Then
Sutton was on a roll. The words were flying out of the tips of her fingers, the thoughts coming faster than she could capture them. She realized she was panting from the mental exertion. She pushed on, didn’t want to catch her breath, wanted this astounding flow to continue.
The flags were flying and the battle raged, swords flashing as they cut through the air, blood spraying from the blades. Ellaclaire ripped the bottom of her dress and sprinted for her life across the field, knowing if she could just make the Grove, she would be safe in the embrace of the wood nymphs, her family. An antelope, flushed from the field, kept pace with her, its liquid brown eyes urging her to move faster, quicker, to follow the path it was creating for her through the long grass. The pounding hooves of a horse grew louder and louder, the beast bearing down until she could feel his breath hot and rank upon her face as she turned to measure the distance until she was captured, watched the shining blade swinging toward her head, and...
“Sutton? Knock, knock.”
The door to her office opened. She tried to ignore it.
She stumbled, and the blade swung above her, missing her tender white neck by a fraction. The knight leaped from his steed...
She heard laughter. The knight would not be laughing in this moment. The knight wanted her dead. Fuck you, knight.
“I brought you a cup of tea. From the sounds of it, you were going wild. I thought you might be thirsty.”
Husband. Not a knight.
Fuck you, husband?
Her fingers ceased moving. She sniffed, smelled the strong, comforting scent of Earl Grey. Decidedly not the primordial ooze of the forgotten forest she was writing about, bathed in blood and fear.
The scene was fleeing, running from her imagination like her characters had fled across the battlefield. She shut her eyes in a vain attempt to capture it, but elusive as a whisper, it was gone. No more forest. No more knight on the verge of murder. No more Princess Ellaclaire. She was squarely back in her office in her staid house on her boring street. Damn it.
Sutton opened her eyes to see her handsome husband looking at her fondly, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits in hand. “Cuppa and a snack, darling. Thought you could use a break. You’ve been at it for hours.”
She glanced at the clock on her computer screen. Forty minutes. She’d only gotten in forty minutes. The word counter flashed at her, a measly thousand words. Her heart sank. Her deadline was next week and she still had the whole final act of the book to write.
Ethan was not able to pick up social cues. It was something she’d found charming when she first met him, and now...well, now she wanted to kill him. Literally break the plate in his hand across the edge of her desk and shove a shard of sharpened Limoges china deep into his neck.
He didn’t seem to notice her tight grimace, her darting eyes. He set the cup and plate on the desk and started in massaging her shoulders. “What are you doing in here, pounding away? Getting close to finishing?”
Dear God, the man was settling in to have a whole conversation.
Her therapist whispered harshly inside her brain, Sutton Montclair. Stop that. He’s lonely. Dashiell is gone. He needs the connection between you. Reestablish a connection with your husband, Sutton. You need it as much as he does. You need each other. That’s how you will survive this.
And now it’s your turn to fuck off, Doc. The only way I’m going to survive this is by meeting my deadline and making sure there’s a paycheck to feed this man in back of me.
She dredged up a smile. “Just reworking the beginning a bit. It was too slow. You know how it is.”
He didn’t. He never had to rework his beginnings. Of course, he hadn’t been working at all lately, which was the reason he was in here, pestering her. She forced herself not to glance at the clock. Every interruption cost her at least twenty minutes, and she only had four hours blocked off today; she had her quarterly lunch with her mother at one o’clock. She would cancel. Save herself the aggravation. Mail the envelope instead. Gain another couple of hours. Screw Siobhan.
“Have your tea before it gets cold,” Ethan chided.
She took an obedient sip. It was delicious, of course. The man was British, it was in his blood. He had two talents—he was brilliant in bed and brilliant at making tea. She had herself a catch, everything she’d ever wanted, and all she could think was, Please go. Please go. Please go. Just leave me alone...
Connect, damn you.
Her smile was a bit wider now, comforting, knowing. She turned in her chair, put her hand on his. “Ethan. Darling. Are you going to get back to work on the book soon?”
His face closed. His arms crossed. A complete body language shift. His lower lip practically jutted out. He was pouting. Ethan could pout with the best of them.
“Don’t start in on me, Sutton. I was only trying to be nice.”
“I know you were, and I don’t mean to nag, but you know Bill has been waiting for you to send that first one hundred pages. He called again last night. I don’t know how much longer you’ll be able to put him off, darling. The publishers want their book, and if you’re not going to deliver, you need to let them know.”
“Bloody hell, Sutton. I am trying to be caring and show you how much I love you, and all you can do is throw this in my face? The chapters will happen when I’m damn good and ready for them to, and not a minute before.” He stood and stormed out of her office. After a moment’s hesitation, she used her foot to shut the door behind him.
You are a devious bitch, Sutton Montclair.
