I stood on the lawn for a full minute after Mira’s car disappeared, dripping and grinning like an idiot. Then I walked back inside my house. With my keys on my counter and my river out the back and my pool that I had just made out with my mom’s best friend in.

’Probably shouldn’t lead with that one when introducing it to guests.’

I tracked pool water across the entire ground floor on the way to the stairs and felt zero panic about it. It was my floor. I could ruin it if I wanted to.

Adulthood is banzai!!!

The shower upstairs came out hot in two seconds, and its pressure could punch the tiredness out of your shoulders. There was a row of empty slots clearly designed for fancy bottles I did not yet own.

Mental note. Buy fancy bottles, even if I wouldn’t use them.

When I came out, wrapped in a towel that was bigger than my old comforter, I caught myself in the bathroom mirror and actually paused.

Huh.

I was built now, like something has been quietly rearranging me from the inside kind of built, which, fair, was exactly what was happening. Broader shoulders. Arms with definition. Stomach doing a small-ridges thing it had not previously been doing.

’Aunty Mira clocked this in two seconds. I hadn’t noticed it in days. Says a lot about my self-image, honestly.’

I patted my own chest twice in mild approval and went hunting for clothes.

The closet was empty except for a single forgotten wooden hanger. Mira would send my stuff tomorrow, so for tonight, towel-and-pants minimalist chic was just going to have to be the look, until my old clothes dried.

I padded back downstairs.

The fridge was stocked, to say the least. Helen had clearly done some prep, or Mira had had someone do it the second the deal closed, because there were eggs and fresh bread and butter and three different cheeses and a slab of beef tenderloin sitting under cling wrap like it was waiting for me personally.

’This is what rich people’s fridges look like all the time? They just open the door and baam, there’s food in there? Constantly? Without you having to think about it?’

I let my nonsensical thoughts run wild. To be honest, I had lived this lifestyle already, but back then I was too depressed to care about anything. That lifestyle was basically hell.

I made a sandwich because I was hungry. The bread was so fresh it actually smelled like bread. Yes, that’s how I would describe it.

The cheese was the kind that had a name. I ate it standing at the kitchen island in a towel and thought, with great clarity, this is the best sandwich anyone has ever made anywhere in human history.

It was a fine sandwich. A very fine one.

Then I went looking for my laptop.

It was in my bag, which was still by the front door where I had dropped it when we walked in. I took it to the study, the one with the built-in shelves, sat down at the desk, looked out the big window at the lawn for a minute, and then I opened the file.

Time to write.

...

Most people would feel weird being alone in a house this big. I had the thought briefly and then dismissed it, because being alone was, hilariously, the one thing I was an expert in.

I’d lived alone for years. I’d lived alone in such a focused, dedicated way that my own building manager hadn’t recognized me when I walked past her in the hall the previous month. A bigger box to be alone in didn’t really change the math. If anything, it had better acoustics.

’Some people would call this concerning. I prefer the term self-actualized.’

The novel had been giving me trouble for a month. It was supposed to be my third on the platform, slow-burn fantasy, court intrigue, complicated heroine. I’d been stuck on Chapter eleven for two weeks. The protagonist had to make a hard choice, and I’d written it three different ways and they all felt like cardboard.

I opened the document, read the last chunk, and started typing.

And then something genuinely strange happened, which was that the writing came easy.

I don’t mean I had ideas. I always had ideas. I mean the connections came easy. The line I had been struggling with had three solutions instead of one, and I could see all three at once and pick the best one without redrafting. The character motivation that had felt like cardboard suddenly had a third layer I hadn’t seen, and the layer made the first two layers click into shape.

I wrote for an hour without looking up. Rewrote Chapter eleven from scratch. It came out better than the previous draft in every single way. The heroine’s choice landed because I’d finally figured out what it cost her, and the cost had been there the whole time.

’Either I’m a genius now or my mind is stealing performance from somewhere I shouldn’t ask about. Probably the second one. Whatever, free upgrade.’

...

The romance subplot was where I noticed it.

The novel had a romance subplot. The romance subplot had, for the past month, been the part of the book I was most sure I had a handle on, because I had written romance subplots before and they were the one thing I felt confident in.

I had also, three hours ago, been kissed in a swimming pool by a thirty-six-year-old mafia matriarch I had called Aunt my whole life.

This was, it turns out, visible in the writing.

The protagonist’s slow-burn love interest had developed, over the course of the new Chapter, a slightly lower voice than I remembered her having.

Her hand kept ending up on the protagonist’s chest in scenes where it had not previously been on his chest. There was a moment where she leaned close to whisper something tactical to him and I had described the angle of her neck.

The angle of her neck. The angle of her neck.

’Get it together, man. She’s a princess. She’s plotting a coup. She does not have time for the angle of her neck right now.’

I cut the neck thing. Left the hand-on-chest because it actually worked. The lower voice stayed too because it was, on reflection, just better characterization than what I’d had before.

Mira’s lipstick had tasted faintly like wine. I was thinking about this while editing a scene about a princess threatening a corrupt minister. The princess, in the editing pass, briefly developed lipstick. I caught myself before I committed it to the page.

’Functional adult,’ I noted, ’cannot stop thinking about what his aunt’s mouth tasted like for ten consecutive minutes. Truly an inspiration to us all.’

I closed the file before things got worse.