My heart thuds in my chest. She’s so still. The rhythmic rising and falling of her chest is the only reason I know she’s not a statue. Casey’s warning rings through my consciousness, but I shake my head to dispel it. She seemed fine on the phone. There’s nothing that could have put her over the edge, as far as I know. The cover issue was inconvenient but not insurmountable, and she told me she didn’t have any difficult scenes coming up.

“Scarlett?” I ask cautiously from the doorway. “Is everything okay?”

She takes in a shaky breath, then lets it out through pursed lips. “No.”

In an instant, I’m on my knees in front of her, my hands resting comfortingly on her thighs just under the hem of her shorts. Now that I’m close to her, I can see her cheeks are shining with tears. “Beautiful, what’s wrong?”

Scarlett presses her eyes closed, her face still turned to the screen. Why won’t she look at me? What the hell is going on?

“There was a baby,” she says finally, not opening her eyes. “Not a baby. An embryo, probably. They’re called embryos for the first eight weeks. I looked that up because I was trying to feel better about it. I thought that if I didn’t call it a baby, it wouldn’t be as confusing for me, I guess. I don’t know. It felt like something one of my characters would have done, but it didn’t really work. How could I be upset about a cluster of cells? But I was, even though I didn’t want to be.”

She’s rambling, her eyes still pressed closed. Is she trying to work out a scene? Is she so lost in her words that she doesn’t know I’m here? That wouldn’t be unlike her. Maybe I misunderstood what this new book is about.

I rub her thighs with a little more pressure, trying to draw her out of whatever trance she’s in. “Scarlett, look at me.”

She furrows her brows and squeezes her eyes shut further. “I can’t.”

Okay, so she does know I’m here. I can work with that. “Why not, beautiful? Is this about your story?”

“No. It’s about me. Us? I’ve been alone with it for so long, I don’t even know anymore.”

My hands go still on her legs. I blink a few times, trying to get my brain to catch up to her words.

Alone with it for so long…

Baby… Embryo…

“You were pregnant?” I whisper, afraid that speaking it aloud will make it more true than it already is. My stomach drops as a pit of anger forms like dead weight in my belly. Is that what kept her away for all those years? “Whose?”