. The anonymous beta reader who’s given me some of the most valuable, honest feedback of my career. Of E.J.’s career…and Sutton’s. Feedback so insightful I once told my editor: I don’t know who this person is, but they understand my books better than I do. I got them on the ARC list early days.
I thought it was clever, really. S. Anderson—probably for Sherwood Anderson, the writing coach of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even Jack London.
S. Anderson is my dad.
I can’t breathe, my chest squeezing as I try to make sense of the information.
