Page 44 of The Lost Book of First Loves

“Right. I’ll grab the journals.”

He headed to the walk-in closet, where she could see a huge safe, twice the size of a typical gun safe.

“Would you like me to go into the other room?” she asked.

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. So I don’t spy on the combination or something and break into the safe in the middle of the night.”

He laughed, a low, sexy sound that somehow seemed to ripple down her spine, much to her dismay. “These diaries are the only thing of value in here and I’m handing them over to you.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

He worked the mechanism on the safe, not bothering to hide the code. The door slid open smoothly and from inside the cavernous space, he pulled out a large archive-grade box, then a second one and a third.

“Carson went through at least a few journals a year, always the same kind.”

He held one up and she saw it was a medium-size black hardcover notebook she recognized as top quality and exclusive.

“He started each writing day by jotting down some of his thoughts. He said it was his way of purging his mind of all the minutiae before he settled down to the serious business of writing.”

“You said you haven’t read any of them?”

“I’ve paged through a few of them, but it feels very personal, reading someone else’s journal. Especially when that someone was a good friend.”

She looked at the boxes and was suddenly overwhelmed at the task. “It’s going to take time for me to get through all of these. Perhaps I should only take out a few at a time. What if the cabin catches on fire while I’m staying here and they’re all lost to the world?”

He smiled a little. “Probably smart.”

“I guess that means you’ll have to come back to open the safe again when I work my way through these, but I would rather be safe than sorry.”

He shrugged. “I’ll give you the code.”

She stared. “You would do that?”

“Why not?”

“You’re surprisingly trusting for a former prosecuting attorney.”

“About some things,” he said with enough of an edge to his voice to make her wonder what might be behind it.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked.

“I guess at the beginning, for continuity’s sake.”

“Sounds good.” He looked through the boxes and pulled out several that looked older than some of the others.

“These are the earliest, I think. By the dates on the cover, he started them a few years beforePurgatory Rivercame out.”

It seemed almost mystical to imagine him paging through these books, recording his hopes and fears. She took the notebook from Beck and opened the pages at random.

The entry she scanned was a fairly banal one, where he talked about a phone call with his agent the day before and how he had written eight pages that day.

To paraphrase Steinbeck, I have sat long at my work and the pen felt good in my hand.

She couldn’t wait to dive into more.

“Here’s the code for you,” Beck said, scribbling some numbers on a sticky note he pulled out of a small box on the desk, bound with saddle-colored leather. “When you finish those and are ready to start more, you won’t have to wait for me.”

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