She’d gone to the library with her parents, once a week, every week, when she was a little girl. It had felt like a magic place to her, full of books just waiting to be read—on shelves, in stacks, in every corner. She’d fantasized about having a place like that in her own imaginary future home, with shelves and shelves of books, wherever you looked.
This library was all her library dreams come true. It was a huge room, but it still managed to feel cozy and warm. There was a round table on the far side with chairs grouped around it, a plush love seat and two overstuffed armchairs in a little circle over by the fireplace, and cushioned window seats that looked like perfect reading nooks lining the walls. There was a long, dark wood table directly in front of her, and an old-fashioned desk in the corner. The room was well lit, with lamps everywhere and the sun streaming in the windows.
But what made this room so incredible was the books. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined every wall, with those rolling ladders so you could reach each and every book.
Izzy slowly walked around the room, trailing her fingers over the spines and occasionally stopping to pick one up and flip through it. There was fiction, history, science, cookbooks, politics, and many shelves full of children’s books. And the best thing about them was that these books looked read. She could tell. These weren’t all brand-new books that some interior decorator had bought in bulk and arranged carefully on a shelf in some sort of order to make the room look good. As a matter of fact, many of them were in no order at all—she itched to organize them. But that also told her they were all books that had been reached for, and read, and maybe even reread. The spines were broken, the book jackets removed or a little torn, pages dog-eared. These books hadn’t just been read, they’d been loved.
She wanted to touch each one, find out about them and where they came from, study the covers, sit on the floor with a pile on her lap and decide which one to dive into first.
She remembered that crack she’d made the other day to Beau, about how there were no books in this house. She winced. But also, she couldn’t believe she’d been living here with these books all this time, totally unaware.
“Have these been here this whole time?” she said to one shelf, full of some of her favorites.
Beau laughed softly. She hadn’t even realized she’d said that out loud.
“Did you think they just appeared by magic?” he asked.
If he’d said that, in that same tone, a few days ago, she would have bristled and stormed out of the room. Now she just smiled.
“I mean, sort of? This room feels a little bit like magic.” She turned around in a circle and looked at it. “It’s a great room. I’ve missed having books around me so much.”
“Feel free to borrow any of these, if you want,” Beau said.
That was so thoughtful of him.
“Oh. Thank you.” Would she feel comfortable enough to do that? She wasn’t sure.
He set the tray on the long wooden table, and smiled at her. “I’m glad I brought you in here, then. I love this room. I’m glad you like it, too.”
She smiled at him. “It’s incredible.” She walked over to the table and inspected the snacks and picked up a bag of Takis. Then she hesitated.
“What’s wrong?” Beau sat down across from her and opened one of his gross-looking juices.
“Oh.” She was embarrassed. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”
Beau grinned at her. “You’re allowed to eat in this library, you know.”
She laughed, surprised he’d read her mind like that. “Okay, but these are so messy! I don’t want to get anything on the books!”
Beau picked up something else on the tray and tossed it to her. “Didn’t you notice that Kettle keeps little packets of wipes by the messy snacks? She thinks of everything. I brought some in here, for exactly that reason.”
Izzy laughed again and tore open the bag. “Okay, then we’re in business.”
In more ways than one. It was time to stop talking about the library and snacks and start talking about Beau’s memoir. She had to get him to write enough of it in the next month in order to prove to Beau that he could write the whole thing, to prove to Marta that Izzy was good at this job, and to prove to herself that she wanted—or didn’t want—to keep working in publishing.
No pressure.
Izzy flipped open her notebook and picked up a pen. “Okay.” She looked at the list she’d made the day before. “How much do you have already? Let’s start there.”
He looked away from her. “Nothing.”
“What?” She couldn’t help her reaction. “What do you mean, nothing? You said you’ve been working on it for a while.”
He looked down at the closed laptop in front of him on the table. “I have been. But I’ve deleted all of it.”
“All of it?” she said. This was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought.
Beau stood up. “Yes, okay? Yes, I’ve deleted everything. None of it was working. This isn’t going to work either, I don’t know why I agreed to it.”
Izzy took a breath and stayed where she was. “Beau.”
He glared at her. “What?”
She looked straight at him. “Why don’t we start over?”
He stared at her for a second, swallowed, and then sat back down. “Okay. Sorry. I’m just…on edge about this, that’s all.”
Izzy grinned at him. “Oh really? I couldn’t tell.”
He laughed, thank God. If he hadn’t—if he’d taken offense to that, too—she’d be certain this partnership of theirs was doomed from the outset.
“I guess you’re used to stress cases, dealing with writers all day,” he said. “Or hotheads, as the case may be—I have no business calling myself a writer.”
When he said that, he just looked sad instead of angry. Okay, now was the time for her best pep talk skills to come out.
“First of all,” she said, “I am something of a hothead myself occasionally, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that?” He laughed again. “Second: If you write, then you’re a writer. You don’t have to have written a book or even feel good about your writing to get that title. And you have been writing—you told me so. All that work you’ve already done? None of it was wasted. It’s all building blocks; even if you can’t see them, they’re there. It will all inform the work you’ll go on to do.”
Now that she knew he’d been listening to her, that he was actually paying attention to her advice, talking to him about writing came easier. And maybe now it was easier because her heart was actually in it. She really cared if she helped him.
“Also,” she continued, “lots of writers are just anxious as hell. Everyone deletes stuff in a panic sometimes. How about next time you feel like deleting something, just open a new document. Call it Deleted Scenes, or The Bad Words, or Stuff I Cut, or whatever, and cut and paste it over there. Hide it in a different folder, if you need to, so you don’t have to see it. Email it to a friend, get them to promise not to read it, whatever. Just save it somehow.”
He swallowed hard. “Okay,” he said. “That’s…that’s a good idea.”
She took a handful of Takis out of the bag to kill time while she thought fast. “Here’s what you’re going to do today.” He opened the laptop, but she shook her head. “Not yet. Sometimes, if you have a block, or things aren’t going well, it helps to switch from one way of writing to another. So here, this notebook is for you.” She pushed one of the notebooks in front of her across the table to him, along with a pen.
“Write down ten scenes you have in your mind for this book. Don’t think too hard, you don’t have to say that much about them, just note them down, just a few sentences for each one. None of this is set in stone, don’t worry.” She picked up her phone and set the timer. “I’ll give you five minutes. Go.”
He looked at her. She could see the objection in his eyes. She didn’t say anything else; she just looked back at him. After a few seconds, his eyes fell to the paper, and he reached for the pen.
When the timer went off, Beau kept scribbling for a few more seconds. He apparently did have something to say. He looked up at her after he put down his pen. “Okay,” he said. “What now?”
Izzy tried to sound more authoritative than she felt. “Now: Pick one of those scenes, and for the next thirty minutes, write it. Right there in that notebook.” She looked down at her phone and set the timer. “Starting now.”
This time, he did object. “But I can’t. That’s the whole problem. I can’t do that.”
“You can,” she said. “I know that you can. Just—”