Four authors waiting to hear back from me.

I doubt I’ll be able to focus enough to comprehend a full page. I’ve been reading the same paragraph over and over and not a damn sentence is staying with me.

It doesn’t matter, though. None of this really does.

All that matters is that I stay in this office for as long as Evan’s here. He’s like a ghost in this house. A ghost of his former self.

So I do what I’ve always done, I’ve bury myself in work. That was the plan anyway, but now I can’t focus on anything but the sounds of him moving through the house.

He walks by the door every few hours, making the floor groan, and I know he wants to open it, wants me to talk to him. All I can hear is him saying it’d be better if I didn’t know. To hell with that.

I’m not going to give him all of me when he can’t be bothered to do the same. There is nothing more important than us. Not a single thing that should come between us; yet it feels like he’s got plenty in the space between my heart and his.

So we’re at a standstill, him refusing to leave and me refusing to blindly forgive.

His voice plays in my head over and over again, telling me it’s only ever been me. I want to believe it. It’s everything I’ve been praying for him to say.

But then what is he hiding?

My eyes flicker to the screen as my nails tap on the pale blue ceramic mug next to my laptop. Tick, tick, tick. I read the line over and over: Love is a stubborn heart.

Magdalene, the editor, highlighted the line. She thinks it’s beautiful and she wants repetition of the metaphor throughout the book.

Love is a stubborn heart.

Is it, though? My forehead scrunches as I think back to the story in the manuscript. The tale about a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Two families who hated each other and their children who wanted nothing more than to run away together. It’s not a tragedy but it doesn’t have a happily ever after either. It’s too realistic.

If love really was that stubborn, wouldn’t they have been together in the end?

Maybe it wasn’t really love.

Or maybe love just wasn’t enough.

I don’t know that I agree that love is stubborn. I suppose it is, but more than that, it’s stealthy and lethal. I nod my head at the thought.

Love is deadly.

Rolling my eyes. I push the laptop away. My comments don’t belong on this manuscript right now.