Bob had a feeling the unnamed prostitute might not last long. And that her loss would scar Rowan.

Derrick would love the pages, but Bob could see it was all going a bit cliché. Familiar trope after familiar trope, strung together. The whore with a heart of gold. The beautiful girl who was not long for this world, who existed solely for the hero to sorrow over and then vow to revenge. In the TV show, the actress playing her would be expected to bare her breasts.

But women could be more than Madonnas or whores or old ladies. They had their own agency. Lilly had taught him that. And so much else. He absently stroked the scarf around his neck. The last time he’d been allowed a shower, he had washed it and then put it back on wet.

And while it was still great fun to write for Derrick, like a wild party, eventually you got tired of waking up on the living room floor with one of your shoes missing.

To prove Bob really was the one who had written the first chapter, Derrick had started broadcasting what he called the Haldon Cam on the dark web. It was like Animal Planet’s Kitten Cam. Derrick’s idea was Bob’s fans would love to watch him typing away on his treadmill. Or as Derrick put it, “Watch his next bestseller being written in real time!” At night, he ran a loop of the day’s footage of Bob typing away, thinking he was giving him time to sleep. In reality, Bob waited until Derrick was asleep and then started in on his other, secret project.

Bob was now writing two Eyes of the Forest, not one. One during the day, in full view of the Haldon Cam, and one secretly at night. One for Derrick and one for himself, like a parent making sure to divide things equally between two kids. Only in this case, one kid had no idea about the other.

For the past few days, he’d obediently climbed under the covers as soon as Derrick turned off the light. But he didn’t sleep. Instead, he waited impatiently until the cabin was silent. Then he got back on the treadmill and wrote.

Now, working mostly by feel, Bob rolled a crisp new piece of paper into the typewriter. A faint, milky light reflected into the room from the snow, but it was enough. By now he was touch typing with ease. In some ways, it felt better to type in the dark when he couldn’t even see what he wrote. No temptation to ball up the page the way he used to.