The Things We Leave Unfinished Yarros, Rebecca (reading like a writer .TXT) 📖

“I caught you.” There was no smirky smile or flirtatious wiggle of his eyebrows, but that didn’t matter. The truth was intoxicating enough.

He had caught me.

“You did,” I answered softly.

“Want to do another one?” he asked, the corners of his mouth quirking up.

I laughed. “I don’t think my arms would let me even if I wanted to. They feel like spaghetti noodles.” I held them out as examples, as if he could see the exhaustion in my muscles.

“I’ll rub them down later,” he promised, and this time that sexy little smile of his reappeared.

My breath caught, imagining his hands on my skin.

“Want to learn how to belay?” he asked, halting my flash of fantasy.

“Spaghetti noodle arms, remember?”

“Don’t worry, the harness does all the work.”

“You trust me with your life?” I asked, peering up at him and doing my best not to stare at his long eyelashes or the curve of his lower lip.

“I trust you with my career, and that’s pretty much the same thing to me, so yes.” The intensity in his eyes was a clear challenge, and I felt it like a jolting shock to my heart, exceptionally painful yet life-affirming.

He really had risked it all for this book, hadn’t he? He’d left the city he loved and moved his life here to see it through.

In that moment, I knew two things about Noah Morelli.

The first was that his priority was and would always be his career. Anything else he loved would take a back seat.

The second was he and I operated on complete opposites of the trust spectrum. He gave it first, then waited for the outcome. I withheld it until it was earned. And he had more than earned mine.

It was time I started trusting myself, too.

“Lead on.”

Once he’d dropped me off at home, I pulled out my phone and called Dan. Within the hour, I’d put an offer in on Mr. Navarro’s shop.

I was all in.

Chapter Eighteen

May 1941

North Weald, England

It had been almost eight weeks and the light still hadn’t returned

to Constance’s eyes. Scarlett couldn’t push her, couldn’t advise her, couldn’t do anything but watch her sister grieve. And yet, she’d still asked her to transfer with her to North Weald. It was the most selfish thing she’d ever done, but she didn’t know how to simultaneously be a wife and a sister, so now both suffered.

Though she may have been on the outs with her parents since marrying Jameson against their wishes, they’d apparently kept the rift private, since Scarlett and Constance’s request to transfer to North Weald had been approved.

They’d been here for a month, and though Scarlett rented a house off-station for the nights Jameson could get a Sleeping Out pass, Constance had chosen to billet with the other WAAFs in the huts on the station.

For the first time in her life, there had been an entire week of Scarlett’s life where she’d lived completely, utterly alone. No parents. No sister. No WAAFs. No Jameson. He was over an hour away at Martlesham-Heath but came…home—if that’s what this was—whenever he could get a pass. Between her worry over Constance and her fear that something would happen to Jameson, she lived in a constant state of nausea.

“You really don’t need to do this,” Scarlett told her sister as they knelt on ground only recently thawed by spring. “It still might be a bit early.”

“If it dies, it dies.” Constance shrugged, then continued digging with the small trowel, readying the space for a small rosebush she’d taken from their parents’ garden while on leave that weekend. “It’s better to try, right? Who knows how long we’ll be at this station? Maybe Jameson gets reposted. Maybe we do. Maybe just I do. If I keep waiting for life to give me the most opportune circumstances to live it, I never will. So fine, if it freezes and dies, then at least we tried.”

“Can I help?” Scarlett asked.

“No, I’m just about done. You’ll have to remember to water it regularly, but not too much.” She finished tilling the soil at the edge of the patio. “The plant will tell you. Just watch the leaves and cover her up if it gets too cold at night.”

“You’re so much better at this than I am.”

“You’re better at telling stories than I am,” she noted. “Gardening is learned, just like mathematics or history.”

“You write perfectly well,” Scarlett argued. They’d always received similar marks in school.

“Grammar and essays, sure.” She shrugged. “But story lines? Plots? You are far more talented. Now, if you truly want to help, you sit there and tell me one of your tales while I put this girl in.” She formed a mound of dirt at the bottom of the hole, then placed the crown of roots over the mound, measuring the distance to the surface.

“Well, I guess that’s easy enough.” Scarlett sat back and crossed her ankles in front of her. “Which story and where were we?”

Constance paused in thought. “The one about the diplomat’s daughter and the prince. I think she’d just discovered—”

“The note,” Scarlett jumped in. “Right. The one where she thinks he’s sending her father away.” Her mind slipped back into that little world, the characters as real to her as Constance was sitting beside her.

Eventually, the two sisters lay on their backs, staring up at the clouds as Scarlett did her best to weave a story worthy of distracting Constance, if only for a few moments.

“Why wouldn’t he simply tell her he’s sorry and move on?” Constance asked, rolling to her side so she could face Scarlett. “Wouldn’t that be the most straightforward answer?”

“It would,” Scarlett agreed. “But then our heroine won’t see his growth, can’t really find him worthy of that second chance. The key to bringing them the ending they deserve is to pick at their flaws until they bleed, then make them conquer that flaw, that fear, in order to prove themselves to the one they love. Otherwise it’s really