friends and his uptight parents. She’d tried to be everything he wanted in a wife-to-be.
But it was never enough.
“‘The funny thing was, Kylie had never wanted to get married before,’” Cora continued reading to the bird. “‘She was always the independent one, the career-driven one. But now that she’d returned home to Little Creek, a town so small it could be mistaken for a speck of dust on a map, she knew things had to change. Her grandma was dying. And she’d never seen any of her grandkids get married. Not a single one in all fourteen of them.’”
Cora looked at Joe, who turned his head away.
“I’m guessing, judging by the cover, Miss Kylie gets herself tangled up with a fireman,” she said to the bird. “But she shouldn’t settle for less than love.”
Love had always been her goal. Watching her parents’ marriage go from rocky, to rockier, to holy shit the bridge is about to blow! had been painful. But it all became clear one day when she found her mother in a drunken stupor in their smoking room—which was a ridiculous name, since no one ever smoked in there—rambling about all the mistakes she’d made in her life.
“I should never have done it,” her mother had croaked, one talon-tipped hand sliding around the back of Cora’s neck as she attempted to lift her mother from the couch. “I should never have married that sonofabitch. He never loved me and I never loved him.”
The conversation—if you could call it that—had stuck with Cora. Love was important, and settling for anything less would lead only to misery. Too bad Cora seemed to fall for jerks time and time again.
Her BS radar was officially broken.
“But we’re not going to think about any of that, are we?” she said to Joe. The white bird swung his head back and forth. It wasn’t quite a “no,” more like the love child of a yoga stretch and some heavy metal headbanging, but she’d take it.
Just as she was about to dive back into the story, her phone rang. A familiar picture appeared on the screen, and she swiped her thumb across it to answer the call.
“Hi, Dad.” She smiled.
“Is that… Are you carrying a parrot on your shoulder?” Her father peered at the camera, getting so close that the image blurred a bit. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, as usual. The man could barely see a thing without them, but he was vain as hell about it.
“It’s a cockatoo,” Cora replied, and Joe made a trilling noise in response. “He says hi.”
Her father frowned. He wasn’t big on the outdoors, and the whole “no pets” rule was one of the only things he and her mother had actually agreed on.
“Well, anyway,” he said. “I wanted to give you a call about the book.”
She stifled a smile. That was her dad, always and forever about business. He’d probably forgotten she was even in Australia. Well, if the cockatoo hadn’t given it away.
“I was worried when I didn’t hear back after I sent that email. I know I can be a tough critic—probably the toughest—but I want you to know it’s for your own good, Cora. I would never send you into the industry unprepared.”
She bobbed her head. “I know, Dad. I appreciate that you push me.”
Even if the hollow ache of his disappointment felt like it might split her in two sometimes. It had taken her months to work up the courage to tell him about her manuscript. Months beyond that to show him anything. No matter how Cora tried to brace herself, at the heart of it, she was a sensitive soul, and every rejection cut like a knife.
That’s part of being a creative person—you need to draw on that pain for your stories.
“This industry is…” Her father sighed. “It’s brutal. I’ve seen authors come and go. I’ve seen the rejection tear them apart. Only the most talented and resilient have even a hope of surviving.”
“I’m resilient,” she protested. Lord knows that resilience was the very thing she’d required to get through her childhood. “And Professor Markham said I had real talent. It’s raw, maybe, but I’m a hard worker. I don’t mind putting my pedal to the metal if it means a shot at my dreams. I know…I know this story could be something great.”
She was meant to be a writer. Books were her life, and the time she spent dreaming up worlds and characters to inhabit them was the only time she