The next time I awoke, it was to the grinding, shrieking sound of a fax machine. I blinked into the light streaming into my bedroom, and I realized I was sweating under the sun rays blanketing me. I kicked my sheets away and didn’t bother to look at the time. I knew it was sometime after noon, and it wouldn’t do my self-esteem any good to check how behind I was on the day. Fortunately, my headache was gone; my almost entirely accidental pharmacological mix-up from the day before had waned. My nausea was replaced by a gnawing, groaning hunger. I ran a hand through my hair and tried not to think about how long it had been since I’d taken a shower. Even if I’d thought on it, I wouldn’t have remembered; linear time was turning into less of a rule and more of a suggestion as every day passed.

I staggered out of bed and into the next room: my office. The fax machine was spitting out pages while screaming its absurd, mechanical battle cry. I rubbed my eyes and glared at it. The only reason I still owned a fax machine was because of Damien’s Luddite qualities, and I resented the fact he couldn’t resort to a quieter mechanism, like email, snail mail, or even carrier pigeon. I would rather have bird shit all over my office than deal with the noises currently assaulting my ears.

I kicked the door closed and slumped my way down the dark, dusky hallways. When my series first took off, leading to a contract, residuals, and a huge uptick in pay for each book, I decided to go full-on with luxury purchases, and the biggest one was my home. It was rich in a small-town sort of way, the sort of home that can be described as a manor only because it’s surrounded by two-story ranch homes, but it was still big enough for the emptiness of it to become oppressive and alien. There were days when I could pretend I was the only human being left on the planet. The only signs I wasn’t truly alone on the planet were the dutifully dusted shelves and clean dishes provided by my housekeeper, Tanya. I’d only seen Tanya on a few occasions, but it seemed we both preferred it that way. I had no idea how to talk to her, and she didn’t seem to want to waste her time dealing with a rich white guy trying to fumble his way around a sentence. Talking to “the help” didn’t come naturally to me, the son of true penny pinchers, and there was no one around to alleviate the tension.

In fact, not running into Tanya and making an ass of myself was pretty much the one redeeming quality of waking up at a time when the rest of the world was settling into sleep.

I shambled down the spiral staircase in the center of my home, trying not to get dizzy. I’d always been prone to vertigo. When I was first buying the house, my boyfriend at the time constantly made fun of me for it. “I’m going to come home and find you collapsed over the railing one of these days,” Paul would say as I crept carefully from stair to stair. “Why didn’t you just buy a house with a regular staircase?” I told him spiral staircases were classier. All he’d done was laugh again.

He hadn’t been wrong. Paul was never wrong.

I scurried down the staircase as fast as I dared, trying to ward off any emotions or thoughts dredged up by the memories, even as I could practically hear his ghostly laughter, low and sweet and rebounding off of the curved walls.

I swept through a gallery of unused or rarely used rooms—recreation room, home gym, guest rooms, and the like—and into the kitchen. I had considered hiring a cook a few times, as I could more than afford it, but I never followed through, which also meant I hadn’t eaten a decent hot meal since the last family gathering. I was still feasting on frozen Thanksgiving leftovers, even though it was about a week into December. I’d never been a good cook, and definitely never cared about nutrition. Everything I put into my body was either garbage or something that could barely sustain me, but this was one of the few areas where my inattention to detail actually paid off; I could go days barely eating and hardly realizing I was hungry, then either binge on snack food or order an obscene amount of takeout before the cycle began anew.

Damien often told me I shouldn’t live alone, and he was probably right.

I looked at what I had in my cupboards. Most of the shelves were full of cereal boxes, especially Reese’s Puffs. I hadn’t been allowed to eat sugary cereals as a kid, so once I’d gotten my own home, I really rebelled, saved only by my extremely high metabolism. I glanced down at my stomach and noticed the slightest bulge, but shrugged it off. My age was starting to catch up with me, it seemed, but hey, dad bods were in, right?

