The Villa(4)

Even if we are ships in the night most of the time, she is still my oldest and best friend. Which these days means we text when we can, call hardly ever, and see each other once a year if we’re lucky.

So, I’m surprised when I get a notification from her the day after our lunch.

I have a crazy thought.

With Chess, that can mean pretty much anything. She might be thinking of marrying a stranger or it could just mean she’s thinking about reintroducing carbs to her diet. Hard to say.

I leave it on read, telling myself that it’s only because I’m supposed to be working right now. My phone technically shouldn’t even be in my office—that’s usually a strict rule of mine. It stays in the kitchen, sitting on the counter until I’m through with my work for the day.

But I’ve been slacking lately, spending more time looking at my phone or dicking around on Twitter than I do actually writing. That must be why my intrepid heroine, Petal Bloom, is still stuck in chapter five of A Gruesome Garden, caught by her private investigator not-quite-a-boyfriend, Dex Shanahan, as she hangs out of the window of the murder scene.

I read the last sentence I wrote again.

Of course it was Dex.

The readers will like this, Dex showing up again. I’d kept him way in the background in the last book, and had the angry emails to prove just how popular a choice that had been. I should be excited about writing him again, about getting Petal and Dex back together.

Instead, I kept thinking that maybe Petal should turn out to be the murderer in this book. Maybe she’s the one who couldn’t deal with Mrs. Harrison, queen of the garden club, found dead with a pair of hedge trimmers in her back?

That was a detail I was pretty sure my editor was going to make me cut—you can get away with some violence in a cozy mystery, but for the most part readers want their victims very cleanly dead. No blood, no mess, certainly no horror or pain. A quiet, picturesque death by poison, and not one of the ones that made you vomit or, god forbid, shit yourself. Just enough for you to give a dramatic croak at the Christmas party or the cider pressing or the spring wedding, whatever festive occasion required an untimely death for my plucky heroine to solve.

In the previous book, Mrs. Harrison had been a real bitch to Petal. Maybe this was her revenge, and Petal’s pluckiness was actually just a deep well of rage against the town of Blossom Bay and the Mrs. Harrisons of the world. Maybe Dex, who always thought he knew better than Petal, had finally reached the end of his rope.

I let myself type it out for thirty minutes. Thirty glorious minutes, and over a thousand words of Petal Bloom hauling herself through that window and doing away with the frustratingly noncommittal Mr. Shanahan before revealing her big plan to wreak vengeance all over Blossom Bay.

It is fun.

It is bloody.

It is the most I’d written in three months.

And when I’m finished, I sit back, read it over, and then, sensibly, delete every single word.

No one reads my books for chaos and bloodshed. They want small-town atmospherics and familiar plot beats. They want Petal Bloom to save the day while Dex looks on indulgently.

And that’s what I’ll give them.

But I spend another thirty minutes trying to start a new chapter, one where Petal lets Dex pull her up through the window, and of course there’s a moment when they almost kiss, but oh no! What’s that? A sound from outside! They must go investigate!

At the end of that thirty minutes, I have 282 words, all of which I hate.

I never should have made Dex so much like Matt. In the early days of our relationship, it had felt … inspired. Cute, at the very least. Taking this guy I was crazy for and crafting a fictional version of him, who adored the fictional version of me that I’d created. Dex is definitely better looking than Matt—how many times have readers written to me, wondering why a man like Dex didn’t exist in the real world?—but there are many other similarities. He has Matt’s love of Talisker whisky. He has a battered brown leather jacket he cares for more than a human baby. He doesn’t have a dog, but he wants to pet every single one he sees.

All of those things are Matt, and when I was first writing Dex, it made me so happy, spending time with this version of him even as I fell in love with the real one.

But Dex hadn’t left Petal when she got sick. Hadn’t cheated on her with some unknown woman, hadn’t deleted every picture of her from his social media.

Dex was still out there, being the Good Guy, the one our heroine could depend on. Meanwhile, my own Good Guy was actually an asshole who had bought a condo in Myrtle Beach and was, according to Instagram, suddenly getting very into craft beer.

Also, Dex would never have tried to take Petal’s hard-earned money.

That was one detail I hadn’t mentioned when Chess had asked how things were—that my ex-husband has decided to go for the jugular.

It started with the divorce negotiations. Matt claimed he was entitled to a bigger cut of the Petal Bloom book royalties than I’d been prepared to give. The books have sold well, and I’ve made a decent living, but I wasn’t rolling around in money. I drove a car that was six years old, still shopped at the cheaper grocery store, and honestly, Matt’s paycheck had been floating us once I got sick and started missing deadlines.

I’d thought maybe that’s why he was going for a bigger share—the health care costs he’d covered while I was on his fancy insurance. But when he and his lawyer doubled down, I quickly understood that it was more than that.