Now a Major Motion Picture (30 page)

Still, the deadline couldn’t be the problem, could it? She’d written the last two books on even tighter deadlines. So what made this book different from the others? She lifted her head and squinted at the words on the screen, the final paragraphs of the story that had been her obsession for more than four years.

She scrolled back through the document, stopping to scan passages in random chapters. It needed hefty revisions—first drafts always did, but the problems went deeper than that. Twenty minutes went by, then thirty. Then an hour. Then two.

She’d skimmed at least two-thirds of the manuscript when, finally, the tears that had been threatening to fill her eyes brimmed over, blurring the words on the screen.

She knew.

She’d been trying like hell to deny it, but she knew what was wrong with the book. Her head sank back into her hands.

She’d always thought this book would be her ticket to getting past Noah—to substituting the misery that had made up her last eight years with something better, something happier. Something like what she had with Colin.

She’d written the book with Colin’s face behind her eyes, his voice in her ears, his presence and the memory of his warm arms in her thoughts. She’d pushed Noah out of the process completely, denied his insistent presence behind the words.

And she’d finished the draft. She’d typed “The End.”

Fear spread through the pit of her stomach, thick and cold. She couldn’t turn the book in like this. She knew instinctively it was a failure, and this series was as real, as vital, as her own life at this point. She couldn’t fail herself, couldn’t fail her fans.

Not with the whole world watching.

“Aaaarrrgh.” She pressed her hands against the sides of her head. “No pressure, right? No, Amelia, no pressure at all.”

Great. Now she was talking to herself.
Maybe I really am crazy.
Lord knew this wasn’t normal. Normal people didn’t feel unseen forces pushing them to write, didn’t hear made-up voices chattering in their heads. Normal people could let go of the past, move on. The world was full of people with past lives, past loves, broken hearts, and they moved on. Every day, they put one foot in front of the other and walked away without a backward glance. Why was she always walking in the wrong direction?

Amelia massaged her temples with both hands and closed her eyes, an image of Colin’s face behind them. She smiled even as a new tear escaped the corner of her left eye and trickled down her cheek. Colin made her happy. Or at least happi
er
. Was that the problem? Could she only produce good work when she was mired in depression, filled with angst?

Was that why she couldn’t let Noah go?

She shook her head, hard, sending a spray of tears onto the letters of her keyboard as Noah replaced Colin in her thoughts. She didn’t want him there, but that didn’t seem to matter—she
needed
him. Without Noah, there was no series. He was the series.

That unseen force that had pushed her writing forward, that was him.

Noah was her muse.

Amelia moaned aloud. How could she have missed that fact? How could she have thought she could write a single word of this story without him? Her subconscious had been trying to tell her for months that she couldn’t. Even after Colin’s visit, even with her every waking thought filled with Colin and the memory of their time together, she hadn’t been able to shake Noah’s presence. When she closed her eyes at night, his face was still the one appearing in her dreams, deep blue eyes following her every movement—ocean, not sky.

She could see them now.

No! Stop this.

She didn’t want to need Noah. She didn’t want this feeling that could only be described as…guilt. Guilt for needing Noah while Colin loved her. Guilt for being with Colin while she still loved Noah.

Oh, God.

Had she really just thought that? How could she still love Noah? She didn’t even know him—she’d stopped knowing him the day she’d walked in on him with someone else. But it was even worse than that, worse than the fact that he’d betrayed her. All these years later, she truly
didn’t
know him anymore…didn’t know the first thing about his life, his work, his friends. Didn’t know what music he listened to, what books he read, what made him tick. All she knew was this image she’d formed of him, this idealized version she’d created in her head and transferred to the page.

The Noah she loved didn’t even exist.

And yet, somehow, he was the most real thing in her life.

She gazed miserably at the words on the screen, at the happy ending that felt forced, contrived. She’d have to scrap it, find new words. She grasped at the lingering image of Colin even as her heart and her head pulled her in a different direction.

