by Katy Cannon
I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a writer.
And it didn’t seem like I was much good at being a girlfriend either, given how bored Zach was looking.
“Come on,” I said. “There’s like two more shops to try, then we can go.”
Zach’s expression brightened. “Then let’s try the next one.”
I signalled to Anja to tell her we were moving on then headed out.
The next shop, a few doors down, wasn’t usually my kind of style. But since I was running out of other options, I figured we’d give it a go.
It only took a glance at the first few racks to know it wasn’t going to work, though.
“What about this?” Zach asked, and I turned to see him holding out possibly the most un-Tilly-like dress I’d ever seen. Bright pink, with ruffles down the middle, cut high in the front and low in the back of the skirt.
I hated it. But Zach looked so pleased with himself for finding it, I figured I had to at least appreciate his wanting to help me out.
“It’s very … pink.” I have red hair. Hot pink never has been and never will be my colour. “Do you really think it’s, well, me?”
“I think you’ll look hot in it,” he said with a shrug.
“Maybe…” Except that wasn’t what mattered most to me, especially not on Gran’s big night. I wanted to look and feel like myself, in something I felt confident and, sure, pretty in. I didn’t want to stand out like a flamingo in a lake full of swans.
Zach sighed. “Come on, Tilly. It’s not like you’ve found anything else. And think about it. You’re Bea’s granddaughter, and she’s the guest of honour at this whole event. She’ll want you to stand out.”
Would she? “I think Gran will want to stand out.”
“Just try it on?” Zach urged. “I think it would be perfect for the dinner. Really let me show you off, you know?”
Except I didn’t want to stand out or show off. I wanted my book to do that for me – but how could it? It was unfinished and even if it ever did get published it wouldn’t have my name on it.
I turned away. “I’ll think about it. We don’t really have enough time left today. I want to hit that last shop before our bus home.”
“OK.” Zach hung it back up but not before taking a photo of it. “So you don’t forget,” he said, sending the photo to my phone. “There’s still plenty of time before the dinner.”
“Right.” I grabbed his hand, and pulled him away from the dress from hell. “Come on.”
I left the shopping centre without a dress, as expected, and we all caught the bus together back to Westerbury. Saying goodbye to Zach, Anja and Rohan at the bus stop in town, I trudged up the hill to Gran’s house.
“Oh good, you’re home.” Dad smiled tiredly at me as I shut the back door behind me. He stood at the kitchen counter, assembling a familiar-looking tea tray.
“Tough day with the twins?” I asked, dumping my bag in the corner.
“I’m not sure who is worse – your brothers or your grandmother.” Dad added a couple of Gran’s favourite biscuits to the plate on the tray. “But now you’re here, you can take this up to Gran and I can sit down and enjoy what will probably be the last five minutes of the twins’ nap.”
“Of course.” I gave Dad a tight smile but if it looked fake he was obviously too tired to notice. The least I could do was deliver a tea tray, right?
Besides, a small part of me couldn’t help but hope that Gran would be her normal self again today, and declare that she didn’t know what she’d been thinking – of course we had to tell everyone about my writing the books, immediately. It wouldn’t be a secret any more.
I could tell from the shouting coming from inside the study before I even knocked that this was not going to be the case.
“Everything OK, Gran?” I pushed the door open with my foot when she didn’t answer the knock. Presumably she hadn’t even heard it over the conversation she was having with herself. I’d hoped for normal but prepared myself to look for more signs that there was something seriously the matter with Gran.
I didn’t have to look too hard.
“Is that my tea? It’s about time. It’s nearly five o’clock! Far too late for tea, really.”
“It’s four fifteen, Gran.” I placed the tea tray carefully on the table. This was what happened when Gran went for too long without tea and biscuits. Craziness.
Gran peered at the clock, obviously struggling to read it without her glasses.
“Well it feels later,” she grumbled, grabbing a biscuit from the plate as she sat down.
“What’s going on?” I perched on the desk chair opposite her and waved at the piles of paperwork covering the floor. It looked like she’d tipped the contents of her desk drawers out and jumped on them. Which might actually have been the case.
“Damn accountant wants some piece of paper I haven’t seen in six months and can’t find anywhere.” She pointed at the email open on the screen and I read it through quickly, frowning.
“Gran, we filed away last year’s paperwork months ago,” I said. “It should be in the cabinet with the rest.”
Crossing the room, I opened the top drawer of the antique wood filing cabinet and pulled out the previous year’s accounts. Thankfully, making sure the books balanced was someone else’s job entirely and all I ever had to do was shove the finished paperwork in a folder and file it under the right label. Easy.
Flicking through the file, I found the statement that the accountant had requested and held it up. “Want me to scan it and send it over?”
“You might as well. You’re doing everything else around here, it seems.”
Because you asked me to! I wanted to yell. Worse than that, she’d basically emotionally blackmailed me into it. And now it was my fault.
No. Something still wasn’t right here.