I grabbed a box of Cheerios, deciding to go with the “healthy” choice, which was officially ruined when I doused it with whole-fat milk and dumped spoonfuls of sugar over it. I thought, not for the first time, that there should be some kind of test involved in being allowed to be an adult. Maybe if I’d been forced to go shopping for groceries, do laundry, develop a budget, clean up after myself, and do taxes while being given a test score, I might have ended up being good at at least one of those things. As it was, though, I was standing in my kitchen, naked, eating sugared Cheerios out of a mixing bowl using a wooden stirring spoon because it was the first thing I found. Ah, I thought bleakly, the romantic life of an author. What a truly wondrous thing to behold.

I meandered toward the dining room. Even after several years of living in the manor, I wasn’t used to the defined, rigid separation between the kitchen and the dining room. It felt ostentatious to me in a way that even my indoor and outdoor pools and hot tubs didn’t. Dining rooms just seemed so formal and cold. But I’d had a TV installed in it and the chairs were comfortable, so I would make do.

I sat down at the head of the table and turned the TV on for background noise. I flipped through programs until I found Law and Order: SVU, the ultimate background show. I stirred my Cheerios, waiting for them to get just soggy enough and for the sugar to fully dissolve into the milk while Elliot Stabler agonized over trying to balance his hectic home life and his distressing job. “Just quit, man,” I muttered under my breath, watching him curl his fists around a suspect’s T-shirt. I made a mental note to call Damien and get his opinion on whether or not a real-life cop like Stabler would be arrested.

It was a little bit depressing to imagine calling Damien over something like that. He was a good friend, but he was my agent first, and he’d never been shy about saying so. The lines had become increasingly blurred over the years, but both of us probably would have agreed I needed to find people to talk to who weren’t also largely responsible for the success of my career. At the very least, I should probably develop a friendship that didn’t fluctuate based on how lazy my writing had become.

As I sat down at my overly ornate table to eat, I saw Tanya had kindly taken it upon herself to bring in the mail and set it next to my placemat, the only objects on the unnecessarily long stretch of redwood I called my dining room table. I shuffled through it; though most of it was junk mail, a couple pieces were fan letters that had somehow made their way to me instead of the underlings that usually wrote back stock responses and stamped my signature at the bottom. And at the bottom of the stack, a thick envelope with nothing written on it and no postage stamp.

This would freak a lot of people out, especially ostensibly “famous” people, but it didn’t bother me. At least anthrax would add a little intrigue to my life.

Instead, out slid a lanyard with a laminated card attached. It said “FANTASTICON” in an overly-enthusiastic, massive font on the top, and below was my name—Lance Epstein—and the words “Special Guest.” There was a strangely glossy picture of an elfin woman as the background, but that was pretty par for the course. Fantasticon was hardly a big, wonderfully-run convention, and I’d been to far bigger and better-funded ones, but I had a soft spot in my heart for it, and just seeing the badge made my heart leap a little in tentative excitement. That joy had become pretty uncommon in my life, but Fantasticon managed to bring it to the surface.

I couldn’t decide if that was sweet or pathetic.

The package must have been stuffed in my mailbox by Damien or his secretary on their way home, because a small pamphlet about the convention and the schedule both slid out onto the table as well.

It was stupid, but every year, I checked where my panel fell in the week-long convention. The con tended to be pretty sparsely populated for most of its duration; it opened on a Sunday afternoon and ran until the next Sunday, and while there were plenty of people that trickled in from Sunday to Thursday, they were mostly casual fans or barely-interested folks looking for something to do when they had a few spare hours. Nights could get pretty insane, especially considering all of the hardcore fans staying in the hotel all week, but for the most part, the exciting stuff didn’t really happen until Friday.

Where my panel sat in the lineup was important to me and my ego, and it did genuinely say a lot about what the convention organizers thought about my relevance in the fantasy genre. The later in the week I was scheduled, the better.

I glanced through the schedule quickly, biting my lip and hoping for good news. I saw familiar names as I went, all of them other clients of Damien’s. Stan Spelling was registered for a Tuesday night, which was probably for the best; he could hardly keep his thoughts together for a one-on-one conversation, much less an hour-long panel, and something about conspiracy theories always cropped up, no matter how unrelated it was to the topic at hand. It was a kindness to both him and his fans to put him in an unpopular time slot so as few people as necessary would be subject to his ranting about the Kennedy assassination.