She scrolled to the end of the document and tapped the backspace key seven slow, agonizing times, each tap pushing her own chance at happiness further away.

Why couldn’t she just let herself be happy?

Connections

By the day Nina and her team arrived in Memphis for the web conference, Amelia was feeling a little better. She’d stopped working obsessively on the book, so she had more hours to give Colin, and they were spending them on the phone. He thought he’d be able to break away again soon, and this time they were planning to meet someplace. Someplace very, very isolated. Where, they hadn’t figured out quite yet.

She was also feeling better about her breakdown—that was the only word she could think of to describe it. The night she’d made her revelations about Noah, she’d cried herself to sleep. The next morning, though, she’d awakened to the buzz of her phone and then the sound of Colin’s voice. It was almost as if he’d sensed that she needed him—he’d never called so early before.

He said he missed her, loved her, just needed to hear her voice. In his usual way, he drained the tension from her body in one fell swoop, and her heart swelled with gratitude and relief. She loved Colin. How could she not love Colin? The night before, she’d simply been lonely. And finishing the series had been an accomplishment, sure, but in a way also a letdown. The books had filled her heart and her mind for more than four years, and that was probably why she was freaked out about finishing them. Maybe she was even wrong about the draft—maybe it wasn’t that bad, after all.

Filled with a new resolve, she hung up the phone, zipped her laptop into its bag and stuffed the bag in her office closet. The draft wasn’t due for another two months. She had time. She’d get some distance from it before she looked at it again, and she was sure that when she did, she’d have a whole new perspective.

From that moment on, she decided, she would focus on the future, not the past.

Amelia shook herself out of her reverie. It wasn’t like she had a choice anyway. There wasn’t time left to worry or obsess—the future was here now, flitting up in its fleeting, unexpected way.

Her eyes moved across her living room, which looked bigger, colder, barely recognizable. When they’d arrived in town yesterday, Nina, Nick, and Nick’s assistant, Teddy, had turned her house into conference central. The four of them had dragged her varied assortment of slipcovered, overstuffed, and weathered furnishings to the edges of the living room and into her dining room. Replacing her furniture was a long table outfitted with computers and snaked with wires and various blinking devices Amelia didn’t have names for. Four lipstick-red office chairs she recognized from the Ikea catalog surrounded the table and gave the austere scene an unexpected punch. The chairs’ presence was foreboding. Any minute, she’d be sitting in one of them, undergoing cross-examination.

She breathed into her coffee mug and waited for the doorbell to ring.

She didn’t feel at all prepared for this—when she’d agreed to do the conference, she’d been Mel Henry, undercover author, ordinary person, but now…well, now she was one half of “
Colinmel
.” The press had latched onto her real name in recent weeks, too, so she didn’t even have her pseudonym to hide behind anymore.

She grasped at the hope that the conference would stick to its focus, but the dread that lay heavy in the pit of Amelia’s stomach told her otherwise. She hadn’t granted any interviews or made any comments to the press. She didn’t feel ready for that. And yet here she was, a sitting duck, about to face two solid days of questioning from fans about her relationship with Colin.

Nina had assured her that wouldn’t happen, but how could she stop it? How could anybody stop it? Besides, she had to face down the rumor mill someday, so it might as well be today. Better to face her readers, her supporters, than the impersonal, hostile face of the media. Trembling, she sucked back a big swig of coffee as if it could wash down the terror of the thought. But all it did was burn her throat.

She closed her eyes and thought about Nina. Her publicist didn’t understand how truly mortifying all of this was to her. From Nina’s point of view Amelia’s relationship with Colin was a windfall, a giant stroke of luck. It certainly had garnered the books and movie more press than either of them had dreamed. And Nina, to her credit, had no idea Amelia had been secretly wishing against publicity from the start—that there was someone out there she didn’t want the news to reach. She couldn’t have made a bigger mess of that if she’d tried.

No, Nina’s enthusiasm was pure, and Amelia tried to focus on that. She had a role to fill, and she’d fill it. The consequences were hers alone to deal with.

