Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,46
ugly. Not on the outside. You make sure to do everything in your power to hide your true self. I see it now.”
He glared at me with true hatred, then walked off, slamming my door.
I realized after a few beats that he had not answered the question.
I stewed over Deacon’s exit for longer than I needed to. Or not long enough. Who could tell. I didn’t have experience stewing over a man…ever. But I did stew. Stared at the window with a glass of whisky. Not at the lake, but the spot where Emily died. What I didn’t do was write. I had snatches of paragraphs scattered all over a Word document, like a shredded, mismatched tapestry.
It gave me hives and made me want to vomit every time I looked at it.
I did not write that way.
I plotted.
Planned.
Outlined each chapter. Set a word count I was usually within on a couple words of hitting.
Everything was ordered. Controlled. Which didn’t work for a lot of authors, but it did for me. Because my stories came to me in such disjointed, ugly, and chaotic ways, the only way they could come together without breaking me as a person was with order.
But not this one.
I knew this one was different.
Of course it was.
That’s why I was here, after all. In this dead woman’s house, telling myself I came here to write when really, I came here to escape.
I was scared of my own story.
So yeah, I didn’t write after Deacon stormed out. I continued my research on Emily’s murder. It hadn’t hit the mainstream media yet, that there was a serial killer out there, preying on pretty, popular, young women.
Because America was in the middle of elections, everyone was watching stuffed suits fight with each other to move into a white house and lie to the masses for another four years.
That, and because journalists—real journalists, muckrakers—were a dying breed. We had killed them. With our social media, with our short attention spans and our narcissism.
Authors had felt that. The publishing industry had to restructure. But it was news that was getting torn up and sold for parts. Authors would always survive. People would always want stories.
Just not news, as it seemed.
I was tempted to contact Huff Post under a pseudonym and write the fucking story myself. I had all the information. The contacts. Quotes from police officers, one New York detective that was not happy I suddenly had to leave town and had to miss our date he was deluded enough to think was an affair.
I had the small columns speaking of tragedy no one really looked at anymore. Violence and death in this world had turned to white noise.
But a serial killer.
That was news.
News was not my job.
So, I didn’t contact anyone. Plus, it would be easier for me to get the information before the Feds swooped in and shut everything down. I was still planning on staging some sort of meet cute in order to meet the town’s chief who, according to Saint, was lazy and fat but also smart. He was the one that made the note the killer had done this before.
These were all the things I thought of with the broken pieces of my story staring at me.
I couldn’t stare at the document anymore. It was like looking at a mass of bloody limbs, too many or too few to turn into a fully formed corpse.
There wasn’t enough here to make a story.
There was too much.
It was too daunting. I was too much of a coward to weed through them all. Too lazy, too much of a perfectionist.
I slammed the laptop shut, in a gesture that was all too familiar these days. My fingers had forgotten what it felt like to glide over the keys. My brain unused to getting so lost in a story that day turned to night and meals passed by.
The cold air hit me like a semi to the face, I was in that much of a rush to leave the house. The temperature had dropped sometime in the middle of my pity party, of my emotional manipulation of my favorite bartender who was likely to spit in my next whisky. Or murder me, depending on how fucked up he really was.
I wondered if it would finally snow. Apparently, we were late in the season to be without it, according to Jessica at the grocery store, who was yet to be dissuaded by my rudeness.
Global warming was totally real, according to her.