Chapter 20: The Novel

## Emily

May 2022

I finished the novel on a Tuesday.

Which was appropriate, because the novel began with a Tuesday — She died on a Tuesday — and endings should echo beginnings, the way the last note of a song should remind you of the first, the way the final page of a book should send you back to the opening line with new eyes and the quiet devastation of understanding something you didn't understand before.

It was 2:17 AM. I was in the loft. Grey was asleep beside me — actually asleep, not the performative sleep of the first weeks after his return, where his body lay still and his mind ran operations behind his eyelids. Real sleep. The kind that came with soft breathing and twitching fingers and the occasional murmur that might have been a word in a language I didn't speak.

Sirius was at the foot of the bed, curled into a perfect circle, her one-and-a-half ears folded against her skull. The apartment was dark except for the glow of my laptop, which painted the sheets in blue-white light and made me look, I suspected, like a ghost writing her own haunting.

I typed the last sentence.

Not with ceremony. Not with the dramatic keystroke of a writer who knew she was finishing something and wanted to perform the moment. I typed it the way I'd typed every other sentence in the book — with my fingers moving faster than my brain, with the wire humming in my chest, with the trust that the words knew where they were going even when I didn't.

She stands at the window. The glass is cold against her forehead. Outside, the stars are doing what they always do — burning and dying and burning again, in an endless cycle that most people mistake for permanence.

But she knows better now.

It isn't permanence. It's persistence. The stubborn, irrational, magnificent refusal to stop burning even when the fuel runs out.

Like her sister, who burned so bright that three years of darkness couldn't dim the memory.

Like the man who folds paper roses, who sat in the dark with a feral cat until it learned to trust, who carried her out of a bathroom and a concrete room and a hundred smaller prisons that nobody else could see.

Like her.

She is not the girl who died on a Tuesday. She is the girl who survived every Tuesday after. And the Wednesdays. And the Thursdays. And the long, impossible, beautiful stretch of days that followed, each one a little brighter than the last, each one proof that the wire in her chest — the one she thought had snapped the night her sister died — was not broken.

It was humming.

It had always been humming.

She just couldn't hear it over the noise.

I stared at the screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the last sentence. A small, patient pulse. A heartbeat.

380 pages.

380 pages of a girl who lost her twin sister and her mother and her sense of self and found, through pain and love and the patient, relentless presence of people who refused to give up on her, that loss didn't have to be the end. That the wire could be repaired. That the debris could burn brighter than the original star.

I closed the laptop. Set it on the nightstand. Lay back in the dark.

"You finished," Grey said.

Not asleep. Of course not asleep. The man had the hearing of a surveillance device and the emotional radar of someone who had spent months learning to read the specific quality of silence that meant I was about to cry.

"How did you know?"

"You stopped typing. You've been typing for four hours. You never stop typing during a session. The only explanation is that you've either finished or your laptop has died, and your laptop is plugged in."

"Spy logic."

"Writer logic. I recognize the sound of an ending."

I rolled over. Pressed my face into his chest. His arms came around me — automatic, instinctive, the muscle memory of a man whose body had learned to hold me the way his mind had learned to read me.

"It's done," I whispered. "The novel is done."

"How does it end?"

"She survives. She hears the wire. She stands at a window and watches the stars and she understands that burning isn't the same as being consumed."

"That's a good ending."

"It's your ending. You gave it to me in the alcove. 'Collapsing stars can be reborn.' You said that in September and I've been writing toward it ever since."

He pressed his lips to the top of my head. "It was always your ending, Emily. I just pointed at it."

---

The next morning, I printed the book.

All 380 pages. Grey's printer — a dusty machine in the corner of the living room that he used exclusively for printing surveillance documents and had never, to my knowledge, been asked to produce anything as emotionally complex as a novel — groaned through the task with the reluctant compliance of a device being used outside its comfort zone.

I stacked the pages on the kitchen counter. Squared the edges. Stared at them.

380 pages. 97,000 words. Ten months of work, from the first two sentences in the alcove to the last paragraph at 2:17 AM. A year of grief and love and violence and recovery, compressed into paper and ink, held together by a butterfly clip because I didn't own a binder.

"What happens now?" I asked.

Grey was making coffee. His coffee, not mine — mine was already on the counter, cream and two sugars, the Sirius mug. "Now you send it to agents."

"Agents."

"Literary agents. The people who represent writers and sell their manuscripts to publishers."

"I know what agents are. I'm asking how."

"You write a query letter. You research agents who represent your genre. You send the book and you wait." He paused. "And while you wait, you trust that the novel is good enough. Because it is."

"You've read it four times."

"Five. I read it again last week."

"And you cried."

"On a plane. Yes. I've discussed this."

