Chapter 20

After Miles’s death, Alex gave up his London apartment, and the money helped her dwindling funds. She and the baby stayed at the farm and after the initial shock that he was finally gone, she met with her financial advisors and learned that the situation was much worse than she had expected. Her stock portfolio had shrunk to almost nothing. She had returned the million-dollar payment to her publishers for failure to deliver the last book. She was nearly a year late when she returned it. And giving them back their money had left a huge hole in her finances. She still got royalties, which helped, but there were no payments for new books, and there wouldn’t be until she started writing again. The money had flowed only out and not in for the past year with Miles so sick, and she had stopped working. She had a half-finished book in her desk, but hadn’t had the time or heart to touch it. And she felt even less able to now.

Miles’s horse-breeding operation ate up all her cash, and every time she turned around, she had to write another check. The obvious solution was to sell the farm and the horses, get an apartment in London, and start writing again. Most of what she had saved was gone. She had been lending Miles money for years, and helping to keep the farm running. His production company had been failing, either through bad management or lack of work. He had never made the kind of money she did, and she had never begrudged him a penny of what she’d given him. She knew she could barely squeeze by with what she had left, and then she discovered that Miles had left two million dollars’ worth of debts, some of them attached to his production company and some of it from the racehorses he’d bought, and the stallions he’d used for his breeding lines, all of which had cost far too much. It was why he had never wanted to marry her, so she wouldn’t be saddled with his debts, but now she was anyway, and she had to figure out a way to pay them. There was no way she was going to sell the farm, she had already made that decision, and she loved it as much as he did. It was their home, and she wanted to preserve it for the children. But she had to find a way to support it, and to pay his debts, and for her and Desiree to live in the meantime.

She found a local girl, Maude, to help her with the baby, and contacted the dealers Miles had used to purchase his horses. She sold those she could privately through agents, and put the rest up for auction. She kept five of the Thoroughbreds to ride, but got rid of all the others, and she reduced the staff to two young stable hands who were knowledgeable about horses. It took six months to sell the horses, but she was amazed by how much money it brought her.

She got a mortgage on the farm, since the property was valuable, and little by little and month by month she paid off his debts. It took her two years to do it. She tried writing once or twice, but she just couldn’t concentrate. All she did was go over figures and numbers, bank statements and bills. She dreamt of them at night or woke up at four A.M. to calculate it all again. And every time she tried to get back to work, her mind went blank and she sat staring at the paper, and she went back to the stack of bills again.

It was three years after Miles’s death before she could see her way clear, and didn’t panic every time she saw a bill come in. She had enough money in the bank to support them for a while. Desiree was a chubby three-year-old by then, running everywhere and chattering to her mother.

Alex hadn’t had a book published in almost three years. There had been countless stories at first about why Alexander Green had stopped writing. Was he ill? Was he dead? Had he been killed? Was he the victim of a crime? Did he have a stroke? There were avid fans pleading for answers. And Alex offered none.

She spoke to Bert from time to time, and he begged her to start writing again.

“I can’t, Bert. I don’t know why. Something stops me.”

“You went through too much,” he said kindly. “It will come back. Just give it time.” But how much time? Miles had been gone for more than three years, and it had taken that long to get a handle on his debts and right the ship again. “It will start again when you stop pushing.”

“What if it never comes back and it’s gone forever?” She had no ideas anymore. She couldn’t concentrate. All she could do was run the farm and take care of her daughter. Alexander Green appeared to be dead. Her publishers were shocked.

“Go somewhere, take a trip, come back to Boston. Get some air,” Bert suggested. But it felt overwhelming to go anywhere without Miles.

“I shouldn’t really spend the money to travel,” she said to him. She had to be careful, there was no money coming in except for a few remaining royalty payments on the old books that continued to sell. She was relieved to have sold the horses. Even if Miles had loved them, they needed the money more. At least she had been able to preserve the property, the land he loved so much.

She hadn’t spoken to Rose Porter in a year, because she had no book to sell, and Alex hated disappointing her. She felt like a has-been. The ideas for her thrillers had stopped coming. Bert said that when it came back, the books would be better than ever, but she no longer believed him. The dry spell had gone on for too long. She no longer had a burning desire to write. She couldn’t.

The joy of her life was Desi now. They went on long walks. She traded a mare for a pony and taught her how to ride, holding her in the saddle. She called Brigid from time to time late at night, and her children sounded like hellions, but at least she had stopped at four, and was enjoying them immensely. Alex talked to Fiona occasionally too, but hadn’t been to London in two years, and didn’t want to go. She had retreated from the world.

Miles had been gone for four years when she started having ideas again. She just had bits and pieces and snippets. She jotted it all down in notebooks, and put them away in a locked drawer. Maybe she would write again one day, although it seemed unlikely.

She called Bert and told him what she was doing, writing in her notebooks and saving them. He told her that the sleeping giant was waking up. And she would know when the time was right to start writing again. She still didn’t believe him and ignored what he said.

“What makes you think I can still do it? I think I’ve lost it, Bert.” She was sure of it.

“You can’t lose it, Alex. Your talent is too big to disappear like that. It’s all about timing. And it’s all cooking somewhere inside. Something will get you going again.” She wanted to think it was true but she didn’t. She missed the days of being able to write effortlessly, but that was long gone.

