The Light We Make

The house emerged from the fog like something that didn't want to be found.

Sadie Chen pulled her rental car to a stop at the end of a gravel drive so long she'd wondered twice if she'd taken a wrong turn. The GPS had given up signal twenty minutes ago, leaving her with only the handwritten directions her boss had pressed into her palm with the weary look of a general sending a soldier to certain doom.

Third left after the covered bridge. Follow the drive until it ends. Don't let him scare you off.

The Ashworth estate was beautiful in the way abandoned things are beautiful—a sprawling Victorian farmhouse painted the gray of old bones, its windows watching the October woods like tired eyes. Smoke curled from one chimney. The porch light was off.

Sadie cut the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the silence settle around her. No traffic. No neighbors. Just the whisper of wind through leaves that had already begun to turn, gold and amber and the deep red of warning signs.

Three weeks. Twenty-one days to coax a finished manuscript from the most difficult writer in contemporary fiction. Oliver Ashworth hadn't published in four years, hadn't done an interview in six, and hadn't responded to a single email from his publishing house in eight months. The only reason Sadie was here at all was because his agent had finally broken—had called their editor-in-chief in tears and said, Send someone. Anyone. Just not someone who'll quit.

Sadie had volunteered before her boss finished the sentence.

She'd built her career on difficult writers. The ones who threw tantrums and missed deadlines, who called at 3 AM to discuss semicolons, who swore they'd burn their manuscripts before changing a single word. She had a gift for them—some combination of patience and stubbornness that worked like a key in a lock. She'd never met a wall she couldn't scale, a defense she couldn't outlast.

But standing on Oliver Ashworth's porch now, hand raised to knock, she felt the first flicker of doubt she'd had since accepting the assignment.

The door opened before her knuckles touched wood.

He was taller than his author photos suggested. Broader in the shoulders. His dark hair was longer than it had been in the press shots from his last book tour, curling slightly at his collar, and there was gray at his temples that hadn't been there before. His eyes—she'd read descriptions of them in a hundred fawning reviews, storm-colored, mercurial, impossible to read—fixed on her face with an expression of such profound displeasure that she almost stepped backward.

"You're early," Oliver Ashworth said. His voice was low and rough, like he hadn't used it in days.

"I'm exactly on time." Sadie pulled out her phone, then remembered there was no signal to prove it. &q...