Next in the lineup was Soren Kingsman on Wednesday morning. Another smart decision, considering he was kind of an asshole. When people gave the advice of “don’t meet your heroes,” they were talking about guys like Soren. Damien probably gave him a morning panel just to annoy him, as Soren tended to get as drunk as possible at every convention he went to. Ben Hayfield was scheduled for a panel on Thursday afternoon, but they were also both scheduled for a panel together on Friday, which made me chuckle. Everyone loved to compare the two of them and their work, which wasn’t totally unfounded; their styles and themes were so similar that some people theorized they actually co-wrote all of their books. Soren and Ben seemed to disagree on that, but it didn’t keep the fans from wanting to see them onstage together. After the initial sense of revenge faded—take that, Ben, you nice, reading-to-sick-kids motherfucker—I felt bad for him. The two of them had never gotten along. Even though I’d never met them, it was painfully obvious, and there were even rumors of the two of them coming to blows a few times. I felt less bad for Soren; there was no doubt in my mind he was the problem.

Also in an excellent time slot on Friday was December Jones. He was a fairly new writer and I’d only met him a handful of times, but he was a strange guy. He had a shock of golden hair and a wide-eyed, dazed expression that always made him look like a recently electrocuted dandelion, and he was so timid that he cringed just from being tapped on the shoulder. He’d exploded in popularity, so the timing of the panel didn’t surprise me at all, but there was no doubt in my mind it was going to go badly. The poor guy seemed more likely to piss himself onstage than squeak out even a single word.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding when I found my timeslot: four thirty on Saturday afternoon. It was a perfect time, set for the maximum amount of attendees to be able to make it, and it was an hour and a half, a crucial thirty minutes longer than any other author at the convention. I realized it was pathetic to have so much of my self-esteem depend on what time I discussed my nerdy books with a bunch of nerdy teenagers, but the wave of relief and validation that swept through me was nice enough for me to not be too bothered.

Next to the listing for my panel, I noticed that Damien had written “Happy now?” I smiled and tossed the paper to the side. Jerk, I thought fondly, and I started devouring my Cheerios.

I meandered my way back up the stairs. I left the empty mixing bowl on the table, telling myself I would get to it later, but realistically, it was going to be Tanya who would deal with it. I brought the mail up with me, determined to go through it in my office.

I walked into my office the way a person late to Mass might walk into a church. I’d taken to avoiding it more days than not. I still tried to force myself to go in at least one day a week to face down the demons that lived there, but no matter how long I stayed, it always ended with me creeping back up to my bedroom and wrapping myself in too many blankets to take a long depression nap.

The fax machine, thankfully, stopped growling, but I was surprised by the sheer number of papers sitting in the tray. There had to be at least twenty. Something told me Damien had forgotten to put a page or word limit on the essay contest and had paid for it dearly. It was a little touching that someone had written so much for me, and it was even more touching that Damien had read through so much bullshit just to get me a little publicity, but the task was beyond daunting.

I sat in my chair in front of my computer. Paul had bought the computer for me, and I used it exclusively for work. The entire concept of having a home office seemed foreign to me, but he had put the entire thing together. He’d built the desk I was sitting at and surrounded it with posters, comforting kitsch, and soft lamps. On the far wall was a reading nook with a wall-length bookcase—something else he built—and an overstuffed sofa with an old afghan my grandmother had made for me for some long-forgotten Christmas. “See?” Paul had said, presenting the room to me proudly. “Now you have a place to work instead of writing all hunched over your laptop in bed. And you even have a little spot to take a break. Maybe now you won’t get so overwhelmed about work.”

I’d been speechless when I saw it. All I could do was turn and give him a hard kiss.

Paul made his own little man cave directly across the hall from my office. We always kept our doors open. On days when I was feeling low, uninspired, or overwhelmed, I would look over my shoulder and see Paul, all long-limbed and hard-muscled, and it would spur me to actually, as he put it, do the damn thing. More often than not, our eyes would lock, me in my office chair and him in a beanbag, and he’d give me a wink and one of his glowing smiles before turning back to whatever movie or video game he was consumed with. And that would be enough.

