Page 9 of Room for Us
My phone buzzes, rattling across the desk. Ignoring it, I reach for my battered copy of A Farewell to Arms, ever stationed beside my laptop. The pages are yellowing, the spine disintegrating from overuse. Gently lifting the cover, I read the inscription.
For Ethan,
Be brave. Be true.
Love,
Mom
Before I’m fully cognizant of moving, I’m on my feet and ripping my hardcovers from the bookshelf. Multiple pristine, first edition copies of my seven books, with their beautiful, colorful custom covers, hefty spines, and silky, printed pages.
I toss them to the floor in a haphazard pile. My life’s work. My worth measured in letters and numbers.
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
E.M. Hart
The words blur. Breath bursts from my lungs, my shoulders dropping in defeat.
I need to get out of here. Out of this office, this house, this city. This state. Maybe the damn country.
Unfortunately, disappearing isn’t an easy thing. Especially when you’re a grown man with responsibilities. Or if I’m honest, just one—a daughter. I don’t want to disappear from her. Just the rest of the world.
Daphne is the only part of my life that doesn’t give me a headache. Since her birth, I’ve been in her thrall, obsessed with every sound and movement she makes. When she was a few months old, I even asked her mother to marry me so I could see her morning and night.
Janice had a good laugh at that—no way was she going to marry a three-week fling. She didn’t even want to date me. A few years ago, she told me she hesitated to contact me at all when she found out she was pregnant. I was a mercurial man, a novelist of negligible success, mostly drunk and only sometimes charming.
I begged her to give me a chance to be Daphne’s father. She consented—warily. More motivated than I’d been in my life, I went home and wrote my first bestseller. The rest, as they say, is history. Until two years ago, that is, when my well of inspiration ran dry. No new ideas. No interest.
Something my agent will never understand—I can’t write about something that doesn’t excite me in some way. The series that made me rich? It doesn’t need a fucking ending. Life’s problems don’t wrap themselves in ribbon and declare themselves resolved. My characters don’t need resolution, restitution, or revenge. They’re doing just fine where I left them, living happily-for-now in their imaginary ever after.
But there’s a contract, a three-time extended deadline, and a publishing house at their wits’ end. Somehow, someway, I have to write one more book in the world that’s given me so much. My publisher demands it. My readers send thousands of emails monthly begging for it.
So what am I going to do?
Exactly what I’ve always done.
Flee.
Opening my laptop, I dive into researching places to disappear to. Somewhere remote, but not too remote. Private, but with amenities. Somewhere meaningful. Motivational. Inspirational. Somewhere I can pry the lid off my writer’s block and find some goddamn words.
An hour of fruitless searching later, I’m on the verge of packing a bag and driving until I run out of gas. Daphne will understand. Even Janice will. I’ve had the sense more and more often lately that both of them are sick of me. Or rather, of who I’ve become. They’d probably love to see the back of me for a while.
Britt was right when she told me I’ve let myself go, lost my spark. Whatever the hell a spark is, it’s gone. I don’t feel it. Or much of anything anymore.
Red teases the corner of my vision—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, in its usual place on my desk.
And I suddenly know where I’m going.
6
“Zoey Kemper, is that you?”
I ignore the voice coming from somewhere behind me in the grocery store. I’ve become a master at avoiding my peers—those I went to high school with and who’ve since made their home in Sun River.
We had nothing in common then, and I’m not interested in rehashing glory days gone by. Their glory days, not mine. So they can take their big smiles, tan faces, and electric-white teeth somewhere else.
I’ve never considered myself a negative person. Well, until recently. Waiting for my luck to turn is starting to wear on me. Almost a month since the inn has reopened for business, and despite hundreds of clicks on our website, there’ve been zero bookings.
