Flashes of my parents’disastrous marriage flicker through my mind. Mom with her endless stream of boy-toy boyfriends. Dad with his perpetual disappointment. Neither could stay put long enough to build anything lasting.
I was five when they tossed me headfirst into their marital whirlpool. That’s when I learned love could be as fleeting as cherry blossoms in spring and as destructive as a tornado on steroids.
In those moments of darkness and chaos, I’d rescue my cherished toy sailboat from its perch on my dresser and let it sail across the sea of my sky-blue comforter in an imagined escape from their domestic hurricanes.
I’d picture myself aboard that tiny ship, sailing towards tranquility far removed from the tempestuous storms at home, the salty breeze filling my lungs with hope and freedom. Each imaginary wave kissing the hull was an assurance—a sanctuary where love couldn’t shatter or distort itself into something cruel and unrecognizable.
Maybe one day, I thought, I’d find a real-life first mate to help me navigate these stormy waters. But until then, it was just me and my tiny sailboat against the world.
I roll my shoulders back,straighten up, and grip my suitcase handle with newfound determination.
“Get a grip,” I tell myself. “You’ve written heroines out of stickier situations than this.”
Of course, those heroines were fictional, their fate controlled by the tap-tap-tap of my keyboard.
Real life is messier.
Real life involves bad hair days, waterlogged heels, broken hearts, and the knowledge that people will weave elaborate lies about the drenched people who surprised them on their doorsteps with the same precision they used to trick you online.
Real life doesn’t come with time machines that whisk you away when everything goes sideways—though God knows it should.
With renewed purpose, I step back into the rain towards the bus station—a few streets over, according to my map app.
My suitcase trails behind me in a steady rhythm as determination replaces despair. Somewhere inside this disaster lies the story I need to tell—I just have to survive long enough to write it.
Chapter Three
The Scottish rainhas evolved from merely unpleasant to actively vindictive. It drums against my shoulders with increasing urgency, as if trying to push me into the ground and bury me without a funeral.
My phone’s map app flickers between helpful and useless, the blue dot of my location jumping erratically across the screen. It appears to be just as bamboozled by life’s shenanigans as I am.
Lovely. Even GPS has abandoned me.
I squint at street signs that might as well be written in ancient Pictish for all the good they’re doing me, my vision blurred by raindrops clinging to my eyelashes.
“Excuse me,” I call to a passing woman hunched beneath an umbrella that resembles a massive red mushroom house fromThe Smurfs. “Where can I find the bus station?”
She gestures vaguely down a narrow side street, muttering something that sounds like “second left, then right at the kirk” before hurrying away.
I have no idea what a kirk is, but I’m assuming it’s some building and not, say, a rare Scottish woodland creature waiting to complete my humiliation by stealing my luggage.
I drag my increasingly waterlogged suitcase down the cobblestone alley, its wheels no longer rolling so much as scraping in protest. The case contains three “date night” outfits I’d carefully selected for impressing Brady, each one now destined to become evidence of my spectacular misjudgment. It also holds my laptop with the fifteen pages of my new manuscript—the only fifteen pages I’ve managed to write in eight months.
Fifteen pages that Margot declared “technically words, but lacking the essential ingredient of not putting readers into a lifelong coma.”
My right shoe squelches with each step, the insole apparently having decided to drink half of Scotland’s rainfall. I should probably find a place to sit down and adjust it, but that would require stopping and stopping might lead to thinking, and thinking would definitely lead to ugly crying.
Public sobbing is not on today’s itinerary.
The memory of Margot’s voicemail from last week surfaces: “Mills, my darling, now Highbury wants an outline by Friday. I’ve told them you’re deepin the creative process—please don’t make me a liar. Again.”
How do you tell your indispensable agent that you’ve lost faith in the very concept your career is built on?
“Hey Margot, funny story—I no longer believe in love, so writing about people falling into it and living happily ever after now feels like crafting elaborate fairy tales about unicorns farting rainbows and responsible politicians saving the day.”
My “Happily for Always” saga had been successful—four installments detailing the smooth-sailing journey of Roxy Fairfax, a highly regarded London Matchmaker, as she helps her clients and herself find love in the most unexpected places.
Readers were captivated by Roxy. My editor and publisher were enchanted by her. Yet, I found myself growing weary of her and her ceaseless hopefulness, her resilience to rebound from heartache with a witty retort and a fresh red rose in her hair.
