Louise Carmen Notebook Novels & Stories

The old wood splintered with a loud CRACK, ripping away from the rusty nails holding it down. Beneath the floorboard, nestled in a tight, dark crawlspace between the floor joists, sat a small object. It was a simple, cheap notebook bound in faded blue cloth. It was covered in a thin layer of sawdust, but it was perfectly preserved from the damp air. Duncan’s heart began to hammer violently against his ribs. He reached his large, trembling hand into the darkness and lifted the notebook out into the dim light of the bedroom. He blew the dust off the cover. On the very first page, written in neat, elegant cursive handwriting that he recognized instantly, was a single name: Amora.

Lillian in the back, which had been her decision, quiet and present, the forward-facing anticipation she had described doing its steady work. The city moved past the windows in the Sunday morning way, lighter traffic, a different quality of movement, the specific tempo of a day that was not a weekday. I held the notebook in my lap. Not open. Just present. The notebook with the names in it, Mirabel and Elena and Sophia Reyes, and the photograph of Victor and Sophia at the restaurant table, and the photograph of Elena laughing outside the Albuquerque building. All the pieces of the story that had been assembling itself since I had woken up in this life and smelled lavender.

The smell of booze wafting our way and tinting the air with that chemical whiff. I can’t miss Carmen sitting alone at the desk, sulk face fully initiated. She’s flicking through a large book, something heavy with aging pages and glances up hatefully as I make eye contact. She doesn’t say anything and goes back to what she’s reading and pretending we didn’t just walk in.

Camille requested water for the table and said they weren't ready to order. When the server left, she reached for the package, unwrapping it with careful fingers. Inside lay five notebooks of different colors and sizes. Her childhood handwriting filled their pages. "What pattern?" Camille asked, though she already knew. Margaret wiped her tears. "How Rose manipulated all of us. How we always took her side. How we...punished you for things that weren't your fault." "Read the green one," Richard said softly. "Page twenty-three." Camille hesitated, then opened the small green notebook. Her thirteen-year-old self had written:

She leans back against the cushions. “And Caesar is practically clawing the walls down back in London. You’ve been cozying up to that tight-lipped secretary, Carlos. You think I haven’t noticed? You’re going to sit at that desk, and you aren’t going to sleep a single wink until you write down every ledger route, every shipping coordinate, and every asset name you’ve managed to pry out of him.” She kicks my shoulder, sending a spike of agony straight down my spine that makes me catch my breath in a sharp hiss. She tosses a heavy, black leather-bound notebook onto the floor beside me.

she whispered, “that maybe we were never supposed to find each other?” Carson’s reply came like a vow: “No. I think we were the only ones who could.” Later that night, Justina found herself in Sloane’s old study—one of the few rooms in the penthouse Carson never touched. Dust covered the mahogany shelves, the scent of old paper and faded perfume lingering in the air. She ran her fingers along the spines of books until one caught her eye: a journal, bound in cracked leather. Inside, in neat, slanted handwriting, were Sloane’s notes.

Caelum: arriving Thursday at three, same as every Thursday. I looked at the notebook on Tuesday morning. I opened it to the "What Comes Next?" page. Every item I had written on this page since Ironveil had been either crossed out or still in progress. The succulent was crossed out. Southern Reaches crossed out and circled. The challenge ruling was crossed out. The Ashford action was crossed out, along with the entire cluster of items around it—Lena, the inspection, the Merra cooperation, the founding document, and the registration. All crossed out. The notebook's "What Comes Next" page was the most crossed-out document I had ever produced.

" This stays in my possession for now on miss Jennifer. I grab her notebook with my other hand and release her wrist by putting it into my briefcase and close it. The class ends and I went to my home. I lie down on my bed, the quietness falling upon the house as I switched the TV off. I keep my soft and dim light lamp on my nightstand at my right, turned on, to be able to see through the room. I take hold on of the notebook I confiscated from her..... this girl who keeps on haunting my mind, my thoughts, and my time, this one who I cannot stop myself from thinking about every second of my days or even nights. I cease torturing my head and heart with her but open the notebook, simple cover, s

I have read her notebooks. I want to note for the record that the notebooks are extraordinary documents. Not because they are polished — they are not polished, they are the private notes of a person thinking things through, and there are places where the thinking is incomplete and places where she contradicts herself and places where she is clearly working toward something she hasn't found yet. But they are extraordinary because they are honest. She wrote what she actually thought. She did not perform her certainty. She recorded her uncertainty alongside her understanding and treated both with the same seriousness. The last entry in the fourth notebook is dated six days before she died.

This felt like a position, somewhere you went to wait for something specific, knowing it would come. She opened the notebook. The first page had dates and observations in her mother's shorthand, covering fourteen months of movement through the hill territory. The middle section had maps, more detailed than the one from the cache. On the last written page was something different in tone — not addressed to anyone, in present tense, like notes made in the middle of thinking. She read three lines before Lucien appeared at her shoulder, close enough to read, far enough to be asking rather than assuming, and she tilted the notebook so he could see.