Besides, it wasn’t as if her role was that tough. Nina, Nick, and Teddy had planned the conference down to the tiniest detail. All she had to do was participate in chats with fans at scheduled times throughout the next two days. Each chat would center on a specific topic—fans had ranked topics of interest when they registered for slots in the forum. So many people had signed up that Nick had designed a lottery system to decide who got to participate. If this event went well, it’d be the first in a string of online conferences. Nina and Nick were falling all over themselves with excitement about it.

Amelia wished she could feel a fraction of their enthusiasm, but all she could muster up was a dull, throbbing fear.

She wandered to her entry hall and peeked out the shutters just as Nina’s rented SUV turned into her driveway. She worked to quell the flutters in her stomach as she opened her front door and stepped onto the porch. Nina, who wasn’t driving, had stepped onto the driveway and was trying to juggle an enormous Louis Vuitton bag and her phone with a heap of brown paper sacks emblazoned with a familiar dark-green logo.

“I come bearing gifts,” she said, seeing Amelia and holding up the bags.

Amelia grinned. Starbucks pastries were totally a guilty pleasure of hers, and Nina totally knew it.

“Here, let me help.” She rushed down the steps and took the bags from Nina’s hands.

Nick and Teddy beat them into the house and made a beeline for the row of computers. Before Amelia had downed half a blueberry scone, they had her set up on one of the interconnected laptops. In no time, the conference was off and rolling, and she found herself completely immersed in her own fictional world. She’d never occupied it with so many other people at once, and she’d had no idea what a thrill that would be. The forums’ participants kept her brain constantly working, drilling her with in-depth questions about characters, settings, things implied and things behind the scenes. They took the sessions so seriously that the line between fantasy and reality became fuzzier by the hour. Amelia was so engrossed in the discussions that she barely remembered her earlier worries.

Questions did surface throughout the day about Colin, but not nearly as often as she had feared. And to her surprise, almost every time it happened readers stepped up in her defense with comments like,
“Leave the girl alone, hasn’t she had enough?”
and
“This is about her books, not her love life.”

Amelia was touched by the protectiveness of her fans. No author could possibly have better fans, she thought, and she told them so again and again. The whole day went far better than she’d expected. When things wound down that evening, she even found herself looking forward to doing it again the next day.

She was tired, though, and so was the rest of the crew. Once they’d finished the pizzas she’d ordered, Nina, Nick, and Teddy headed for the door. As soon as it closed behind them, Amelia dashed back to her room to grab her phone. She had a couple of missed calls from Colin, and she was dying to call him back and tell him about the conference.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey.” His voice was uncharacteristically subdued.

“Hey back. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing much. Just a long day.” He paused. “How was the conference?”

“It was awesome, seriously. I don’t know why I was dreading it so much. You wouldn’t believe how great everybody was, and the questions…man, they were so tough. I mean, the whole thing was maybe tougher in that sense than I expected, but that’s what made it so cool.”

“That’s great. I’m glad it went well.” He still sounded off, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Colin was the most perpetually sunny person she’d ever met.

“Seriously, what’s wrong? You sound…depressed.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. “So you haven’t seen any…news today? Well, not news, that’s not the right word for it. But you haven’t heard anything you want to talk to me about?”

Amelia hesitated. “Noooo. I haven’t had a second free today. Well, I mean, we had breaks and stuff, and lunch but…” Her voice trailed off, and her heart thudded in her chest. “Why, Colin? What’s going on?”

He sighed. “Nothing. That’s just it. Nothing’s going on. But…” He paused, sighed again. “Shit. I never pay any attention to this crap, but I was afraid you’d see it and be upset. There’s news out today about me, and it’s not true. I know you’ve seen how it all works enough by this point that you know better than to believe it, but I’ve been scared all day that you’d see it or hear about it and that you
would
believe it. When I didn’t hear from you all day…well, I’ve been worried.”