When Desiree turned five, Alex hadn’t talked to Bert in a while so she called him, just to say hello. There was no answer. She called him the next day, and still got nothing. She wondered if he’d gone on a trip, but he never did. She got an odd feeling about it, and called Rose Porter the next morning. She came on the line quickly.

“I was just going to call you,” she said in a subdued voice.

“Have you talked to Bert lately? I’ve been calling him for two days. The message machine isn’t on and he’s not answering.” Rose was silent for a moment at her end.

She didn’t know how to tell her, but she knew she had to. “I wanted to talk to you today. I was worried about him too. I don’t know why, but I have his landlady’s phone number. I called her yesterday. He had an accident two days ago. He slipped on the sidewalk and hit his head on the curb. It was a freak accident.” Alex felt sick as she listened.

“Where is he now?” she asked, sounding panicked, but not wanting to know the end of the story. “Is he at the hospital? Is he okay? Did he have a concussion?”

“Alex,” Rose said in a strong firm voice. “It’s over. Bert is gone. He died instantly when his head hit the curb.” There was silence at Alex’s end as she tried to process what Rose had told her, but her brain didn’t want to. What Rose had just said couldn’t be true. He couldn’t be gone. She needed him. She loved him like a father. She was thirty-eight years old and had known him for exactly half her life.

“Are you sure?” she said in a whisper.

“Yes, I’m sure…I’m so sorry.” Alex was more than sorry, she was devastated. She couldn’t imagine a world without him, any more than she could a world without Miles, and now they were both gone. They had left her alone, just like her father.

“I have to go,” Alex said, unable to talk to Rose any longer. She sat in a chair in her room crying for a long time, and Desiree came to find her. She was just back from playing in the garden, and saw Alex with tears running down her face.

“Mama’s crying?” her beautiful little blond child asked, and Alex nodded. There was no point hiding it from her. She couldn’t. Another of the most important people in her life had disappeared.

“Mama’s sad,” she said, pulling the child onto her lap and holding her in her arms. Desi was all she had now. Everyone else was gone, except people who were so far away. She hadn’t seen the nuns in years, or Brigid, not since Miles died, and now Bert was gone forever.

“Don’t be sad, Mama,” Desi said and kissed her where the tears were, and Alex smiled at her, and went to make her lunch. She thought about Bert all day, and fell asleep thinking about him, and in the middle of the night, she sat bolt upright, as though he was sitting in the room with her, and she knew what she had to write. The story came out in one piece, already finished in her head, and she hadn’t even begun it.

She sent Desi out to play with Maude the next day, sat down at her desk, and pulled out her Smith Corona. The case was dusty. She hadn’t touched it in years. For five years the sleeping giant in her, as Bert called it, had been in a coma, and now it was wide awake, turned into a dragon in her chest, fighting to get out, and nothing could stop it. She wondered if Bert was doing it to her, if he had willed it to happen, or if it was simply time. He had said something would get her going again. And ironically the something was him. She couldn’t stop writing from the moment she sat down.

She wrote day and night for three weeks, and then she sent Rose Porter two chapters. She called Alex as soon as she read them.

“That is one fantastic story.” She sounded thrilled and so was Alex. It felt like the best book she’d ever written.

“I started writing the night you told me about Bert. I think he gave me the story.”

“No, you gave you the story, Alex. It’s all in there, you just have to find it again.”

“That’s what Bert told me. I thought it was gone.”

“No,” Rose said firmly, “it’s better than ever. It will never be gone. Keep writing.”

Alex kept writing for the next four months with no one to show the book to. She couldn’t send it to Bert now, or follow his directions. But she could hear him in her head, telling her what to do, when to stop and when to move ahead, when to end a chapter or write something really vivid with details of brutal murders. The story just rolled out of her head and onto the page, and she couldn’t hold it back. And on the last page, with a shocking exposé at the end, she knew it was finished, she didn’t need anyone to tell her. Not even Bert. And she knew he would have loved it.

She spent two more weeks polishing it and making small corrections. It was surprisingly clean, and then she scanned and emailed it to Rose Porter.

She read it the next day, in one sitting. She finished at 3 A.M. and called Alex. It was 8 A.M. in England.

“You’re back!” Rose said, sounding elated, as Alex sat smiling, staring into space. She knew it too. She had found the magic again, the secret. After five years of silence, Alexander Green had come alive again, returned from the dead, stronger than ever. “I’m sending this to your publisher tomorrow. And you’ll be paid three million this time.”

“That would be nice,” Alex said, smiling broadly. But it wasn’t about the money. It was about the dragon in her that wasn’t dead but only sleeping, and had roared to life again.

Rose told the publishers she wanted three million per book and a four-book contract, which made Alex nervous at first, but now she knew that she could do it, and so did her publishers. They all agreed, it really was the best book she’d ever written. She was better than ever. The shock of Bert’s death had brought her back to life. The pain of losing Miles had put her to sleep, and now every fiber of her being was tingling as though there was an electric current passing through her body.

She walked out into the garden with Desi after Rose called to tell her she got the four-book contract for her asking price. After scrimping and saving, losing everything, and almost having to sell the farm, she was back with more money than she’d ever had. She had lost Miles and Bert, but now she had Desi. Life had a strange way of trading one blessing for another. It had worked out in the end, and she hadn’t sold the farm. She knew Miles would have been proud of her. And now so was Bert.