The Truce

The cabin was smaller than the photos suggested.

Gemma Holt stood in the gravel driveway, overnight bag slung over one shoulder, staring at the weathered cedar siding like it had personally wronged her. The listing had promised "rustic charm." What she saw was a two-bedroom box in the middle of nowhere Vermont, a forty-minute drive from the nearest town, surrounded by trees that blocked any hope of reliable cell service.

Six months. Six months of this, because her publisher and his publisher had gotten into a legal pissing contest over a shared anthology project from three years ago, and somehow the solution they'd landed on was forcing the two of them to actually complete it.

Together.

In the same space.

For one week every month until the manuscript was done.

She heard the second car before she saw it. A rental sedan, navy blue, pulling up beside her Subaru with the kind of precision that somehow felt condescending. The engine cut. The driver's door opened.

Isaac Reyes unfolded himself from the front seat, and Gemma felt her jaw tighten reflexively.

He looked the same as he had at the PEN America gala six months ago, when they'd spent an entire cocktail hour studiously ignoring each other from opposite ends of the room. Dark hair that curled slightly at the temples. The kind of cheekbones that made you want to write poetry about him and then stab him with the pen. Wire-rimmed glasses he didn't actually need—she'd seen him reading without them—that he wore because they made him look more serious.

"Holt," he said.

"Reyes."

They stood there, fifteen feet apart, neither moving toward the cabin door.

"You're early," he observed.

"I'm on time. You're late."

"I'm exactly when I said I'd be."

"Which was after me. Therefore, late."

His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. More like the memory of one, suppressed before it could fully form. "That's not how time works."

"I'm a novelist. I can make time work however I want."

He actually did smile then, small and sharp. "Debatable, based on your pacing in The Cartographer's Daughter."

And there it was. Four years since he'd written that review in The Atlantic, calling her debut "structurally ambitious but emotionally hollow," and he still couldn't resist. The review that had haunted her first press tour. The review that had made her cry in a hotel bathroom in Chicago.

The review that had started everything.

"At least my books get reviewed in places that still exist," she said sweetly. "How's The Literary Standard doing? Oh, wait. Folded, didn't it?"

His smile disappeared. Direct hit.

The thing about Isaac Reyes was that he'd ...