She reread the paragraph she’d been into before he interrupted her. An antelope? Where the hell had that come from? It was crap. Stupid, ridiculous crap. She cut it, took a sip of the delicious tea. Felt the anger start.
It was their ongoing battle. Ethan had an unerring ability to interrupt her just as she was at the most crucial moments in her work. She understood exactly what was going on. It was his own resistance to writing his new book. She’d always been understanding and forgiving, even going so far as to follow him back to his own office off the cavernous kitchen and help him get started. He liked for her to start his sentences. It helped him work.
After Dashiell died, none of that mattered. She didn’t want to help him anymore. The bastard had tricked her into getting pregnant, and instead of hating the situation, she’d fallen head over heels with the small, bald, smelly, diaper-clad result of his deviousness, and karma had ripped the child away from them both, as they so justly deserved.
The thought of Dashiell sent a stake through her, and she shut the laptop. There would be no more work today.
Connect with Ethan, Sutton. Save your marriage. Do something. You can’t continue to live like this.
The voice in her head had been worse, lately. Whispering, sometimes, things she couldn’t quite catch, couldn’t exactly understand. She needed to up her meds, she knew she did, but she also needed the lack of control that the hypomania brought to her work. If she upped her meds now, she might shut that edge down, and she just needed to get the damn thing done and then she could anesthetize the voice until she needed it again.
It was exhausting, the delicate knife blade of her life. Too many pills and the voices disappeared, too few and she couldn’t make heads or tails of things.
It would be so much easier to simply be dead. If she were dead, she wouldn’t have to finish the book. They would write nice things about her in the trades—Writer Gone Too Soon: The Inevitable Madness of an Artistic Life. There would be stories polished and reprinted about suicide and its impact on writers. Fifty or so writers would try to capitalize on her tragic death to talk about their own battles with depression, and oh, yes, please buy my book.
No. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
She felt light, suddenly. A beam of happiness drove through her. She always had this moment, with every book, when she felt that it would be easier to die than finish. It meant she was going to have the breakthrough that catapulted her to the end.
Sutton wasn’t entirely insane. She knew herself very, very well.
Smiling, she took the empty cup and saucer to the kitchen. Now she was in the mood to connect, in more ways than one. And Ethan never said no to a good lay.
In the kitchen, Ethan was sitting at the table, a book in front of him. A rush of emotion filled her. It was his battered copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, the one book he turned to in times of need. Signed by the author, no less. Of course it was.
He was struggling. That’s why the pages weren’t done. Ethan was struggling, and Sutton was doing everything she could to make his suffering worse. She blamed him. She blamed him for everything. She was a horrible person. Horrid. Evil to her very soul. Only an evil woman would let her husband suffer when she could alleviate the pain and despair with a touch.
Why are you still blaming him, Sutton? It was an accident. Worse, it was completely, utterly random.
But was it? Had he killed the baby to punish her?
Had she killed the baby to punish him? She’d been so drunk. The last thing she remembered was holding Dashiell, crying into his onesie, the soft fleece blanket wrapped around her shoulder, sheltering him. Had she smothered him unknowingly, then set him back in his crib facedown?
She dumped the teacup in the sink with a clatter and walked out of the room without saying a word, ignoring Ethan’s eyes boring into her back.
He had no idea how bad this was. Losing Dashiell was something unrecoverable; not knowing exactly how he’d died was life threatening.
She was broken inside, broken in three parts now. She’d been whole once. Then she’d been torn in two, and she’d barely recovered. And now she’d been torn again, and there was no way to repair the rent. There was simply no way to go on like this. One minute upset, the next happy. Swinging from the branches of her once-perfect life, to and fro, completely unable to control her emotions.
No, she couldn’t continue living this way at all.
She stalked back to her office. Pulled up her Facebook page. Sometimes, when she got herself distracted, a few minutes reading nice things people said to her about her work could get her back on track.
The comment was on the top of her page.
I can’t believe I wasted my money on this trash. Sutton Montclair should be shot. Don’t get me near a gun, ha ha.
Shocked, she read the message over and over again. It had fifty likes, though the vast majority of the comments expressed absolute outrage.
She looked at the username, didn’t recognize it. Clicked on to the page. It was anonymous—no profile picture, no photos or albums, no status updates, only one like to its credit, Sutton’s fan page. Without a second thought, she deleted the comment and blocked the user. She had absolutely no problem with people not liking her work—she had expressed that on many a panel and blog—but there was something ominous about the comment that made her uneasy.
She shouldn’t have done it. She should have told someone, made a note of the username and the comment itself. Hitting the delete button was a very big mistake. When the police tried to track who she claimed was the real stalker, that was the only clue to their true identity. She couldn’t defend herself.
But that morning, so long ago, after drinking her delicious tea and having mixed feelings toward her slightly estranged husband, Sutton had no idea where it was all going to go.