More Than One Night (28 page)

She blanched. Luckily Reese and David chose that moment to appear beside her, Reese drooping against her fiancé’s side in a dramatic display of exhaustion. Amelia pushed her chair back in relief and hugged her friends good-bye before following Reese toward the door.

* * *

Out on the street, she glanced at her phone—it was just after midnight. She ambled down the cobblestone blocks of Beale with one arm linked in Reese’s. David followed behind, cheerfully indulgent as their voluntary DD.

The air was warm, but the breeze coming off the river had a slight chill in it—the faint hint of a fall that hadn’t yet appeared. Amelia shivered and quickened her step, lost in thought and oblivious to the cars and lights and people surrounding them. The clang of a trolley’s bell jolted her out of her daze, and she almost crashed into Reese, who stopped short at the curb to wait for it to pass. The long red-and-green car clattered by on its track, the driver dinging her bell every thirty seconds as a warning to preoccupied, and drunk, pedestrians like her.

As they walked, Reese kept up a constant stream of chatter, but Amelia didn’t hear a word of it. Her mind skimmed over the conversation she’d just had with Katie, then the call from Andrew, and she realized suddenly the impact one would have on the other. She had no idea what kind of pressure would be added to her schedule now that a movie contract was in her future, but the prospect of returning to her old job seemed unlikely.

She stared ahead at the trail of moonlight glistening over the broad, rippling expanse of the Mississippi and thought about her old job, her old life, comfortable as a broken-in shoe. She glanced down at the pewter heels that a few hours earlier had held such promise. Suddenly they were offensive—a symbol of everything she was giving up.

As if in answer to her thoughts, her right heel snagged a jagged edge in the sidewalk. She lurched forward, avoiding a face-first plunge onto the concrete only because Reese squeezed her arm tighter, hauling her up yet again.

“Whoa, Mel. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Amelia said, feeling the full weight of the lie.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, David inched his Land Rover over the jagged lip of Amelia’s driveway, and she cursed herself internally for not flipping on the outside light before she’d rushed out several hours earlier. She fumbled for her keys as she made her way up the dark steps. The house was a classic 1920s bungalow, deceptively small from the outside with a façade spanned by a deep porch with battered stone columns—a characteristic of its Craftsman roots. The original, arched front door was deliciously dinged and gnarled. She’d spent an entire weekend stripping layers of old paint and then staining it a deep walnut that matched the rest of the trim.

Just before she put her key into the lock, she heard the faint whoosh of a window being rolled down. She turned to see Reese’s head leaning out of it, her hair a blue-white glow in the light of a nearby street lamp.

“You all right?” Reese called out.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Amelia said with a surprised laugh, pausing as she slid the key into the deadbolt. She opened the door and turned to face them before crossing the threshold into her dim foyer. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Oh…kay,” Reese said, watching her in a way that made Amelia feel discomfited. “I’ll call you in the morning.” She didn’t roll the window up until David had shifted the hulking vehicle into reverse and eased it back down the narrow drive.

Amelia kept the smile pasted on her lips and repeated the words in her head.

I’m fine.

She tossed her keys with a loud clatter into a pottery bowl on one end of the long wood bench in her entry and kicked out of her shoes, wishing she hadn’t picked a night like this to break them in. She raised one foot and tugged up the leg of her dark skinny jeans, wincing as she surveyed the glaring, red blister on her heel. She remembered Reese’s comment in the bar.
Oh well, at least they looked damn good.
She took in a long, slow breath and rubbed her eyes. The same could be said for her life right now. It looked damn good on the surface, the sources of friction visible only to her.

She walked into her living room, its cream walls, slipcovered furniture, and quirky collection of local, homespun art giving the room a cottage kind of charm. Her favorite chair, light blue and well-worn, looked like she’d just slipped out of it—a book lay folded open on its arm. Beside it glowed a small mercury glass lamp, the only source of light in the silent house. She kept the lamp on a timer to make it look like someone was home when she was out, a habit she’d picked up from her mom.

