“That you should not be up working at two in the morning. It is not good for you to pull those late nights, Scarlett. Not sleeping is part of what got you into this mess in the first place. What would Dianne say?”

She must be serious if she’s referencing my therapist by her first name.

“She’d probably tell me to set better work-life boundaries,” I begrudgingly admit. “But I don’t have a life anymore, so I don’t think those boundaries apply.”

I mean that to be cute and self-deprecating and not as sad and lonely as I fear it came across. Luckily, Trina laughs. “They do if it means the difference between you being able to continue this work sustainably or having another breakdown.” Leave it to her not to mince words. But it’s good. I need to hear this.

“I’m not going to have another breakdown.”

“Oh yeah?” She clearly doesn’t believe me. “Then why did you call me and ask me to tell you not to delete everything you wrote today?”

Touché.

“It was a moment of weakness.”

“And how many moments of weakness have you had since you started writing this one?” she asks pointedly, but she doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Listen, we negotiated better deadlines for you this time around. There is no reason why you need to be doing edits and drafting simultaneously anymore.”

“I’m not. My edits still haven’t come back.”

“They will,” she presses. “Take a break, Scarlett. Your problem right now is that you’re not thinking past this next book. You’re thirty-two years old, for fuck’s sake. You need to figure out how you’re going to do this for thirty-some more years until you can retire, because whatever is happening over there is not it.”

“Boundaries,” I mumble.

“Boundaries,” she repeats triumphantly, as if she’s so excited I’m finally catching on.

Maybe I do need to sleep more. I’m not really going to argue that, even with myself. Better sleep leads to better mental health. I found that out the hard way. But there are other boundaries that could protect me, too. Here I am, thinking I need to do everything all the time. Thinking I need to work with Ryan again just because he said a few nice things. As if five years apart was long enough to forget enough of what we had together to make a work relationship plausible. As if the memory of his touch, his smile, his words didn’t come crashing right back into me the moment I laid eyes on him in that conference room.

As if I haven’t been burying myself in a new manuscript at least partially to avoid thinking about him. When he’ll send edits back, what he thinks of my revisions, whether or not he’ll stop by again. Why he hasn’t stopped by again.