I sat down in my office chair and tossed the mail on the desk. My fingers twitched anxiously when I booted up the computer, but I did it anyway. It took a while for the screen to flicker on, a sign of how outdated it had become in the time I’d had it. It was only five or six years old, but in tech terms, it may as well have been Paleolithic. I kept my eyes glued to the screen, even as bits and pieces twitched to life, almost as if it was remembering how to work. It had nearly forgotten its job.

I tried not to think about that too metaphorically.

My brain searched for a distraction—any possible direction—that it could take. I wanted to forget where I was sitting, if at all possible. Hell, I wanted to forget my existence, but I would have been happy with a few Googled pictures of cute cats.

But a distraction wasn’t what I needed or so I sternly told myself. What I needed was to sit down and do what I was meant to do: write. I had to actually produce something. It had been too long, and with Fantasticon coming up, I didn’t want to feel like the failure everyone else undoubtedly knew I was.

I opened up a Word document so old that a layer of virtual dust lay thickly over it. The click of my mouse sounded more like the cracking open of a heavy, long-neglected tome of some kind, something ethereal and mystical.

Instead, I found my own stupid, pathetically uncomplicated words staring back at me.

There were people who would have been impressed with the work I’d done, and I knew that. “Eighty pages?!” an acquaintance of an acquaintance said to me only a few months prior. “Wow, I have no idea how you’d even do that. That’s so much work! I could barely manage five pages when I was in college.”

I didn’t know much about college papers, so I couldn’t really compare it to that, but what I did know was the workload was actually fairly pathetic.

All of the books in my series had been long, to the point where a couple late-night shows had competitions making people bench so many copies of them. Eighty pages, compared to where I needed to be, was pathetic, especially given my extended hiatus. I had written the four massive books that comprised the series thus far in a year a piece. Eighty pages over five years? That was hysterically bad. That was something anyone could do.

And it became all the more humiliating when I had to admit it was only eighty pages because it was double-spaced.

I looked at the screen. The most daunting thing, I learned, was not the blank page. That’s what everyone wants to think, that starting is the hardest part. But beginnings, in my experience, were the easiest bit of writing. Beginnings brought with them a sense of excitement you just couldn’t replicate in any other part of a story. They held promise and dreams in them. When you start a story, you’re full of fire and passion and ideas. The page is not a barrier; it’s a limitless expanse, an open road to be driven down, a wild landscape to be traversed and discovered. Anyone, I realized, could write a beginning.

No, the blank page wasn’t my enemy. My own words were.

I looked at the first few sentences and realized the Lance who had written them had done so five years ago. That was a slight shock. Five years is a long time. Back before I was a dismal failure, I remembered looking at words I’d written the day before and feeling lost. It was so hard to reconnect to the person that had put pen to paper, the person who had laid those words bare. How, I wondered, could the Lance of today possibly reconcile with the Lance of yesterday?

And I was trying to write like the person I’d been five years ago.

Good fucking luck with that one.

I read through the first few lines. I made an edit here or there, just a tweak to a word or a revision of a mistake. I wasn’t usually the type to edit my work until it was done, but then again, I wasn’t usually the type to take so damn long to produce something. So while I was trying new things, I might as well go all in. I read a little further on, then started skimming. The story was surprisingly unfamiliar. I’d formed the skeleton for every book, for the entire series, in notebooks I kept safely stored in the drawer beneath my desk, so I technically knew everything that was going to happen, but only in broad strokes. Reading the words was bizarre; I had no recollection of most of it. I thought scanning it might help, that a particular word or phrase would jump out and grab me, but nothing did. It all felt alien, as if someone else had snuck into my home and written the beginning of the fifth book.

I scrolled down, past the huge blocks of foreign text, and found where I’d left off.

“No!” Eli grabbed Elinor’s arm hard, twisting her around to look at him, their identical eyes meeting. Her face couldn’t seem to decide if she was angry or just shocked at her twin’s outburst. “Elinor, we don’t lie. We can’t.”

She ripped her arm from his grasp, her jaw set. “And why not?” she sneered, hoping he wouldn’t see the panic in her eyes, that he wouldn’t hear she was asking him a very real question.