She felt the usual prickle of pride as she glanced around the cozy room. Her house was one of the things she loved best about living in Memphis. So many of her friends in other cities—especially her old friends in New York, where what had seemed like an enormous salary turned out to barely cover cab fares—were paying double in rent for cramped, dingy apartments what she paid for a mortgage on a three-bedroom, two and a half-bath house with modern upgrades and period charm.

Seriously, your life’s not so bad, Mel.
A tiny smile tugged at her lips as she crossed the black-and-white tile floor of her kitchen, thinking only she would feel the need to talk herself off the ledge the day she’d sold the movie rights to her first book. Her friends, if they knew, would think she was unhinged. She reached for a glass, half-filled it with water from the tap, and popped two ibuprofen to stave off the next morning’s headache. The microwave screen read 12:32.
Hmm, not too late to work.

She smiled again, thinking her friends would question her sanity at that thought, too. But she couldn’t afford to lose the whole day. Besides, she felt good, wired, the haze of her lingering buzz minimizing the enormity of her task.

She’d written her first book in the late-night hours. It was the only time she’d had, as busy as she’d been with work. At the time she’d had no inkling anybody else might want to read what she was writing. She probably wouldn’t even have shown the manuscript to Reese if she hadn’t demanded to know why Amelia was suddenly so busy all the time. And without a doubt, she wouldn’t have attempted to get it published if Reese hadn’t pushed her into it.

She shook her head as she mulled over the many ways her life had changed in the past two years.

Placing her glass in the sink, she flipped off the light and headed down the back hall toward her room. She replaced her party clothes with a T-shirt and her most lived-in flannel pants, pink plaid ones with a tiny hole at the left knee. Her pulse throbbed in her temples, beating past the layers of alcohol and Advil, as she made her way barefoot down the hardwood floor of the hallway to her home office.

She flipped on the light as she stepped into the room. Two months earlier, she’d painted the blue walls yellow—she’d read it was the best color for stimulating creativity. The small, square space was stuffed with an inspirational assortment of her favorite things: the scrapbooks and journals she’d kept since childhood, her favorite books, framed photos of all shapes and sizes. When she flipped on the desk lamp, her eyes lit on a cluster of frames on her desktop. In one was her older brother, Henry, and his family. In another were her, Henry, and their grandmother, smiling in front of a roller coaster on a trip to Six Flags in St. Louis. And in a third was her father—the only picture she had of him—with Brooke in a park or in the woods, some outdoor setting unknown to her. Her father was a poet, which sounded romantic, but became less so when you learned he’d left her mom for another woman when Amelia was five months old, a nurse in Brooke’s obstetrician’s office. He’d told Brooke the woman was his muse, that she’d inspired the best work of his life. Amelia thought it was as good an excuse as any to get the hell out of Dodge.

He’d died when she was nine, in a motorcycle accident in Colorado.

She sighed and plopped into her modern, lime-green desk chair, which contrasted starkly with the quirky antique table she used as a desk. Flipping open her laptop, she pulled up the blank document she’d closed twelve hours earlier, willing herself to be objective.
This isn’t personal. I have a job to do.
She paused with her fingers over the keyboard.

And stared at the screen.

Who was she kidding? She might have been able to detach herself the first two times around, but those first two books were different. She’d been drawing from the good stuff then, and the good stuff had been easy to write.

She stared at the desktop, one finger absently tracing the patterns in the wood. Her series,
Shattered
, was billed as a dystopian action-adventure, but at its core it was a love story—one critic had described it as
The Maze Runner
-meets-
When Harry Met Sally
, and secretly she’d always thought that was an apt description. The story was set a century into the future, twenty-five years after a cataclysmic collision with a meteor had shifted the Earth’s orbit, changing weather patterns and exterminating entire species—and two-thirds of the globe’s population—within weeks. Survivors had huddled into commune-like communities, and governments had morphed and joined forces or dissolved altogether.

