“I don’t know, babe.” How long had it been since Annie had asked Kristin to give her some time to get over her silly crush? And was she getting over it? She didn’t have much of a choice. “I don’t think Kristin is the sort of person to shout this sort of thing from the rooftops.”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure Sheryl is cut from the same discreet cloth.” Jane sighed. “And in a few weeks, they’ll all be in the shop for Caitlin and Josephine’s book launch party.”

“Would you rather we didn’t have the party in the shop?” Annie didn’t care if she had to lose an evening of excellent business to save Jane from an extra dose of mortification.

“No, of course not. As long as I’m not writing, we can’t afford to turn down opportunities like that.”

Annie didn’t feel like adding a discussion on Jane’s writing and the sense of, at times, illogical responsibility and pressure it provoked in her, on top of the one they were already having. “If you’re sure,” she said, and gave the back of Jane’s neck an extra gentle squeeze.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When Jane failed to write, she read everything she could get her hands on, hoping that being confronted with the written word would fill her with such joy and awe, she’d want to produce some of her own. At the moment, she was right in the middle of a Google vortex of inspirational writing quotes. She’d come across most of them before: “All first drafts suck”; “A small number of words every day will add up to a full-length book soon enough”; “Procrastination is just another form of resistance” and so on and so on.

Until she came across an article saying that when you’re prolific, you can’t expect everything you create to be a masterpiece or become a classic. This gave Jane pause. It came pretty close to thoughts she’d been harboring herself, because didn’t writing mediocre prose—that could always be fixed later—trump not writing at all? Yes, throwing away her last work in progress had been a huge relief at the time, but not long after it had started grating. She wasn’t producing anything new and Jane’s preferred state was production modus. When she wasn’t writing, she felt less than she could be. She got worked up about minor things that would otherwise be absorbed by the buzz of creation. She figured she would even be dealing better with the whole Kristin business if she wasn’t feeling so inadequate in her professional life.