Eli froze, brow knit in concern. “Ella,” he said, but the old childhood nickname did nothing to soothe his sister. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” she argued. “Think about it. Think about the world before we found the Books of Veracity.”

“We were clueless. Sheep. We were kept in the dark.”

“We were happy!” she snapped. “You keep acting like the truth has somehow made our lives better, but it hasn’t! Ever since those books came into our lives, we’ve been miserable! We’ve been on the run, hunted down like animals. Is that really how you want to live?”

“It’s worth it,” Eli murmured. “It’s all worth it. The fact that it’s hard doesn’t change that.”

“Tell that to Anna Lee,” Elinor bit back.

There was a stunned, hurt silence. Both felt it, but neither wanted to be the one to heal it.

“Maybe,” Eli said quietly, testing the waters, “we don’t want the same things anymore.”

Elinor didn’t even blink. “Maybe we don’t,” she replied, and she turned and walked away.

I took a deep breath. Jesus. This would have driven the fans wild, the two main characters arguing, one of them apparently abandoning the mission entirely. I vaguely remembered the storyline I developed for this book. It was huge, a total turning point for what was supposed to be a twelve-book series. Heroes would stop being heroes and villains would stop being villains. It was crucial.

People were going to lose it over this book. If it ever came out, that is.

I sat back in my chair and sighed heavily. I’d never said anything publicly about this book or how important it was. I never said when it might come out, why I delayed it for so long, or even how long the series was going to be. After a while, I claimed that I was working on different projects, but it was a lie. I hadn’t done a damn thing for five years.

God, I’m pathetic, I thought with a sigh.

I set my fingers on the keyboard. I went to a new page. I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember everything I’d written, but I figured it would be better to start actually writing than spend my time rereading stale words.

I wrote a couple words. Eli started...The hall was...There were... Everything I wrote was erased almost as quickly as it was written down.

I knew exactly what I should do. I should read the entire thing through, then dig through my desk drawer and find the outline for the fifth book. Then I should start from there. The writing didn’t have to be perfect, or even good. It just had to get done.

But that wasn’t what I did.

Instead, I selected all the text. I set it from double-spaced to single-spaced, then to one and a quarter spacing, then back to double-spaced. I changed the font from Times New Roman to Garamond, convinced myself it looked like I was trying too hard to write the next Harry Potter, and switched the font to Cambria. I dimmed my screen, convinced it would keep me from straining my eyes, something that never happened to me but that I was suddenly extremely concerned about. I changed the text color to a deep blue, felt stupid, and changed it back to black. I changed the font to Calibri, then Arial, then Helvetica, and ultimately back to Times New Roman. I checked out all of the tabs at the top of the screen, telling myself it was very important for me to understand the minutiae of how Word worked.

When I checked the clock, I found that fifteen minutes had gone by, and I’d accomplished literally nothing.

I knew it wasn’t going to help, but I still turned my chair around and looked behind me, out the door, reaching for inspiration I knew wouldn’t be there.

The door to Paul’s old man-cave was open. The walls were still a deep blue. Several boxes still cluttered the room, along with an old, sunken beanbag chair. I tried to avoid it as much as I could on an average day, but when I saw it, my heart always dropped.

The few people I had in my life tried to encourage me to just empty the room out. Even my mother—a cold, calculating woman who would randomly show up at my home in spite of how little we got along with each other—had told me to take care of it. “It isn’t healthy to keep all of this around,” she said, her voice clipped. She sniffed at the room, pulling a distasteful face. “This is only holding you back. No wonder you can’t get any work done. You’re too busy being psychologically blocked. This room is connected to your id. You need to rid your workspace of anything that may focus on your...” She looked me up and down, clearly disappointed, “...baser desires.”

I’m sure it’s a real mystery how I grew up to be such a neurotic.

Normally, I didn’t listen to a word my mother had to say. The two of us had never gotten along or been close, even though I grew up without my father. Mother was a psychotherapist with a doctorate degree, so people assumed she always knew best, but she was also a self-proclaimed Freudian, so I didn’t have too many qualms about completely and totally discounting everything she told me.

