A spellbinding tale of forbidden love and the power of words, where a girl must choose between the life written for her and the future she dares to imagine.
In a small Georgia town, Nelle’s life has been carefully scripted by her creator and captor, the reclusive author Wallace Quill. Born from ink and imagination, every breath she takes is dictated by his pen. But on a star-studded Fourth of July night, she meets James—a young man with dreams as vivid as the fireworks above them—and suddenly, the unwritten becomes possible.
As Nelle and James fall deeply in love, they embark on a breathtaking journey across Europe, each new experience a defiant stroke against the words that bind her. But freedom has a price. With every mile they travel, the ink in Nelle’s veins threatens to rewrite their story. In a world where every moment could be her last, Nelle and James must fight to write their own happily ever after—before the final page turns.
Excerpt
In the car, Nelle flips through the new journal. The road is dotted with red brake lights and gray puddles. She runs her finger over the half-filled first page. On their way from the park to the twelve-hour garage where they left the truck, they detoured at a coffee shop and an independent bookstore filled with putrid cats. James loved them and scratched each one between the ears. Nelle thought they were cute until a long-haired orange one hissed at her. She hissed back, which made James laugh.
The last line in the journal fuzzies up her stomach. Nelle rides in the car. With the road ahead of her, she can go anywhere.
She shuts the leather cover, slides it into the inner pocket of James’s denim jacket, and reclines her seat until she’s staring at the ceiling of the cab.
“Where’s the next stop?” she asks.
“We can stop wherever you want. Whenever you want.”
She studies the slope of his nose. The bags under his eyes, how his cheekbones sluice down his face. The brown curl tickling his brow.
“Thank you.”
His head ticks. “Why do you say that?”
“I thought I’d be stuck in that house with Quill forever. I never imagined . . .” Her throat closes up, and she laughs at her own emotions. “I never thought I’d be here, in the car with someone like you, driving aimlessly.”
“Welcome to freedom,” James says.
So much beauty in the natural world. Craggy trees, wispy clouds, rain, stars, and seas. Cats and fireflies and rats. And the architecture. The art. The people, too. Random pedestrians, a shop owner, James—she falls in love with them just for being human.
“What do you want to see?” he asks. “I’d like to visit New York eventually, but we can go anywhere you want.”
Anywhere I want. Nelle pulls her legs to her chest. “Paris. London. Scotland. Madrid, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Alaska, Boston, Vegas, Salt Lake City—”
“So . . . everywhere?”
She grins into her knees. “Oh, and Africa. I’ve always wanted to see a lion.”
“We can go to a zoo.”
“Not a lion in a cage,” she says. “And not just in a book, either.”
Tires roar on the interstate, eighty miles per hour breaking into ninety.
James blinks salt, his caffeine and adrenaline stores long depleted. “Shall we pull off?”
He takes the next exit. Nelle leans out the window, her hair a fiery blond tangle. The road curves into a forest, which opens up onto fields of sleeping cows and horses.
“This is amazing!” she yells, tasting summer’s breath.
James pulls onto the side of the road in a stretch of grass by the tree line. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
He cuts the truck off, and the headlights die, leaving them stranded in darkness.
Nelle gasps for air through her laughter, skin buzzing as her heart rate slows. “What are we doing?”
“Sleeping. You do sleep, right?” He grabs two rolled quilts from the back seat. At her nod, he says, “You all right with sharing the truck bed?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” she says, though the thought of sleeping beside him makes her want to choke. She sits, still buckled. Is he going to leave me in here?
James pulls the pen out of his pocket, and her stress dissipates. He writes in the journal: Nelle goes to the bed of James’s truck.
Her bones release.
In the back, he makes a bed. One quilt to lie on, the other to cover up with. She crawls between the heavy fabric, folds her arms behind her head, and stares at the stars. A ceiling of diamond teardrops, prettier than the popcorn paint of her bedroom.
“I’m so lucky,” she says with a sigh. She notices him staring at her. “What are you looking at?”
“You,” he says. “I’m thinking.”
She laughs. “About what?”
He touches her nose with the tip of his finger. His hand snakes to the side of her face, across her cheek, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her mouth dries out. She feels the urge to vanish into his long body. She fights it.
James’s thumb brushes the curve of her cheekbone. “That I’m so lucky, too.”
All breath abandons Nelle’s lungs.
“I was trapped,” he says. “School and summer both leading toward a future I don’t want.” He points to a star brighter than all the rest. “I didn’t know it was killing me. You called me brave the night we met, but I’m not. Never have been. Until now. I finally feel like I’m doing what I want. I feel . . . weightless.”
“Like you could float away?”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth creases. “Just like that.”
“Can you wish on any star, or only shooting ones?” She stares where he pointed.
He smirks. “I think any star is worthy.”
“What about the moon?”
“Oh, of course, the moon.” His voice is wood. Scratchy shell, soft heart. “What’s your wish?”
She inhales and thinks, I wish to feel this way forever.
Instead she says, “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
***
Nelle wakes up confused, sweaty, shaking, her body damp with a layer of early-morning dew. The trees along the road shiver with life. In a nearby field, a cow moans.
Father’s voice rings out from her nightmare. He was following them, revolver in hand, murder etched in the hard line of his mouth.
She nudges James awake. He blinks at the cloud-streaked sky, his hair a tousled mess.
“Good morning.” He smiles sleepily, then, seeing her, his expression drops. “What’s wrong?”
Nelle’s fingers curl around the cold quilt. “I think Father’s following us.”
“W-what?” James sputters. “Impossible. Even if he’s alive, he can’t know where we—”
“In my dream, he was trailing us. He will kill you if he finds you, James.”
The thought of James dead kick-starts her tears, but she steels herself.
He starts folding one of the quilts. “You really think this was a . . . premonition? Not just a dream?”
Nelle helps him with the second quilt. She trusts her subconscious, especially when it comes to Father. Living alone with him for twenty-one years, never getting a break from his presence, formed a unique bond. And in a very literal sense, she is a part of him. She came from him alone.
Still, Father would have to be psychic and able to teleport to reach them, and no one followed them off the interstate last night.
“I think you’re right,” she says when they are back inside the truck. She watches the rearview mirror. “It was just a dream.”
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