Page 24 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
Instead, it’s been sitting like an unpulled grenade on that counter for twenty-four hours. It’s radioactive. I should stay away.
I turn, putting the fridge door between me and the letter.
My eyes graze over the contents of the fridge without taking them in…because the letter is calling to me. Like Jumanji.
I lean back, peek around the door again. A ray of sun catches the letter. Read me.
“Ugh. Fine.” I slam the fridge door, snatch the letter, and tear it open.
Dear S.B,
I met two women tonight. One was a voice in the dark, who told me everyone deserves a second chance. The other was a woman I’ve spent seventeen years being wrong about—or maybe seventeen years being right about. I can’t tell anymore.
My heart picks up a beat.
The thing is, she treated me just the way I always thought she would. And I’m not sure I blame her. So I don’t know why that broke something in me, except maybe that I think I’d started to hope, and hope is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever carried.
I keep thinking there’s a version of my life where I’m not always on the wrong side of the glass. Where I don’t manage to screw everything up. Your books make me believe that version exists. Your letters make me believe I might deserve it.
Write back. Please—B.B.
Heat rises in my chest, a mixture of sympathy and righteous indignation battling for space inside my head. Why? Why did he have to be Beckett Benson?
I set the letter on the counter. Carefully. The way you’d set down a land mine prepped and ready to blow.
She treated me just the way I always thought she would.
I can’t write back. If I respond as S.B. and pretend I don’t know who he is—that’s a lie wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache. If I say The cookie woman was scared, give her time—I’m literally puppeteering my own romantic disasters through a pen name, which is the kind of thing that happens in the novels I write and which always—without fail—ends up in heartbreak. The only difference here is that that’s fiction and this is real life, where that sort of thing winds up with you in court, not the chapel.
I leave the letter. March back to the office. Open the laptop.
I type:
He finally looked at her. Really looked. And the thing that cracked open in his chest wasn’t love—not yet. It was something more terrifying. Recognition. The realization that this woman saw him—not the jersey, not the headlines, not the mistakes, not the performance—and didn’t look away.
My pulse thuds in my wrists. It’s a start, right?
Problem is, it’s not fiction.
But from there, the words start flowing. It’s well into evening when my phone buzzes again, pulling me out of the story, back to the real world.
Dad
Hey Evie, just touching base about the Farewell Skate event this weekend. Think you can make it?
It takes a moment to process the words. The Farewell Skate—I vaguely recall my dad mentioning it during the gala the other night. One last community skate before the old Sutton Arena comes down.
Everly
I don’t know. I’m so far behind on this book.
Three dots appear.
Dad
It would mean a lot to me, and to the community.
Blake’s Café is still there.
