Chapter 2: Comments

"Nora can't die!!!"

"Author, I am not okay."

The comments came in faster than I could read them.

My name is Nora Brooks, and I am a bestselling author of fourteen novels and one very ill-advised cooking blog. At five o'clock in the morning, I was sitting at my desk with a laptop on my knees, a cold cup of tea at my elbow, and my heart doing something strange in my chest. I had just posted chapter eighty-seven of my newest novel, The Great flood apocalypse. The chapter ended with my heroine drowning.

The notifications went off like popcorn.

"You killed her?? After everything she did for that snake???"

“Snakes will always be snake… deceptive and betrayers!” Another comment came.

“Gosh, she was so stupid… she deserves it.”

I had never seen so many exclamation marks in my life. I scrolled, and they kept coming.

The views counter was climbing too. Four thousand. Nine thousand. Eleven. By the time I finished my first sip of cold tea, the chapter had been shared in three reader groups, and someone had already made a tearful video titled, Why Nora Wells Deserved Better. It had two hundred comments, and every one of them was addressed to me.

"Weak heroine, weak ending. If she'd just TOLD him the pills were her blood, none of this would have happened."

"Why would she tell him? He's a snake. He doesn't deserve to know."

"This is the WORST ending I've ever read. And I read your whole mafia king’s plus-sized queen series."

I winced. The mafia king’s plus-sized queen was my third book, and it had sold two million copies. I did not need to be compared to myself.

"I thought you were better than this," one reader wrote. "Turns out the Hockey captain liked me made sense. The mafia king’s plus-sized queen made sense. This one just ends? With her DEAD? You owe us a comeback."

"Her family should have been able to unlock her hidden powers!" wrote another. "Where is the justice??"

"She deserves it," argued someone else. "She was weak. She let everyone walk over her. Honestly, good riddance."

"You are a monster, Nora Brooks," wrote another person. "A monster."

"I have been reading you since your first book," wrote another, and that one hurt more than all the rest. "You never let a heroine die for nothing. What changed?"

I put my hands over my face.

On the wall above my desk hung a framed cover of The mafia king’s plus-sized queen, signed by a hundred people at a book fair. Next to it was a crooked photograph of me and Tasha at nineteen, grinning at the camera with paper crowns on our heads. I had a good life. I had spent twenty years building it out of ink and stubbornness. And here I was, at five in the morning, being scolded by strangers for hurting someone who did not exist.

What had changed? I did not know how to answer that. Maybe I had been tired. Maybe I had wanted to prove I could write a sad book. Maybe, after fourteen happy endings, I had wanted one story where the girl who gave everything simply lost, because that was how it had felt to be me for most of my life.

It had been the plan from the start. Nora Wells, the weak and gentle heroine of The Great flood apocalypse, would give everything to a black snake who would grow into a dragon and then throw her away. Betrayal. Tragedy. A sad, perfect ending that would make readers cry, and cry harder, and talk about it for months. I knew exactly how it would feel. I had written it carefully but never expected them to take it so personally.

I typed an answer, deleted it, and typed again. "I'm sorry you're upset," I wrote, "but this is how the story ends. Betrayal is a theme. It's supposed to hurt."

The reply came in under a minute.

"If it was supposed to hurt, it worked. But then you owe her something."

"Then give her an ending that matters."

"She was too good to die."

I closed my laptop. Opened it. Closed it again.

"You could still fix it," wrote a stranger. "You have the power. You made her. Give her a second chance."

I laughed out loud, alone in my study. A second chance. As though I were a goddess.

A reader named DragonMom77 had written four paragraphs, ending: Nora is the only reason that dragon was worth anything. Everyone knows she should have survived. Please, please, give her a chance.

It was ridiculous. They were arguing about a girl who did not exist.

I knew that. I also knew that I had never in my career received so much mail about one fictional person. It was strange. It was almost as if they could feel her, somewhere, waiting.

And still I felt the faint, sick weight of eighty-seven chapters sitting on my chest.

My phone buzzed against the desk and nearly fell off. The screen read TASHA.

"Please tell me you haven't read the comments," said my best friend, the instant I picked up.

"I haven't read the comments."

"You're lying. You always lie when you're tired. I've been reading them for an hour. Nora, you killed her."

"That was the plan."

"The plan was bad." Tasha sounded half laughing and half furious. "I have an idea for the fix. A good one. Come meet me. I'm at Delmar's, the coffee shop across from your building. Bring your laptop. I'll buy you a croissant. Please."

"It's five in the morning."

"They're open all night. Nora. It's not a good ending. You and I know that. So Come on."

I looked at the screen. Another notification slid down. DragonMom77 again: Please don't leave her there.

I sighed. "Give me ten minutes."

I pulled on a coat over my pajamas and shoved my feet into my shoes. I grabbed my phone and my keys and did not bother with the laptop. It was a block and a half. I would be there in five minutes, I would let Tasha talk, and I would go home and sleep. This was the problem with writing about drowning. It made everyone want to rescue the character, and nobody wanted to rescue the author.

The morning was cool and quiet. The street lamps cast long yellow pools on the empty pavement. Across the wide road, Delmar's glowed warm and gold behind its window, and I could see Tasha inside at a table, waving at me with both hands.

I stopped at the crossing. The light was red. A few cars were still hissing past, the last of the night traffic.

I stood there with my hands in my coat pockets, shivering a little, and let myself think about the book. After Fourteen happy endings. I thought, for no reason I should maybe do a sad ending. I enjoyed writing it and thought it was a clever ending.

A small, thin sound cut through my thoughts.

It was a whimper. I looked down.

At the edge of the curb, a stray dog stood trembling. It was small and scruffy, brown and white, with one torn ear. It was staring at the road with wide, terrified eyes, as though it were looking for someone it had lost.

"Hey," I said softly. "Hey, sweetheart. Come here."

It bolted and shot out into the street, straight into the path of a pair of headlights that had come around the corner much faster than they should have. I saw the dog freeze in the glare. I saw the headlights grow.

"No!" I shouted. "No, no, no!"

I don’t remember deciding. I only remember that my feet were off the curb, and that the pavement was rushing under them, and that I had the dog in my arms, small and warm and shaking against my chest, and that somewhere to my left a horn was screaming.

I saw Tasha through the window of Delmar's. Her mouth was open. She had dropped her cup and was running towards me.

The light hit me before the sound did.

I remember the impact as a kind of enormous, soundless push, like a wave. The dog slid out of my hands. The street tilted. I heard my name, shouted from very far away, in a voice I knew, over and over and over.

Nora. Nora. Nora.

Tasha's hands were on my face. The sky was above me, very black, and very high. The streetlights had gone soft and gold.

"Don't," I tried to say. "Don't you dare. I need to fix it. They want a different ending, I need to—"

"Stay with me. Stay with me, please, please, they're coming—"

The gold lights blurred. Her face wavered. The voices around me grew thin and watery and strange, like voices heard from the bottom of a pool.

And under them, quiet and cold and very close, I heard the sound of the sea.