Page 42 of Fighting Words

I flip open the front page and see an entire table of contents with page numbers and everything. Summer is nothing if not meticulous.

“Are you single?” she presses.

I smirk. “Single as they come.”

“Because you’re so isolated? I doubt there are Sedbergh dating apps.”

“You’d be surprised.”

She laughs. “Really?”

“I’m teasing. You’re right, it’s harder to date here.”

“But Alice?” she suggests gently. “It sort of seems like there’s something there between you two.”

“I really like Alice, as a friend.”

She nods, understanding. “That’s too bad. She’s really great.”

“She is,” I confirm, not the least bit sad about the prospect of not being with her.

It occurs to me that I would love nothing more than to continue this conversation, to ask Summer more about Andrew. I’m curious about their relationship and how stupid the man has to be to let a woman like Summer slip through his fingers. I’m aware now, wholly, that I’m attracted to Summer in a way that’s starting to feel impossible. Even now, during this conversation, I’ve skated my gaze over her mouth, taken notice when she’s licked a bit of coffee off her lips. I’ve studied her fingers, the delicate hold she has on her coffee cup, and I want to reach out and feel her hand, hold it up and flatten it against mine, measure the difference before we lace our fingers together.

I clear my throat and flip to the next page.

“Should we get started?”

CHAPTER 13

SUMMER

Nateand I have barely come up for air in five days. We’re in an all-out war against writer’s block and imposter syndrome.

Right now, neither of us is allowed to leave the cottage. That’s the rule: from the hours of 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. we have to work. So far, we’ve succeeded only in getting on each other’s nerves. Saturday, the morning after we ate dinner with his friends, we flipped through my notes and he critiqued my descriptions of his characters, even though I pulled them directly from the style sheets produced by InkWell and approved by him! Not to mention, Iknowwhat I’m talking about. I’ve cross-referenced from my own read-throughs of his books. I know his characters like the back of my hand.

The next day, we broke down the plots ofThe Last ExodusandEcho of Hope. In the first book, a catastrophic event devastates earth, leaving only a small group of astronauts with the knowledge and the technology needed to escape the dying planet and find help for its dwindling population. ThroughThe Last Exodus, this group of adventurers prepares for a dangerous journey into the unknown, with the goal of seeking inhabitable planets across the cosmos.

Book one is about this crew leaving Earth, and book two is about surviving in space.Echo of Hopeis the uncomfortable middle, the stillness that exists for these twelve individuals as they leave their families and friends in the midst of a global catastrophe. Desolate and hopeless, the band of explorers travels from one star system to another.Echo of Hopedelves further into the inter-crew relationships established in book one, dissecting what everyday life would look like on a spaceship of this kind. The crew faces trials and tribulations, losses and grief. In the book’s gripping conclusion, when hope seems lowest, they finally detect a promising exoplanet that could be their new home. All is not lost.

That’s where we’ve left off.

All the readers—myself included—are hungry for answers, and I’m staring at the only man who can give them to me while he goes about making the slowest cup of tea ever brewed. He’s breaking some kind of record.

“You already had a cup of tea this morning. Do you really need another?”

“No, I don’t really want it.”

I rub my temples, exasperated. “Thenwhyare you making it?”

“I need something to do. I’m going stir-crazy.”

He riffles through the tin of tea bags, reading every label with careful attention to detail.

Dear god, I’m going to lose it.

But I can’t. I am the conductor of this crazy train. I have to keep us on track. I look over at the clock. It’s 12:54 p.m., not quite quitting time yet.

This is what I have been able to pin down from him so far. The promising exoplanet first found in book two is Kepler-452b, and book three will begin as the crew descends to the planet, filled with hope and trepidation about the idea that this new world could be Earth’s long-sought salvation.

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