I’m sure Freud would have had something to say about that. It was lucky that I thought he was full of shit.

Of course my mother thought the man-cave was a part of my id. It had something to do with Paul, and she always said anything related to him was about my id. He and I had started hanging out when I was fifteen and he was sixteen, and we’d fallen into a relationship before I even really knew what was happening. When Mother found out, she was deeply unhappy. She was still of the mind that homosexuality was “abnormal” and somehow meant she was a bad parent. I tried to argue that even Freud eventually said that even though he thought different sexualities were abnormal, he also thought they were perfectly harmless. She didn’t listen. I also tried to argue she was a bad mother, but my being gay had nothing to do with it. That she listened to, although she had a lot to say about it, and none of it was good.

She wasn’t the only one that thought clinging to Paul’s things was bad for me. There wasn’t much of it around, but I couldn’t get rid of the little that was still strewn around. His man-cave remained untouched, as did the bedroom he had slept in when either my sudden inspirational fits or my restless legs kept him awake. Any room that was deemed “his” had been kept empty, and I avoided them as pointedly as I could. I kept the doors open because closing them would be interfering, but I kept my eyes down when I passed them, like a child holding their breath when being driven past a graveyard for fear of their breath waking the spirits there. I knew it was bad for me, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually face the reality of the lack of his presence. I preferred to imagine, in a house so large, he was just somewhere else, and that one of these days I would bump into him and he’d give me a welcoming kiss on the cheek, or maybe even just hold me in the way he had a long time ago, just wrapping his arms around me and tucking my head under his chin and hugging me with a long sigh.

I couldn’t remember the last time he’d held me like that. It was more than the five years that contained his absence.

I stared into Paul’s old man-cave. I could still remember every detail as if it had been just yesterday that he’d been in his lounge chair, wearing a headset and playfully arguing with someone else on his team during Call of Duty. I could fill all the empty spaces with the memorabilia and assorted items of his interests: a Cruising poster, a desk that contained a computer somewhere within all the clutter, a trash bag filled with empty pop cans and beer bottles. The emptiness of it wasn’t just painful—it was alien. It felt like it shouldn’t have existed, like someone cleared it out over the course of one night. Someone had done that, in fact, but that night was so far into the past that I should have grown accustomed to the emptiness.

But I hadn’t.

I tore my eyes away and looked back at the years-old words on my screen. There was no point to them, I thought irritably. It wasn’t as if there was something they could do for me. What would finishing the book achieve, really? Money? Making the fans I hadn’t yet lost happy? Those may have been things I wanted, but they were overshadowed by the Herculean work that came with them.

I felt very, very tired in that moment. I had been awake for a few hours at most, but all I could think of doing was crawling back into bed.

I shut down my computer. It asked if I wanted to save the changes I had made to the document, as if all of my fiddling had accomplished something. The question was almost embarrassing, and I hit “no.”

I forced myself up out of my chair and turned to see the pile of papers sitting in the fax machine’s paper tray. I groaned quietly—I’d forgotten I agreed to read through the fan essay. My own self pity had distracted me.

I snatched the papers out of the tray, annoyed at the thickness of the stack in my hands. Thumbing through, I saw it was a little over twenty pages. It was double-spaced, fortunately, but it was also a huge waste of paper. Of course Damien wouldn’t have thought of attaching a word limit to the contest; he was the type of person who could barely make it five paragraphs before getting bored by whatever he was writing. He was much more interested in reading than actually producing anything.

I wrapped my threadbare robe around me and made my way up the stairs, kicking my way into my bedroom, shutting the door, and flopping down on the massive, cushy mattress. It was cold, and I wrapped myself in a bundle of blankets, waiting for my body heat to spread to my new cocoon.

The papers crinkled in my hands, and I decided to take a look through them. Hell, there wasn’t much else for me to do. I thought about the mixing bowl I’d left on the table, considering I should probably go downstairs and take care of it instead of leaving it for Tanya, but the very idea of walking downstairs was so exhausting that looking through the essay felt like the lesser of two evils.

I started reading—or, at least, I started letting my eyes scan the pages—tricking myself into feeling like I was reading when I wasn’t actually taking in anything it said.