"You cried again. In the apartment. Last Thursday. I heard you."

He was quiet for a moment. The almost-smile appeared — number one hundred and something, I'd truly lost count. "The chapter about the mother's pancakes. It gets me every time."

I picked up the book. Held it. This stack of paper that weighed barely three pounds and contained ten months of my life, rendered in sentences that bled and burned and said the things I'd been too afraid to say for three years.

"My mom would have been so happy," I said. "She always wanted me to write. She used to say, 'Emily, you have a voice like a knife — it cuts through everything. Use it.'"

"She was right."

"She was always right." I set the book down. Looked at Grey. "I want to dedicate it to her. And to Charlie. And to a man who folds paper roses."

His eyes softened. Not tears — something quieter. The private tenderness that existed beneath the almost-smiles and the controlled expressions and the sixteen years of walls. "You don't have to—"

"I want to. The dedication page reads: For Margaret and Charlotte Glass, who taught me that burning isn't the same as being consumed. And for G, who sat in the dark and waited."

He set his coffee down. Crossed the kitchen. Took my face in his hands and kissed me — the morning kiss, the coffee kiss, the you-are-the-most-remarkable-person-I've-ever-known kiss that tasted like dark roast and permanence.

"Send it," he said. "Today. Right now. Don't overthink it."

"I always overthink it."

"Then overthink it while typing the email."

I did. I sat at his desk, with his laptop (mine was recovering from the four-hour session), and I wrote a query letter. It took seventeen drafts. Ash proofread it (via text, with increasingly aggressive encouragement: "SEND IT EMILY GLASS OR I WILL SEND IT FOR YOU AND I WILL ADD EMOJIS"). Syn provided editorial notes that were, as always, precise and kind and exactly right.

I researched agents. I found twelve who represented literary fiction with themes of grief, recovery, and love. I customized each query. I attached the first fifty pages.

And then I sat with my finger over the send button and felt, for the first time in ten months, the old fear. Not the Jordan fear or the concrete-room fear. The deeper one. The one that whispered: who are you to think you have something to say? Who are you to believe that your pain, your words, your voice, are worth anyone's time?

Jordan's voice. My father's silence. The accumulated weight of three years of being told, through fists and absence and indifference, that I was nothing.

I breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

Deep breath, Snowflake.

I pressed send.

Twelve times.

Then I closed the laptop, picked up Sirius (who protested), held her against my chest (she protested more), and said, "I just sent my novel to twelve literary agents."

Sirius purred. Not in approval — in resignation. But I chose to interpret it as approval.

---

The first response came three days later.

From an agent named Sarah Chen at Blackwell Literary. The email was two paragraphs long:

Dear Emily,

I read your first fifty pages last night and stayed up until 3 AM to finish them. This morning, I requested the full manuscript from my inbox, which I never do before coffee. I am deeply moved by the voice, the emotional precision, and the raw, uncompromising honesty of your writing. This is a novel that demands to be read with open hands and a full heart.

I would love to read the complete manuscript. Please send it at your earliest convenience.

Warm regards,* *Sarah Chen

I read the email seventeen times. Then I screamed. Then I called Ash, who screamed louder. Then I called Syn, who said "I knew it" with the calm certainty of a woman who had never doubted me. Then I texted Grey, who was in a meeting with Malachi:

Emily: AN AGENT WANTS THE FULL MANUSCRIPT

Grey: Send it immediately.

Emily: I'M SCREAMING

Grey: I can hear you from downtown.

Emily: GREY

Grey: I know. I'm proud of you. Send the book. Then eat lunch.

Emily: I'M NOT HUNGRY I'M SCREAMING

Grey: Eat lunch and scream simultaneously. Multitask.

I sent the book. All 380 pages. Then I ate lunch (gummy worms, which technically counted). Then I sat on the couch with Sirius and stared at the ceiling and felt something I hadn't felt in so long that I'd forgotten its name.

Hope.

Not the cautious, hedged, prepared-for-disappointment version of hope that I'd been operating on since the gas station. Real hope. The kind that fills your chest and makes your eyes bright and makes you believe, against all evidence and all experience, that good things are possible. That you deserve them. That the universe, for all its indifference, occasionally looks at a girl who has been through hell and says: here. This one's for you.

Three more agents requested the full manuscript that week.

By the end of the month, Sarah Chen offered representation.

By the end of June, there was a two-book deal with a major publisher.

The novel was called Halfway Out of the Dark.

And on the dedication page, in the font my mother used for her books (Georgia, 11-point, because some things were inherited like eye colour and stubbornness), were the words:

For Margaret and Charlotte Glass, who taught me that burning isn't the same as being consumed.

And for G, who sat in the dark and waited.