Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,131

truth. The whole thing, the whole story.”

My face bent in a frown. “What do you mean?”

“You had a story to write,” she answered. “So write it.”

I shook my head against the thought, but my mind hooked the thread and pulled it, the idea lengthening and unraveling in my hands.

Write the story.

Tell him how I felt.

Tell everyone how I felt.

That, I could do.

“I don’t know if it will change his mind,” I said softly, wishing with all I had in me that it could.

Katherine reached for my hand. “But it might. If you’re honest and if he loves you, it might.”

The words were already stringing themselves together in my mind, my hope nothing but flickering embers.

But embers were better than nothing. And with gentle care, with love and tending, I could try to coax them into a flame.

And so I squeezed her hand and said, “It just might.”

The Truth About Tommy

Tommy

Three days.

Two broken hearts.

One shitstorm.

Zero words on my manuscript.

I stared at the blank page with blank eyes and a blank mind. I hadn’t written a word since before Chicago. The ending of the story had eluded me, my muse gone. I didn’t know how the story ended.

I didn’t know how our story ended.

In all the phone calls and meetings I’d had, not one of them had been with the one I needed, the one I wanted. There was only one person who could comfort me—the one who had broken my heart. We hadn’t spoken, though not for lack of things to say.

There were too many things to say. And I didn’t know how to say any of them.

I didn’t even know where to start.

I’d had my hands full anyway, attempting to straighten out the mess in an effort to ignore the gaping wound in my chest. The biggest win my lawyers had notched on their belt was Janessa’s head on a platter. When faced with the lawsuit, the Times had smiled, said they would take care of it, and she had been dismissed immediately. The next in line had swiftly stepped in, and I’d found her to be much more compliant. A retraction was in the works, I’d been told. Beyond firing Janessa, it was the best any of us could hope for.

Vivienne had not gotten her job back after all, and the slander suit we’d slapped her with—along with an ominous revenge porn charge—sent her packing. Literally. I’d heard she was on her way to Los Angeles. If I had my way, she wouldn’t be able to get a job at a newspaper more reputable than the Enquirer. And I often got my way.

My editor had been a much more difficult problem to solve. Thank God Steven loved the book enough to put up with my shit. I was just a few chapters from the end, and once that was turned in, he’d assured me things would be okay. Assuming the newspaper’s retraction went out soon.

And assuming I could write the end.

Amelia’s letter sat on the corner of my desk, folded and unfolded and folded again. A reminder.

I’d woken up in Chicago ready to come home and make it right. To work through it all, forgive and apologize, to hold her and move on.

But she’d been gone. And the letter that awaited me did nothing to mend my broken heart.

I’m sorry I hurt you so deeply that you’d seek comfort with her. I’m sorry for all I’ve done.

And I’m sorry I wasn’t enough.

I’ll always love you.

—Amelia

I closed my laptop with a forceful snick and pushed back from my desk. The room had become foreign, my life foreign. Amelia had changed everything, all the way down to where and how I wrote. And sitting in this room again was only a reminder that I couldn’t go backward.

I couldn’t erase the last month with her. I couldn’t pretend like things would be the same.

I didn’t want them to be. But I didn’t want to go back that far.

A week would have done just fine.

I missed her desperately. Every cold, quiet night without her. Hours spent wondering what she was doing, if she was all right, knowing she wasn’t. Days spent trying to reconcile what had happened and how I could both not want to see her at all with the need to find her, to hear her voice, to know she was alive and loved me and was hurting just as hopelessly as I was.

I exited the room, though its morose energy clung to me like the cold, following me down the