But, hey, he was a writer, and if that shredded, soggy scrap didn’t contain the wittiest line ever penned, given the circumstances, he’d eat his keyboard. Despite this being a scene straight out of a horror film, he began to laugh.

Even as he reached for the note, he laughed. Even as his arm reminded him he had months of physical therapy ahead, he laughed. And as he considered, ruined as it was, that he might still frame the piece, he laughed. It would be a unique reminder to him that he should never forget the tenuous grasp any person has on their fate. That fate enjoyed delivering a constant stream of big, cosmic jokes.

The sheet tore into tiny, soggy shreds at his touch. The more he tried to save it, the more it dissolved in his hands, returning to its original pulped form. The words faded and became only smeared lines on the disintegrating paper. But he’d never forget them. He saw them in his mind as his hand trailed across the notepad only a few short hours ago.

The End. Goodbye.

He laughed again as he scrunched the mush and pressed it into the book before bending to Orelia to return her precious possession to her grasp.

73

William slid his hand between the two books and pushed, so that he might gain a closer look at the novel to their left’s cover. Yes, he was right! Suffer Them to Come to Light, an early edition. He hadn’t seen it on a shelf—other than his own—in a long time. For a moment, he even considered asking for a pen and offering to sign the inside flap, then thought better of it.

That book was part of his past, along with the title New York Times Bestseller. This one, printed before he’d earned that moniker, only included his name in bold, white letters.

He was good with that, for the moment.

Plain old William Barnes. Copywriter.

Not such a bad job. To write blurbs for websites and make a little on the side hawking a few magazine pieces. This work paid the bills without the pressure of striving to top sales charts. The bonus being, he didn’t need an agent or a publishing house with their deadlines and demands.

At night he still wrote fiction but now for his own pleasure. He no longer craved that others read his books. Reading his own work was enough. The pure pleasure of creating something from nothing was all he needed for the moment.

Somewhere amid the mad fury of those days of his early success, he’d lost his way. He had forgotten why he created stories. It had become about sales numbers, due dates, reviews and money.

As time distanced him from all that had happened, perhaps he might return to publishing, when he could tell himself that the events on that storm-filled night were just a bad dream. That a book conjuring good and bad luck, had never existed. To believe that it could seemed ridiculous.