Give me a break, it was twenty-four pages. And considering I’d been signed up for this contest without my consent, I figured skimming was appropriate. I was wholeheartedly planning to quickly peruse the essay, then call Damien and tell him there was no way in hell I was going to go hang out with a teenager for two days, no matter how nice they were. But then a particular paragraph caught my eye.

I still can’t say what it was about that one paragraph, but my eyes slowed, and my brain actually began to process what was on the page. I don’t know what it was that I expected, but it certainly wasn’t what I saw.

“These books,” it began, “meant everything to me as a kid, but it wasn’t just because they were well-written, or that I liked the characters, or even that I was just sort of a lonely, bookish type that liked to hide in a story. This story, after all, was like no other, and I never felt that I was hiding when I was in the world of Verdecken. What drew me in and kept me there was the fact that this was a series about learning to be honest and uncovering the truth, something I had struggled with my whole life. I was constantly lied to, especially by my family. I was shunted in and out of the system with each of my mother’s relapses, and every single time, a bevy of lies came with the changes. I was told that I’d find a family who would love me and adopt me. I was told that my mom would get her act together and become a real mother. I was told that my dad might even try to gain custody of me. Everyone around me thought that the only way to protect me or keep me happy and safe was to lie to me. I didn’t just love Eli and Elinor. I was them. I was their missing triplet, another kid who just wanted to know the truth. Seeing people who valued honesty and fought to make sure that no one else would ever have to be taken advantage of again gave me a sense of purpose. It helped me find a direction when I was lost, and it gave me hope. Most of all, it taught me that there were other people in the world who cared about the same things I cared about. I had faith again, and it was all thanks to this series.”

I wasn’t aware I was crying until the words on the page blurred out and a tear dripped down across the bridge of my nose and onto my pillow. I hadn’t realized it, but this had been exactly what I wanted to hear for so long. I’d just been waiting for someone to tell me I still mattered, that I was still relevant somehow. The fan letters I received had become less admiring and more admonishing over time, and I just assumed that everyone had moved on and left me behind.

But this person hadn’t. They’d stuck it out, written a giant essay about it, and declared that my words had given them hope, and that was more than I could have hoped for.

I couldn’t pretend I was excited about having to talk to a person I didn’t know, but if I had to meet a random fan, this kid seemed like the right one.

I read the essay all the way through. It was just as inspiring and touching as the bit I’d already read. This kid, Sam, had a mother who loved him dearly but who was just terrible at being a parent; she had given birth just after she turned fifteen and ran away from home to be with her boyfriend. When she brought Sam in for a checkup at the free clinic, they noticed bruises on both mother and child, and Sam was sent to live with his grandparents while his mother stayed in a shelter. Every time she got Sam back, she made it clear she loved and cared for him, but she didn’t seem to care much for herself, and that affected her parenting. She chose abusive criminals and thugs for romantic partners, went on and off drugs like a person trying to start a paleo diet, and lacked both a traditional education and any sort of common sense that might enable her to raise her son or get a job. Though she no doubt had her struggles, her son paid the price as well, being pushed off on his grandparents and foster families. The father who would send him a token greeting card on birthdays and Christmases never appeared in the flesh, and made it very clear to social workers he didn’t want the responsibility of raising his child. Sam was depressed, angry, and confused.

And then my books came along and lo and behold, his life changed. Things that previously seemed impossible to get through were then just trials he could overcome with enough patience and hard work. My words had given him a sense of calm he carried with him through every bad day.

That was no small thing, and I knew that. There were books I’d read that had saved my life, and if I’d been able to meet their authors, I would’ve done anything for that chance.

I couldn’t let Sam down.

I called Damien, saying a silent prayer of gratitude that his voicemail picked up instead of him directly. “Hey, it’s me,” I said, knowing he would know exactly who I meant. “I’ll do the contest thing and meet the kid. But you’re not allowed to brag about it.”

I knew he was probably going to give me a ton of crap for going back on my word so easily, but I didn’t care. It was the first good decision I made in a long, long time.

Or at least that’s what I told myself as I drifted back off to sleep, nestled in my blankets.