Copyright 2018 by Colleen Hoover

Oh, my God. I double over in my chair, clutching my stomach. “Please…
please…” I say out loud. Though I don’t know why or to whom I’m saying it.
I need to get out of this house. I feel like I can’t breathe. I should go sit
outside and attempt to clear my head of everything I just read.
Every time I’m reading her manuscript, my stomach cramps from all the
time I spend clenching it. I skimmed several more chapters beyond chapter five,
but none were as horrifying as the chapter that detailed how she tried to choke
her infant daughter.
In the subsequent chapters, Verity focused mainly on Jeremy and Chastin,
rarely mentioning Harper at all, which grew more disturbing with each
paragraph. She talked about the day Chastin turned one, and she talked about
when Chastin spent the night at Jeremy’s mother’s house for the first time at the
age of two. Everything that had initially been “the twins” in her manuscript
eventually dwindled down to just “Chastin.” If I didn’t know any better, I would
think something had happened to Harper long before it did.
It wasn’t until the girls were three that she wrote about both of them again.
But as soon as I start the chapter, there’s a sharp rapping on the office door.
I open the desk drawer and quickly shove the manuscript inside it. “Come
in.”
When he opens the door, I have one hand on the mouse and the other resting
casually in my lap.
“I made tacos.”
I smile at him. “Is it time to eat already?”
He laughs. “It’s after ten. It was time to eat three hours ago.”
I look at the clock on the computer. How did I lose track of time? I guess
that happens when you’re reading about a psychotic woman abusing her
children. “I thought it was eight.”
“You’ve been in here for twelve hours,” he says. “Take a break. There’s a
meteor shower tonight, you need to eat, and I made you a margarita.”
Margaritas and tacos. Doesn’t take much.

---

•••
I ate on the back porch while we sat in rocking chairs and watched the meteor
shower. There weren’t very many at first, but now we’re seeing one every
minute, at least.
At one point, I moved from the porch to the yard. I’m on my back in the
grass, staring up at the sky. Jeremy finally gives in and positions himself next to
me.
“I forgot what the sky looked like,” I say quietly. “I’ve been in Manhattan
for so long now.”
“That’s why I left New York,” Jeremy says. He points to the left, at the tail
end of a meteor. We watch it until it disappears.
“When did you and Verity buy this house?”
“When the girls were three. Verity’s first two books had released by then and
were doing really well, so we took the plunge.”
“Why Vermont? Do either of you have family here?”
“No. My father died when I was in my teens. My mother died three years
ago. But I grew up in New York State, on an alpaca farm, if you can believe
that.”
I laugh, turning to look at him. “Seriously? Alpacas?”
He nods.
“How, exactly, does one make money raising alpacas?”
Jeremy laughs at this question. “They don’t, really. Which is why I got a
degree in business and went into real estate. I didn’t have any interest in taking
over a debt-ridden farm.”
“Do you think you’ll go back to work soon?”
My question gives Jeremy pause. “I’d like to. I’ve been waiting on the right
time so it won’t be a huge adjustment to Crew, but it never feels like the right
time.”
If we were friends, I would do something to comfort him. Maybe grab his
hand and hold it. But there’s too much inside me that wants to be more than his
friend, which means we can’t be friends at all. If an attraction is present between
two people, those two people can only be one of two things. Involved or not
involved. There is no in-between.
And since he’s married…I keep my hand on my chest and I don’t touch him
at all.
“What about Verity’s parents?” I ask, needing the conversation to keep
flowing so that he doesn’t hear how exaggerated he makes my every breath.

---

He lifts his hands from his chest in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I barely know
them. They weren’t around much before they cut Verity out of their lives.”
“They cut her out? Why?”
“It’s hard to explain them,” he says. “They’re strange. Victor and Marjorie,
insanely religious to their core. When they found out Verity was writing thriller
and suspense novels, they acted like she was suddenly denouncing her religion
to join a satanic cult. They told her if she didn’t stop, they would never speak to
her again.”
That’s unbelievable. So…cold. For a second, I empathize with Verity,
wondering if her lack of maternal instinct was inherited. But my empathy
evaporates when I remember what she did to Harper in her crib.
“How long did their estrangement last?”
“Let’s see,” Jeremy says. “She wrote her first book thirteen years ago. So…
thirteen years.”
“They still haven’t spoken to her? Do they even know about what’s
happened?”
Jeremy nods. “I called them after Chastin passed. Left them a voicemail.
They never called back. Then, when Verity had her wreck, her father actually
answered the phone. When I told him what had happened, to the girls and to
Verity, he grew quiet. Then said, ‘God punishes the wicked, Jeremy.’ I hung up
on him. Haven’t heard from them since.”
I pull a hand to my heart and stare up at the sky in disbelief. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” he whispers.
We’re quiet for a stretch. We see two meteors, one to the south and one to
the east. Jeremy points at them both times, but says nothing. When there’s a lull
in both the conversation and the meteors, Jeremy lifts up beside me, onto his
elbow, and looks down at me.
“Do you think I should put Crew back into therapy?”
I tilt my head so that I’m staring at him. We’re only a foot apart with him
positioned like this. Maybe a foot and a half. It’s so close, I can feel the heat
coming from him.
“Yes.”
He seems to appreciate my honesty. “Alright,” he says, but he doesn’t lower
himself back to the grass. He continues to stare at me, as if he wants to ask me
something else. “Did you go to therapy?”
“Yes. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” I look back up at the
sky, not wanting to see the expression on his face after my next sentence. “After
watching the footage of myself on that railing, I was worried that deep down, it
meant I wanted to die. For weeks I tried to fight my sleep. I was afraid I’d hurt

---

myself intentionally. But my therapist helped me realize that sleepwalking is
unrelated to intention. And after several years of being told that, I finally
believed it.”
“Did your mother go to therapy with you?”
I laugh. “No. She didn’t even want to talk to me about my own therapy.
Something happened that night, when I broke my wrist, and it changed her. Our
relationship, anyway. We always felt disconnected after that. My mother
actually reminds me a lot of—” I stop speaking because I realize I was about to
say Verity.
“Reminds you of who?”
“The main character in Verity’s series.”
“Is that bad?” he asks.
I laugh. “You really haven’t read any of them?”
He lies back down on the grass, breaking eye contact with me. “Just the first
one.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because…it was hard for me to fathom that it all came from her
imagination.”
I want to tell him he’s right to be concerned, because his wife’s thoughts are
eerily similar to her character’s thoughts. But I don’t want him to have that
impression of her at this point. After all he’s been through, he deserves to at least
be able to preserve a positive memory of his marriage.
“She used to get so angry with me because I didn’t read her manuscripts. She
needed that validation from me, even though she got it from everywhere else.
Her readers, her editor, her critics. For some reason, my validation seemed to be
the only validation she wanted.”