“I know. Bonnie’s amazing. She’s… everything. But it’s too late,” I said, the words like stones piled on top of my heart.
Hunter wasn’t finished. “This isn’tyou, brother. What happened to the guy who used to jump off the roof wearing cardboard wings to see if he could fly?”
“He broke his ankle, if I remember correctly.”
Ignoring my sardonic reply, Hunter kept going. “What happened to the kid who sent out hundreds of query letters to magazines and agents, trying to get your short stories and graphic novels published, who kept going in spite of all the rejection letters filling up your inbox? You were fearless. Youwentfor it. You learned from your mistakes and kept trying. Even when we got older, and everyone said, ‘Writers never make any money,’ and, ‘Don’t quit your day job,’ and that no one wanted to read about dragons, and elves, and sword-fighting knights in this day and age… you wrote it anyway because you had a story to tell, and you believed. You said, ‘If anyone can make it in this business, I will.’ You inspired me, man. You always have. There’s no fucking way I’d have launched my own tech company if I hadn’t watched you take risks, and trust yourself, and go for it.”
He finally stopped for a breath. “Findthatguy… and tell him to find his balls and get his butt on the highway to New York. Or he’s going to regret it for the rest of his life. AndI’llhave to hear about it.”
“I’m a mess,” I confessed. “I never dealt with all the shit that happened with dad. What if I can’t change?”
“You can do anything you want to. I know because I’ve watched you do it my entire life. It’s going to take some work, but neither one of us is afraid to work at what matters to us. So, the question is—how much does Bonnie matter to you?”
The answer popped immediately into my mind.
More than anything.
After we said goodbye and hung up, I sat for a while, thinking about my younger brother’s advice and staring at Bonnie’s left-behind laptop.
Hunter was right. I’d sustained hundreds if not thousands of rejections before I’d found success as a writer.
And those were probably just as well-deserved as the one Bonnie had delivered on Thursday morning.
But I hadn’t quit and thrown myself a pity party. I’d improved. I’d grown and changed as a writer, becoming a better version of myself.
I’dtrustedthat all the blood, and sweat, and tears would be worth it all someday.
My reward had been a publishing contract, followed by a bidding war and a larger, much more substantial contract when I’d submitted Onyx Throne. The television show and sales of the sequels had surpassed my wildest dreams.
Why would I ever quit trying to win Bonnie back when the potential reward—a real-life Happily Ever After—was so much greater?
I knew what I had to do.
Flipping through the notebook, I found the article she’d written about our interview.
Thankfully, in spite of what she’d claimed, her handwriting was neat—or at least it was a whole helluva a lot neater than mine.
I opened a file on the laptop and transcribed the article word for word. It was good. Really good. She was an incredible writer.
Maybe one day soon, if I was really lucky, I’d get to tell her that in person.
For now, I still had some work to do.
Retrieving my own laptop, I copied and pasted a particularly exciting excerpt from the middle of Book Seven and emailed it to Charlotte, along with Bonnie’s completed article and my compliments on what a talented, patient professional she was.
Then I re-opened my Book Seven manuscript and started writing. My fingers flew over the keyboard, the words coming faster than they ever had before.
My brain and heart were on fire, crackling and popping with fresh inspiration and ideas. The words flowed, the page numbers increased.
I didn’t even need caffeine. I was going on the power of new hope.
By sunrise Monday, the book was complete, and I knew the ending was exactly, perfectly right. It wasbetterthan the one in the original outline.
Somehow all that had transpired over the past year and a half, the good and the bad, had worked together to produce the conclusion that had always been meant to be.
Now all that was left was chasing my own happy ending. I hit “print” on the final chapters—plus a dedication page that, if I dared to say so myself, was truly brilliant.
Gathering the pages, I slid them into a big brown envelope.
