The Fiction Writer

That's what writing fiction was, wasn't it? Processing your own life, answering all those questions in any way you wanted to, since fictional worlds operated with their own language and their own rules and their own timelines. They offered their own answers.

The truth was, I was getting pretty tired of retellings. Of writing them, of living them. Of being trapped by their constraints. Whatever I was going to do next, I wanted it to belong completely and only to me. I wanted to write the rest of my story my own way.

Too melodramatic.” I laughed, but the sound caught in my throat, coming out more like a tiny cry. “But I guess people always say the truth is stranger than fiction.

You think Ash is some kind of magician who will change your life? Well, magicians saw beautiful women in half or make them disappear.” She snapped her fingers, and I thought about Bex. About Angelica. Is that what Ash had done to one or both of them? “Leave Ash alone. Go home. You’re out of your depth, young lady.

But what happened to that girl? I’d left her somewhere so long ago, it was almost hard to remember she existed. That she was me.

She looked up again, and now I noticed her eyes were a steely gray, the color of every morning in Malibu before the fog burned off across the water.

Life imitating art imitating life. Is it truth or fiction? The line feels blurry between where one ends and the other begins.

A disaster disguised as a brilliant plan.

God, she made it sound so easy. Like all my doubts and worries were whispers, not screams.

I stare off at the water, and it’s dark and beautiful. But even here in this moment, I understand I will leave this place someday soon. That whenever I return again, it will be as a stranger, or as a ghost of the woman I am now.

You can’t dance with the sun forever, without eventually bursting into flames.

I laughed, and then a silence settled between us. We’d run out of coffee to drink and things that were definitely safe to say.

Just sitting in the passenger seat suddenly took me back ten years, and for a moment I remembered what it was like to feel happy, to be filled with this strange thing called hope.

Sometimes I can still remember how I used to be a woman on my own in the world. How I was young and pretty and smart, and life glittered with so much promise and possibility.

Maybe from the very beginning, everything about our entire relationship was built on a lie.

I’d long believed that a person’s books can tell you everything there is to know about them.