Page 4 of The Villa

At the end of that thirty minutes, I have 282 words, all of which I hate.

I never should have made Dex so much like Matt. In the early days of our relationship, it had felt… inspired. Cute, at the very least. Taking this guy I was crazy for and crafting a fictional version of him, who adored the fictional version of me that I’d created. Dex is definitely better looking than Matt—how many times have readers written to me, wondering why a man like Dex didn’t exist in the real world?—but there are many other similarities. He has Matt’s love of Talisker whisky. He has a battered brown leather jacket he caresfor more than a human baby. He doesn’t have a dog, but he wants to pet every single one he sees.

All of those thingsareMatt, and when I was first writing Dex, it made me so happy, spending time with this version of him even as I fell in love with the real one.

But Dex hadn’t left Petal when she got sick. Hadn’t cheated on her with some unknown woman, hadn’t deleted every picture of her from his social media.

Dex was still out there, being the Good Guy, the one our heroine could depend on. Meanwhile, my own Good Guy was actually an asshole who had bought a condo in Myrtle Beach and was, according to Instagram, suddenly getting very into craft beer.

Also, Dex would never have tried to take Petal’s hard-earned money.

That was one detail I hadn’t mentioned when Chess had asked how things were—that my ex-husband has decided to go for the jugular.

It started with the divorce negotiations. Matt claimed he was entitled to a bigger cut of the Petal Bloom book royalties than I’d been prepared to give. The books have sold well, and I’ve made a decent living, but I wasn’t rolling around in money. I drove a car that was six years old, still shopped at the cheaper grocery store, and honestly, Matt’s paycheck had been floating us once I got sick and started missing deadlines.

I’d thought maybe that’s why he was going for a bigger share—the health care costs he’d covered while I was on his fancy insurance. But when he and his lawyer doubled down, I quickly understood that it was more than that.

It wasn’t about money, it seemed. It was aboutownership. Because I’d talked out my plots with Matt, because he’d madesome suggestions when I was stuck and because, stupidly, I’d once said in an interview withMystery and Suspensethat “the Petal Bloom books wouldn’t exist without my husband, Matt,” he now argued that he was entitled to a lot more than a couple of dedications and a mention in the acknowledgments. He wanted a cut of my earnings—not only of what I’d already made, but anything else Imightmake in the future from Petal. Apparently, I only had a career because of him.

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised he felt this way, though. I’d written the first few Petal Bloom books before we’d gotten married, so they were under my maiden name, Emily McCrae. I’d planned on keeping that name for professional use even as I took Matt’s last name, Sheridan, personally, but apparently it hadn’t even occurred to Matt that I wouldn’t use Sheridan on my books. It had bothered him enough that I’d relented, insisting on the change even though my publisher had been less than thrilled about it.

So yeah, I probably should have seen this coming, but I’d thought it was just a ridiculous money grab, that any judge would laugh it out of court.

So far, no one is laughing.

Just last week, I had to turn over the past five years of contracts, check stubs, and royalty statements to his attorneys, and at night, I lie awake wondering what it will feel like if he actually wins.

If every time I sit down to write, for the rest of my life, I’ll be putting money in the pocket of a man who left me the second that things got hard.

I’m so busy feeling sorry for myself that I realize I’ve missed two texts from Chess.

HELLO!!

SERIOUSLY EM I HAVE A—PLAN—

That makes me smile in spite of myself.

Chess was always big on plans, only about a third of which actually came to fruition, and that’s me being generous. There was the costume party she wanted to make our entire dorm participate in (she dropped it after she couldn’t find a costume she liked). The scavenger hunt senior year (she forgot to actually make a list of things to find). A trip to Cabo for my bachelorette party (straight up never happened).

And of course, there was always the Book.

That’s how we used to talk about it, the Book that we were going to write together, the searing exposé of girlhood and sex and academia that was going to make us both literary darlings. That plan had almost gotten off the ground. I think we got about ten thousand words in before Chess lost interest. There had been a new guy, someone she’d met at some random bar, and with him had come an entirely new set of friends to hang out with and impress. I had gotten used to it by then, how when Chess dated someone new, she seemed to become an entirely new person. I’d just assumed she’d get tired of him and his crowd like she always did, and then we’d get back to the book.

The guy had eventually—inevitably—gone away, but she never mentioned working on the book again.

I sigh, getting up from my desk. Outside, it’s already getting dark, and I realize I’ve wasted another day, working and yet somehow getting nowhere. Across the street, the Millers have already turned on their porch light, and I can hear the sound of kids laughing, bicycle tires bumping from street to sidewalk and back again.

Matt and I bought this house six years ago, firmly ensconced in Family Territory, because we thought we’d be one of them soon enough. We were planning on having kids soon,living that suburban dream, but then I’d gotten busy with the books, and just as that had slowed down, I’d gotten sick, and now here I was, the one single lady stuck in a two-story, four-bedroom house that didn’t feel like mine at all.

I take my phone into the kitchen, opening the fridge and seeing if I have anything that isn’t completely depressing to heat up for dinner. There’s a pot of soup from the other night, so I grab that, sitting it on the stove before studying the few bottles of wine left in my wine rack, the reds that Matt didn’t bother taking.

I think about all those orange bottles still in my medicine cabinet.

Antibiotics. Those were the first things the doctor prescribed when I started getting sick, just over two years ago. I was nauseous all the time, prickly sweat beading my upper lip and the small of my back.

Matt had been sure I was pregnant, but the tests were always negative, and when I’d finally gone in to see my gynecologist, she suggested I might actually have gotten a really bad case of food poisoning, something my body couldn’t fight off on its own. I left with a prescription for these big horse pills that made my arms and feet break out in an itchy rash, but didn’t do a thing to curtail the nausea. If anything, it seemed to get worse, accompanied by a fuzzy feeling in my head, an inability to focus on anything.

That had led to CT scans, to ENTs, to a different kind of antibiotic and then, finally, when no one could find anything wrong with me, a prescription for intense motion sickness pills.

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