“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“You know what I’d rather do?” Kaylee said. “I’d rather just send it to you. I think it’s a romance, not a genre I know that much about. But you know romance and women’s fiction very well. Maybe you could take a look and tell me what’s missing.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“I’ll concentrate on finishing the suspense as a priority. Am I still on the schedule for next fall?”
“Of course,” Simone said. “But you know you have time if you need it. I don’t want you to feel pressured. We can drop you out and put you back in a few months later, depending on how slammed we are. Kaylee, I don’t want you to worry—you have a publisher and when a good writer has an emergency, we don’t kick them when they’re down. We’re here to work with you.”
“You’ve been so good that way. Please know how much I appreciate your patience and understanding.”
“As long as you know how much we love publishing you.”
* * *
Kaylee put in a tough week but produced forty pages that she liked, and the protagonist was getting closer to discovering that it was her photographer’s jealous brother who was murdering models. But she was exhausted. At the end of a hard writing day her neck and shoulders ached. Sometimes Landry would give her a nice shoulder rub in the evening and revive her spirits.
They were sitting in front of his TV, the fire roaring against the cold night, when her phone rang. She looked at it and declined the call.
“I don’t mean to be nosy, but you’ve done that a lot lately,” he said.
“It’s my father,” she said. “I really don’t feel like dealing with him now.”
“Do you know why he’s calling?” Landry asked.
“Yes. He’s hoping we can get together sometime around the holidays. You know how I feel about the holidays.”
“Like you wish they weren’t happening,” he said.
“Exactly. I know there’s no avoiding them but I really don’t want to try to add Howie to that stress.”
Landry frowned. “Did he do something really traumatic that makes you want to avoid him at all costs?”
“He did absolutely nothing. Nothing at all,” she said. “Can we just not talk about him?”
He gave her silky hair a soft stroke. “We won’t talk about it if you don’t want to, but I’m here for you if you do. I’m a good listener. And I care.”
“I know, that’s very sweet.”
“Because I love you, Kaylee.”
She felt the tears begin to gather in her eyes. Then they spilled over and there was a catch in her voice when she said, “I love you, too.”
“I’m no expert, but shouldn’t that make us happy?”
“It does make me happy, but what about us? I came here to get away and try to ignore the whole Christmas thing, but then there’s you and you live here and I live there and what’s going to happen to us? I’m supposed to go home after Christmas. I want to be in my mother’s house again but you don’t like Southern California and I can’t stay here, this isn’t my home. I have a home. You have a home! What am I supposed to do? We haven’t talked about—”
“Kaylee, you can do whatever you want to do. I know the landlord here. I can fix it for you to stay. Or go and come back. Literally anything that works for you.”
“That’s just it,” she said. “I don’t know what will work. I can’t stay, I can’t go. I can’t ask you to come to Newport, we’re not ready for that kind of commitment. I can’t stay here much longer, I don’t have my things around me. I’m only sure of one thing and it’s huge. I want my mom to not have died!”
He pulled her close and held her for a moment. “I know,” he said. “It’s going to be all right. Just stick to your original plan. Get your book done and get through Christmas. Everything will look better on the other side.”
“It would break my mother’s heart to think I’m dreading Christmas. She always worked so hard to make it nice for me.”
“I think she would understand, and I understand.”
* * *
Landry didn’t have any deadlines or pressing work—he wasn’t showing anything and he sold some of his pots from his website, but he was ahead of schedule. Still, he kept mostly to his shop working and designing because he didn’t want to get in Kaylee’s space. After having a good cry, she’d snapped out of the blues for a while, but she was hard at work and a little more serious than usual.