“Gran, are you feeling OK?” I asked tentatively. It was the only thing I could think that would make her behave this way. She had to be sick again. Gran was the worst patient ever, and the only time I’d ever known her to be so cruel, so unpredictable, was when she’d been ill the year before. She’d been forgetting things then, too, the fever messing with her brain until she couldn’t think straight.
She glared at me. “Of course I am! Even if I do have a million things to do, organizing this … you know. The…”
“The wedding?” I guessed.
“Exactly! Percy will want everything to be perfect, of course, but he won’t wait on marrying me so there’s everything to do.”
I blinked. “Percy? You mean Edward.” Percy was my grandfather, Dad’s dad. He died sixteen years before I was even born.
“Of course I mean Edward,” Gran snapped. “Honestly. So much going on. Is it any wonder I can’t keep everything straight!”
“You know we’re all here to help if you need it,” I said cautiously. Even with the pneumonia last year, I’d never seen Gran like this before and, to be honest, it scared me. “With the wedding, I mean.”
In an instant, Gran softened, her smile returning to the one I knew so well. “Of course I know, darling. Don’t you worry. I’ve got everything in hand. Go on, you must have homework to do.”
“I do, actually,” I admitted, returning her smile. “But you’re sure you don’t need anything else?”
“I’m fine,” Gran said, but looking at her, I knew she wasn’t.
There was something the matter with Gran and I didn’t know what it was. And that terrified me.
“I’ll see you at dinner, then.” I shut the study door behind me and headed for my room, running the whole scene through my mind over and over. There was something wrong about it – something more than just Gran’s anger or her confusion.
It was almost an hour later when I realized.
Gran hadn’t been wearing a hat.
A soft knock at the door startled me. “Come in,” I said, trying to gather my thoughts together. At the moment, they felt like they were scattered all
over the room, drifting away until there was no sense left in them.
“Hey, sweetheart.” Dad stuck his head around the door. “Dinner’s nearly ready. You OK?”
I nodded, but then slowly it turned into a head shake.
Dad pushed the door to behind him and settled on to my desk chair. “What’s up?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” I said, with a half smile. Swallowing, I braced myself to ask the question I’d been avoiding for so many months. “What’s wrong with Gran?”
Dad’s expression tightened. “I wondered if you’d noticed.” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “We don’t know for sure. But she’s been forgetting things a lot more recently – names, places. Recent things. Like that invitation for the gala dinner – it had been posted months ago, but either she lost it or she opened it and forgot about it until the other week.” He sighed. “I’d hoped we could just chalk it up to age – or Gran being Gran. But it’s only got worse since she got sick last year. And I think we’ve all experienced the mood swings… I’ve been trying to get her to go for some tests but she won’t talk about it. And she definitely doesn’t want it mentioned in front of Edward.”
Memory loss. Confusion. Mood swings. I’d noticed all of those things over the last few months and not said anything. I’d thought it was just Gran being Gran, too. Or I’d hoped, and in that hope convinced myself.
But what if it wasn’t?
“I thought it was writer’s block again,” I admitted, feeling stupid.
Dad laughed. “So did I, to start with. It was just like that awful summer with her Search For A Story and that woman with the herb burning. And really, it could still be nothing more than her being wrapped up in Edward and the wedding,” Dad went on. “I mean, last time she got married the mood swings were just as bad. And it can’t be writer’s block – she’s still on top of work, and the latest book, right? So things can’t be that bad. If there was something seriously wrong, she wouldn’t be able to write.”
“Right.” A heavy, thick feeling descended over me as I lied to my father. Gran wasn’t coping with work, or with writing. In fact, she wasn’t doing it at all.
I was.
And suddenly, horribly, I thought I knew why.
The page in front of me was infuriatingly empty. I’d been sitting, staring at it ever since the last school bell rang, wishing it would fill up with the inspiration and ideas that would make my – or Gran’s – book a huge success. Something that would show her editor and her agent that she still had it, even if it was actually me doing the work.
Her legacy mattered to her. And despite everything, I wanted to protect it for her. Because if I was right, she couldn’t do it herself.
Not because the weakness she’d been left with after the pneumonia was back, or because she had writer’s block, or even because she was busy planning a wedding. They’d all just been cover stories – ways for her to convince me to write the book without questioning it or worrying about her.
The real problem was far harder to fix than any of those.
It had been more than a week since Gran’s meltdown in the study and despite my best efforts, I hadn’t written a single word of fiction since.
But I’d been doing a lot of research. And I’d been watching Gran – observing her, making notes of every little thing that struck me as strange or wrong or worrisome.
I had a long list.
I knew the truth now. Gran was sick – and not the way she had been last year, when I’d taken over the last third of her book for her. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was one and the same thing. Maybe the pneumonia that had kept her in bed for so many weeks wasn’t what had made her last chapters of Aurora Rising incoherent.
Maybe this had been happening all along and I just hadn’t noticed.
Sighing, I grabbed my phone and pulled up the webpage I’d read so often in the last week that I’d almost memorized it.
Dementia: The Early Warning Signs.
