Madeline felt her face flush. She swallowed the lukewarm—practically cold—liquid in the bottom of her cup, hoping to obscure her face. “Yes. Autobiographical.”

“But the stuff about what’s going on in the marriage between the couple,” he said. “The way they interact. The kinds of things they fight about. It feels . . .”

“Forced?”

“Inauthentic.”

If Hoffman had thrown hot coffee in her face, it wouldn’t have burned more. What an awful word for an author to hear about their writing.

Inauthentic.

But she couldn’t deny it. When she wrote those parts, it felt forced, like she was struggling up a steep hill with a heavy pack on her back. She strained her imagination but just couldn’t get it to go where it needed to go. At times like those, she wanted to throw her pen across the room and burn the whole manuscript.

How did anybody do this for a living?

How did anybody do this at all?

“Maybe I should abandon this,” she said, hating to admit defeat. It ripped at the very fiber of who she was. But she didn’t know if she had enough time, energy, or knowledge to go on. “Maybe I should write poetry instead. I have those poems from your class.”

She expected Hoffman to burst with joy. And he did.

A mile-wide smile split his face. “You don’t know how much that does my heart good.”

Madeline was glad to see him happy. And she tried to cover her own disappointment over admitting she might not be able to write a novel for her thesis project by forcing a smile across her face. She probably looked ill.

Then Hoffman did something unexpected.

He reached under the table and placed his hand on her knee. And he left the hand there for a moment that drew out longer than Madeline imagined it could, his fingers against the denim.

Right when Madeline was about to look around, to see if anyone else was watching, he pulled his hand back.

“I want you to write that novel, Madeline. I think you have the ability to do it.” His smile lost none of its intensity. And even though his teeth looked a little gray and uncared-for, there was something charming about how much he wanted to help her. “And I have some ideas for how you’re going to get there.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Hoffman’s behavior in Troy’s shook Madeline.

She went home that night, back to the little apartment on the third floor, the one at the top of the rickety staircase, and replayed the conversation in the coffee shop. She realized everything about it had been pretty normal. Hoffman had acted like he always did—a little out of it, a little condescending, but ultimately supportive. When he told her he wanted her to go ahead and write the novel and not poems, her heart flipped like someone had shocked her with jumper cables.