At the series’ start, an international team of scientists who’d been studying the disaster predicted another collision within the year. In the midst of government cat fighting, the group was preparing to send up a team of experts charged with diverting the enormous mass of debris and gases that was moving in the Earth’s direction. This team included prodigies from a prestigious college program who had been hand-picked and taken from their families as kids to rebuild North America’s fledgling space program. Among them were Nick Brockman and Liana Riley, the series’ main characters.

The idea for the first book had come to Amelia in a dream—literally, she’d dreamed the entire story as if she were watching it on a movie screen, and astonishingly remembered it in vivid detail when she’d woken up. She’d written down as much as she could fit into her journal and eventually moved to the computer screen.

She’d published the books under a pseudonym—Mel Henry—and a lot of people knew that, but no one knew why. She’d always been a little shy, a little reserved. Her agent, her friends, her mom, they all thought she wanted to protect her privacy, and Amelia let them think it. No one, not even Reese, knew that the reason she’d kept her identity hidden was because she’d based Nick and Liana on herself and Noah, and because parts of the books—lines of dialogue, certain scenes—were pulled directly from her past.

But Noah would know it. She was sure of it.

Amelia thought that over, her chin in her hands. It had been eight years since she’d last seen Noah. Like her, he had moved on, moved far away from the small Midwestern town where their story had started. She wasn’t sure where he was, and after the way they’d left things, she figured he didn’t care where she was.

That thought made her feel faintly pathetic as she pulled up Google and typed in the familiar combination of letters.

Noah Bradley.
Click.

And there he was. Well, there they were—Noah Bradley was a fairly common name. She was 99.8 percent sure he was the Noah Bradley in Texas, though his Facebook profile was private and his profile photo was of a brown Labrador retriever. She’d pored over the website of the architectural firm she was pretty sure he worked for, but it didn’t include staff photos. By putting his name and his firm’s name in the same search field, she’d found him quoted in a few news stories, but never about anything personal, just projects he’d been involved in. Nothing that quelled the ache inside her.

She didn’t find anything new tonight.

“Aaaaaargh.”

Amelia closed the search window and pressed her fingertips into her temples. It had been that same ache, that same need to feel close to him, that had caused her to start writing in the first place.
She
might have been cheated out of a happily ever after, but that was the beauty of fiction—she could change the ending. For her characters, her books could offer the satisfaction, the closure, she hadn’t managed to accomplish in real life.

She rolled back in her chair. She hated what she was about to do, and yet she knew it was inevitable—her whole day had been leading her here. She traced a familiar path to the room’s one closet and reached up for the worn, gray shoebox.

The box was perched on a stack of photo albums, wedged between an old travel bag and her guest room linens. She’d figured, back when she’d shoved things into it and slammed the lid on Noah, that she’d cut herself loose of the box one day—that magical day when she was finally over him, or at least when she’d found someone to replace him. Clearly neither of those things had happened.

In one swift movement, she pulled the box from its hiding place. She picked through the pictures and objects inside, each item drowning her in its own flood of memories. Their senior prom picture.
Ohmigosh, we look like babies.
Ticket stubs from a Jason Mraz concert freshman year.
And afterward in the quad, almost…on that blanket under the trees.
His fraternity pin.
The night of his formal, sophomore year. I think that picture’s in here somewhere…

Carefully avoiding one corner of the box’s contents, not wanting to uncover the one item she knew would inflict more pain than her sudden masochistic impulse would permit, she paused with her hand on the scratched jewel case of a CD Noah had made for her before playlists had sent the “mix-tape” into obsolescence. Since she was inflicting this pity party upon herself, welcoming it, she decided to embrace it full-force, crossing the room to pop the CD into her laptop’s disc drive. The notes of familiar, forbidden songs, thick with meaning, swelled through the room. She resisted the urge to click stop, instead scrolling over the loudspeaker icon to turn the music up.

Crossing the room again, she folded her five-foot, six-inch frame into an overstuffed chair in the corner. She leaned her head back, clutched an orange-and-white striped pillow to her chest, and closed her eyes, letting the notes and lyrics of the songs she’d shared with him, her only love, drown out every thought that wasn’t tied up in these memories.