Page 33 of Room for Us

“I’m sorry to hear that. How did she die?”

I tense. “Heart attack. What’s with the twenty questions?” My effort to find a light tone fails, the words emerging strained.

Those unnerving eyes narrow on me, seeing too much and nothing I want him to.

“I’m a curious person. Call it a professional hazard. You can ask me questions too, if you want.”

This conversation is already too much. An iceberg—pretty on the top, miles of darkness below. I don’t want to know anything about him, mainly because I want to know everything.

But the opening is too much to resist. “What brings you to Sun River for six weeks?”

He blinks, a guard dropping over his face and eyes. “I need some time to figure things out.”

“What kind of things?”

“Work things.”

“What do you do for work?”

He pauses. “I’m a writer.”

Ha! I was right!

“Screenwriter?”

“No.”

Eh, almost right.

His recalcitrance makes me smile. “Not so easy when the questions turn on you, is it?”

Ethan chuckles, head dropping, a lock of dark hair shadowing his cheek. “Nope.” His gaze shifts up, finds mine. “Guess we’re both used to being alone.”

His choice of words hits a newly exposed nerve. My spine straightens. I’m not used to being alone. Until recently, I had a husband and partner. Chris and I were married almost seven years, and mostly happy until the last few. I think. That counts for something, right?

Cold drifts down my spine, clearing a path for the truth—or rather, the lack of truth. All the secrets I never told. The lies by omission.

Our marriage contract was made on disintegrating paper, and I was the toxin that infected it.

“Zoey?”

Shaped by his lips, my name sounds different. New and uncertain, but unaccountably familiar. Like he knows more about me than is natural. Like he hears all the words I can’t say.

Like we’re the same.

The revelation lands like an arrow in my gut, twisting deep inside me. Seizing my mug, I stand and head to the sink.

“What did I say? Did I upset you?”

“Not at all.” Glancing at him—not really seeing him—I force a smile. “Just tired suddenly. I’m going to turn in.”

I don’t bother rinsing my mug. It hits the bottom of the sink with a jarring clang, and I’m gone from the room before the sound fades.

21

That professor who said writers are selfish pricks? He also made it clear that most writers—successful ones, namely—have antisocial tendencies. Ingrained habits of exploitation, manipulation, and violation of privacy. It makes them especially suited to picking apart motivations, shaping three-dimensional characters, and crafting plots that test the deepest reservoirs of what makes a person human. What makes them good or evil. Or neither.

Suffice to say, he wasn’t a popular guy. His class was closer to psychology than the written craft. But I admired his loyalty to the exploration of why and how. The mapping of the engine that drives a writer’s mind. Its colors and shades. The music it makes, both light and dark.

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