Page 102 of Sunsets at the Beach House

“Jesse loved the piece I took him. He wants to know if you’ll supply the Dolphin Club with pies. He’d like to make it the club’s signature dessert.”

The elevator doors opened again. Kat and Cash dispersed to their rooms.

Claire stepped out but went nowhere. “Really? I’m sure we could. How many pies do you think he’d want?”

“According to him, a minimum of twenty-one a week.”

Claire did a little math in her head. “Wow.” She smiled. “I’ll talk to Danny tomorrow about it, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t be possible.”

“Excellent,” Jules said. “Should I make a pot of decaf?”

“Sure.” A little trill of excitement went through Claire at the possibility of doing business with Jesse. If he was serious about the pies, which she had no reason to think he wasn’t, that would mean they’d be opening with a standard weekly order.

She hadn’t thought about offering to supply restaurants. But now she was.

Margo did not sleep in, but when she woke, she found she was a little achy from the work she’d done the day before. Moving was not for anyone over the age of fifty as far as she was concerned. But she took two Aspirin and got herself going.

Today was the last full day of writing they’d have for a while. Tomorrow, Conrad’s sister Dinah would be arriving and the day after that would be Willie and Miguel’s wedding.

She sat next to him now, in his office, as they worked on the next chapter. It was coming along all right. But they both seemed to be feeling the pressure of the impending downtime.

She sighed. “Something’s wrong. I feel like we’ve gotten off track somewhere.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“Where do you think it happened?”

He shook his head. “Let’s go back to the previous chapter and read through.”

“Are you going to print it out again?”

“No, we’ll just read it on the screen.”

“How about you read it out loud? I think that might give us a new way of looking at it.”

“All right, I will.”

She focused on the wall behind his desk, wanting to give herself over to the words as she heard them and not be tempted to read over his shoulder.

As he began, she closed her eyes and listened intently, which wasn’t hard. He had such a nice reading voice. The chapter unfolded well, the setup was good. Maybe the characters could be a little more rounded? A little more description might not hurt, either. She concentrated, listening for any parts that were slow or missing tension.

He reached the end. “Her fists clenched, her nails digging into her palms as she strode away from the hospital. She would get her revenge. She would show them just how serious she was. No one would tell her what to do. Not more than once.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “It sounded better than I thought it was going to. Are we wrong? Is it actually working?”

His eyes narrowed. “I think it’s…fine. But I think we can do better than that. What if she doesn’t leave the hospital? What if she stays there?”

“That would mean she’d have to talk to the police about the body that was just found.”

He nodded, a slow smile spreading across his face. “That’s exactly what it would mean. It would certainly up the tension.”

“You’re so smart. Yes, it would. Can we save that chapter as-is, though? Just in case we change our minds? I’d hate to have to rewrite the whole thing.”

“I’ll copy and paste it into a new document, then we’ll work from that one and make a decision when we’re done.”

“Very good.” She rubbed her hands together. This was exciting. A little nerve-wracking, too. They’d never changed an entire chapter, but this, she supposed, was what writing was all about. What was that saying she’d heard about writing? You had to kill your darlings? Well, they were about to do just that if they rewrote an entire chapter that was probably good enough.

But “good enough” had never made anyone a bestseller, had it? If they were going to compete in the thriller market, they had to be as good as they possibly could be.

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