Page 31

Chapter Thirty-One

My eyes scan Lake Michigan. Children squeal gleefully as they race into the water at sunset.

I am home.

Again.

Funny, isn’t it, how—whether you want to or not—you always have to return home either in person or memory in order to move on to the next chapter of your life? I pivot my eyes to the chapter I’m writing in my next novel.

I hear a familiar voice, the squall of a gull. I look up again.

A large gull rushes a smaller one on the shore. Instead of dashing away, the younger gull stands its ground, squawks, extends its wings. The other gull stands down, and the two warily begin to navigate the same turf.

I refocus on my manuscript.

I write. The words flow.

My parents are reading books under umbrellas.

Jess has just docked the new boat she bought—a tritoon named The Ni-Ko-Nong II —on the beach before Eyebrow Cottage. She is lying on a towel in the seat, GiGi’s hat covering her face.

The gulls squawk, their voices carried on the wind.

“You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves,” GiGi used to read from Jonathan Livingston Seagull . “That’s what I mean by love.”

What is love?

No, more importantly, what is unconditional love?

It is love without conditions.

I will love you but …

I will love you if you change for me.

Do this , and I will love you.

Some of us are lucky enough to be shown unconditional love in this world. Too few of us ever experience it, and so we go through life expecting conditions on the love we give and receive.

We must have good teachers. We must be good students.

My parents didn’t buy that Hamptons house. They realized they had everything they ever needed and wanted right in front of them.

A home with a history and a heart. A family bound by strength.

And we are all writing again. My father is working on his next novel. It’s commercial fiction.

My mother is working on a memoir.

“Lord knows you have the voice for it,” I tease her.

I am working on my next novel for Pauline Page Books, this one about a recent college grad, a young writer who discovers a hidden manuscript in her grandmother’s cottage that upends her parents’ elitist literary lives and threatens the devious plans of the world’s bestselling romance novelist…

And misogynist.

And you wonder where authors get their inspiration?

Jess has expanded The Swans. She is now doing author interviews and book recommendations as part of the Today show and has brought her followers and influence back to The Mighty Pages, where she started.

Marcus is begging to work with her.

Speaking of Marcus, he recently sent me a copy of my own novel. He had re-created the cover by drawing on it with his own illustrations: dollar signs for birds, Solar Flare written across the summer sun. He had superimposed a photo of himself as the lighthouse, as if he were still watching over me.

Inside, he had written how working with me had made him even more popular among female readers. His sales were skyrocketing.

Thank you helping the rich get richer! XOXO, Marcus

He had also enclosed the old NDA with a note that read, “Wish to reconsider?”

He continues to send gifts—unannounced—to me in Michigan.

I’ve received stickers of classic book covers from Little Women to Pride and Prejudice , and he sent me a Taylor Swift Eras Tour T-shirt on which he had scribbled, Keep writing, little girl!

I am no longer angry at him. I am no longer scared or envious either.

I simply feel sorry for him.

And the T-shirt—which I’m wearing right now—fits like a dream.

I type furiously, finishing my chapter.

When I look up, the summer world is a Technicolor dream. The lighthouse shimmers down the shore.

The sun is halfway below the water on the horizon.

The final wink.

I type the final period of my chapter.

I hear profound silence.

And, in that silence, I hear the voice of a strong, young woman.

This is the power of literature. This is the power we must unleash in life.

The only thing that separates writers from one another is voice. The only thing that separates each of us from our intended destiny is using that voice.

Every story is important. Every voice is powerful. It’s finding the strength to share it and use it that is the trick.

And when we don’t, the deafening silence we hear is simply sadness.

We all nearly drown at one point in our lives, and we too often let that experience serve as a final period in our existence. We stop living. We let the villains of the world silence us.

It’s only by listening to that voice within—the one that speaks to us late at night, the one calling to you right now, the one we try so hard to ignore because we just want to fit in and we just want life to be less painful—that we can bring our stories to life.

That we come to life.

Because when we do, our words are no longer our words, our stories are no longer our stories, they belong to you, the reader. You make them your own, and, when you do, for a moment the pain eases, the words are no longer jumbled, your heart is superglued back into place once more, it is whole, we are one, and the world actually makes sense again.

If even for a single, mighty page.

An acorn bounces onto the deck beside me.

I reach over, pick it up and place it in my pocket.

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