Short-term memory loss.
(“You promised you’d come.” No. I didn’t.)
Mood swings.
(“I don’t need any more doctors.” Yes, she did.)
Confusion.
(“Percy will want it to be perfect!”)
The list went on. Until it reached the clincher.
Difficulty following storylines in books or on TV.
I knew it wasn’t the same, following a story you’d created as opposed to watching one and having it make sense. But I’d wondered, for so long, how Gran could have forgotten all the loose ends she needed to tie up in the Aurora series. How she could have dictated such a muddled mess of events and scenes. How, with every book I worked on with her, I seemed to spend more time reminding her of the story she was telling, straightening out the plot lines. I’d thought maybe she was getting lazy, because she knew I’d catch those mistakes for her.
But now I was very afraid I knew exactly why.
I shut down the webpage. Gran would never admit it, that much I knew. But just knowing what was going on … I understood better. I knew now why she needed me to write the book. Why she was so scared of telling anyone that I was doing it.
Her whole identity was being Beatrix Frost, bestselling romance author. If she couldn’t follow her own stories from beginning to end, who was she any more?
If finishing this book was the only thing I could do to help her … I had to. Right?
Even if I had no idea where to start.
“That looks like it’s going well.” Drew dropped his bag on to the table and took a seat opposite me.
“And that kind of comment is just endlessly helpful,” I snapped, slamming my notebook shut.
He stared back at me, expressionless, and I just wanted to throw something at him. To do something that would cause him to feel at least a fraction of the confusion I’d been feeling since our kiss.
Yes, Gran being ill wasn’t his fault and neither was the fact that I had zero inspiration for the ending of this book. But the kiss? My confusion over Zach – the perfect romantic hero boyfriend? That was all Drew’s fault.
And for once, I really, really wanted someone to blame for some of this mess.
“I might be able to help, you realize,” he said, one eyebrow rising lazily.
“Help? You?” He only seemed to know how to make my life more complicated. “You do realize that criticizing other people’s books is a lot different to actually writing them, yes?”
I was being unfair. I knew that. I just didn’t care very much.
Lots of things were unfair. My Gran losing her wonderful mind ranked a lot higher on that list than me snarking at Drew.
Frowning, Drew pushed his bag aside and rested his forearms on the table, leaning towards me. “OK. What’s going on, Frost?”
I looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Clearly it does. Is it Zach?” He put a funny emphasis on the end and if I’d had any doubts as to his feelings about my boyfriend they were gone in the time it took him to say his name.
A sharp, hard, half-laugh bubbled out of me. Zach. “He’s the least of my problems.”
Somehow, Drew didn’t look reassured by that. “Then what? What’s going on?”
I raised my eyes to look at him. He was so serious, compared to Zach’s light and laughing manners. And he knew books. Really knew them.
Could I tell him?
“You know who my gran is, right?” I said slowly, picking my words with care. It had to be easier to talk about Gran than about what was going on between him and me.
“I think everyone knows that, Frost.”
“Yeah. Right. Well … she got sick last year.” I couldn’t tell him the truth – not about Gran’s memory problems. Not about what we suspected was wrong with her. But I hadn’t known that when all this started, either. So I’d go with the beginning of the story, instead. “Pneumonia. She was … she was on a deadline and she was practically incoherent. She tried to dictate the end of her book to me li
ke we sometimes did but this time … it didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t the ending to the series that her fans deserved and I knew she’d hate that. But then she was taken into hospital before we could rewrite it and…” I trailed off, hoping he’d fill in the gaps.
“You wrote a new ending for the book.” He sounded slightly awed at the idea but the frown line between his eyebrows only deepened.
“Yeah. And the editor loved it and the fans loved it and even the reviewers loved it. So when Gran realized what I’d done … she asked me to write her next book for her. From scratch.”
“And pretend it was hers?” Drew asked.
I nodded. “I wanted to help. She was sick, then she had writer’s block, and she said this could be my first step, too. That once the book was out there, we’d tell people, and it could be the start of my own career. She wants me to take over her legacy and—” I broke off, staring down at my hands against the table. I hadn’t admitted the last part to anyone before. Not even myself. “I’m not sure if I want it,” I whispered. I’d always wanted to be a writer. But not like this. Not pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
The scraping of chair legs against the wooden floor of the library made me jerk my head up, in time to see Drew pacing away from me. He reached the first row of shelves before he turned and headed back again.
“Do you realize exactly what you’re saying?” he asked, his voice tight, the words clipped. “Do you know how many people would kill to have the chances you have?”
“Do you think I don’t know that? But it’s not as simple as it sounds.” This was familiar, now. Us, arguing. Except there was something more in it, this time. Something that cut deeper.
“Because you actually have to work for it?” All the usual laid-back nonchalance drained from his voice, leaving his words sharp-edged and stinging. “Because for once, even though you’re being given everything you ever wanted just because of your famous family, you actually need to put something in, too? They can’t just give you fame – you need to write for it – and you don’t know how?”
