Page 23 of Not a Strong Enough Word

“I’ll sleep when I finish.”

“When you finish it’ll be tomorrow, with a new word-count goal. Come to bed, just for a few hours.”

She waved me off without sparing me a glance. “It won’t take much longer. Once I got going, the first half went really fast. One more hour, I promise.”

But I had heard that before. “Another hour” would turn into “Why not get ahead?” and “If I write double, maybe I can turn this in early,” which was almost always followed by a frantic “Nothing will ever be as good as In the Time Before” and ten pages gone with the click of a button.

I scrubbed a hand down my face and padded groggily to the kitchen to put on another pot of coffee. If she was going to pull an all-nighter, the least I could do was make sure she didn’t delete it all when she reread it in the light of day.

“Hello? Ryan? Did I lose you?” Trina’s voice cuts through the memory, scattering it like leaves in a windstorm.

I clear my throat and glance out the floor-to-ceiling window in my office, almost surprised to find the spring sunshine streaming in, casting the room in a bright, happy light. Those darker memories haven’t been as prevalent as the other, softer ones, but this one felt real enough to be an omen. It dissipated, but it’s lingering.

“No, I’m here. I’m sorry,” I say, still blinking in the light from the window.

“I asked what you thought of the premise. Did you hear me?”

“Sorry,” I apologize again. “I didn’t. You were cutting out.”

It’s yet another lie, but this time Trina is onto me. “Mm-hmm,” she hums, unconvinced. Then, after a pregnant pause, she says, “Scarlett is okay. This isn’t like last time.” Her voice is gentle, reassuring, but there’s something underneath it. Agitation? Disquiet?

I run a finger over the edge of my desk to ground myself and take a guess at what she’s upset about. “If it bothered her that much, I won’t see her again unless I have to.”

“Hmm?” she hums again, distracted this time. “Oh, no. She…well, she’s an idiot mostly, as you know, and she actually seemed touched that you went out of your way to drop off those notes.”

A soft smile curls half of my mouth upward, but the relief is short lived. “What aren’t you saying, Trina?”

“I don’t think it’s a great idea for you to see her again. She’s got systems in place now. Lots of therapy, medication…you know?”

There’s an unspoken but at the end of her statement, so I wait her out.

Trina’s sigh turns into a little mewling whine, and I know she’s about to say something she wishes she could hold back. “The late nights aren’t great for her. But I’m on it, okay? There’s nothing to worry about yet.”

I don’t like that “yet” one bit, but Casey and Trina have both told me essentially the same thing, and I know the smart move is to listen to them. “Will you let me know if there is something to worry about?”

“Ryan.” Her tone is a warning one. “I’m telling you; don’t get involved, okay? This is hard enough without revisiting all the heartbreak on top of it. I’ve got her. I promise.”

For a second, I think about protesting. Trina wasn’t there during all those late nights. She wasn’t the one to watch her try to push forward almost immediately after she got off yet another plane ride from yet another city on her press tour. She didn’t see Scarlett start to second-guess every sentence, every word. She didn’t hold Scarlett and listen to her talk about how numb it all felt.

But then the realization that I haven’t been there for the past five years hits me like a ton of bricks. Trina has, and she’s probably right—Scarlett has systems in place now that I know nothing about, and Trina is keeping an eye on her. They don’t need me muddying the waters and causing unnecessary trouble.

My shoulders slump forward as I close my eyes against the sting of this new awareness. “Of course,” I say. “Just…keep me posted, okay? And I’ll have this round back to her as soon as I can.”

When we hang up, I tell myself that the little pocket of dread that opened up when she sent her second draft at two in the morning is just bad memories coming back and nothing more.

I almost believe it.

Chapter 12

Scarlett

Deep in my creative writing master’s program, one of the members of my cohort mentioned once that he never deleted anything. He said he had a whole file titled graveyard.docx where he put everything he cut from any manuscript, no matter how large or small. He swore up and down that he would use it later, and that it saved him a lot of time when drafting similar scenes because he’d pull something from his graveyard to use in new works.

That guy was a moron. If it’s garbage in one manuscript, inserting it into another isn’t going to make it magically worth something. It’s like putting makeup on a rotting corpse and pretending it’s alive.

I much prefer to just let it die.

But I’ve done a lot of work with my therapist, and it’s her voice in my head telling me that callously deleting the two thousand eighty-nine words that are currently highlighted on my screen would be two giant steps backward, both for my manuscript and my mental health.