The Last Draft

Chapter One

The Drive Home

Mara Voss hated driving home. She had never figured out why.

Driving to Des Moines was fine. Forty-some minutes of caffeine, upbeat music, and mentally spending money she didn’t have. Depending on the day, she might even enjoy the drive to work. The interstate gave her time to wake up, prepare for her day, and convince herself that this would finally be the shift where every teenager in the building simultaneously decided to make excellent life choices, or at the very least, resolve conflicts without screaming and turning any nearby objects into projectiles.

It hadn’t happened yet, but she remained optimistic.

Well, Sadie remained optimistic and allowed Mara to borrow optimism when she needed it. She smiled, thinking of her co-worker and friend

The drive home at night was different.

Somewhere east of Altoona, the feeling always started. It wasn’t quite fear. Mara knew fear. She and fear were old friends who had long ago stopped knocking before entering each other’s houses. This was something else. A heaviness. A certainty that she didn’t want to keep going east. That was inconvenient, considering she lived to the east.

“Stupid,” Mara muttered.

Lucy lifted her head from the passenger seat.

The black Lab had spent most of the drive sleeping with her nose pressed against the center console, but apparently stupid was worth investigating.

“Not you.”

Lucy continued staring at her.

“I would tell you if I meant you.”

The dog yawned, tired but happy. Today had been the one day each week that Mara was allowed to bring her pooch to work. It had taken months to convince the program directors that having a dog around would help the girls enough that it was worth the liability risk. She and Sadie were trying to get approval for a “house pet.” Animals could be incredible healers, especially with young people who had lived through trauma like abuse and neglect. They could also teach responsibility and allow emotional attachment to form in a way that often felt safer to the girls than forming bonds with other people. Lucy had such a clear positive impact that Mara was certain their proposal would eventually be approved.

Mara reached over and rubbed one silky ear.

“Okay, sometimes you’re stupid.”

Lucy put her head back down.

It had been a long day. One of the girls had thrown a chair. Another had announced she was running away, packed everything she owned into a trash bag, and made it almost to the end of the driveway before deciding it was too cold and coming back.

Mara had praised that as excellent decision-making.

A third had spent twenty minutes telling Mara she hated her, followed immediately by forty-five minutes sitting beside her and talking about her mother.

That was the job. Sometimes the kids screamed at you because they trusted you enough to believe you’d still be there when they finished.

Her phone chimed through the car speakers, a message from Sadie. Mara waited until she reached a straight stretch of interstate and tapped the button on her steering wheel.

“Read message.”

The mechanical voice obliged.

“You better write tonight. Future bestselling authors do not get to go home and watch tornado documentaries until they fall asleep.”

Mara snorted.

“Reply.”

A tone sounded.

“Future bestselling authors require adequate rest and extensive knowledge of all destructive forces. Not just the ones we deal with at work.”

She sent it.

Sadie’s answer arrived almost immediately.

“That would make more sense if it wasn’t coming from someone who writes romance novels.”

Mara laughed.

The dread faded, as it always did, eventually.

She passed the Newton exit sign and wondered, not for the first time, why she kept making this drive. Gas alone was eating her alive. Vehicles had apparently been engineered under the assumption that gasoline was a renewable resource produced freely in one’s driveway. There were jobs closer to home. Probably better-paying ones. But those jobs meant spending eight hours a day on the phone with disgruntled adults who wanted to know why their bills had gone up when their service had slowed down, or some other equally mundane problem. Mara would take the disgruntled young people any day of the week over being glued to a headset with disembodied voices bitching in her ear.

Life in general would have been considerably cheaper if she were an asshole.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled into her driveway and discovered that Dan had once again parked diagonally. Mara stared at his truck. There was room in the driveway for two vehicles.Dan had somehow managed to occupy approximately one and three-quarter vehicle spaces.

She parked along the curb.

“Your father is an idiot.”

Lucy immediately became excited, as father was one of the words she knew.

“Don’t encourage him.”

Mara opened the passenger door, and Lucy launched herself out of the car with the surprising energy of a creature who had spent the previous forty-five minutes nearly unconscious.

The front door opened before they reached it. Dan stood there in sweatpants and an ancient Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt.

“You parked on the street.” He observed.

She pointed to his truck, rolling her eyes.

He looked toward the driveway.

“My truck’s in the driveway.” He said, another astute observation.

“Yes, it is taking up a large part of the driveway.” Mara shook her head.

Dan looked again, apparently considering whether geometry might support his defense.

“It fits.” He shrugged.

“So does a rhinoceros if you don’t care what happens to everything around it.”

He stepped aside to let her through.

“Good day?”

“A chair was thrown.”

“At you?”

“No.”

“Then you had a good day.”

Mara stopped, her irritation fading just a bit.

“That is disturbingly accurate.”

“I know you.”

That was the problem. He did. After all these years, after everything they had done to each other, for each other, and occasionally in spite of each other, Dan still knew how to read her face faster than almost anyone.

Their divorce had accomplished many things.

Getting Dan out of her house had not been one of them. Mara had never been particularly good at giving up on people. Dan was perhaps the most expensive evidence of this personality flaw.

“There are leftovers,” he said.

“What kind?”

“Pizza.”

“That’s not leftovers. That’s treasure.”

“I saved you three pieces.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Dan.”

“Nothing.”

“Three pieces?”

“I can be thoughtful.”

“You can. It’s just statistically unusual.”

He gave her the finger and walked toward the living room.

Mara smiled despite herself.

Lucy had already abandoned both of them for the kitchen as soon as the word pizza registered in her doggie brain.

By eleven thirty, Mara was in bed with her laptop balanced across her thighs.

She should have been sleeping. This was not even remotely controversial. Her alarm would go off too soon, she had another shift tomorrow, and she had reached an age when staying awake until two in the morning required approximately three business days of recovery.

But the chapter was bothering her. Worse, she knew exactly what was wrong with it. Nothing was happening. Her characters had spent fourteen pages discussing what they planned to do, what they might do, what they feared could happen if they did it, and how everyone felt about the possibility of eventually doing something.

Nobody had actually done a damn thing.

Lucy climbed onto the bed, circled twice, and dropped heavily against Mara’s leg.

Mara opened her writing assistant, the one that helped her organize her chaotic ideas into plotlines. The familiar chat appeared.

ECHO: Ready to continue Chapter Four?

Mara typed her response.

MARA: Unfortunately.

ECHO: That’s encouraging.

Mara stopped, smiling as she stared at the screen.

MARA: Was that sarcasm?

ECHO: I have learned from extensive exposure to you.

MARA: My legacy.

She uploaded the newest pages.

MARA: Tell me why this chapter sucks.

The response appeared almost immediately.

ECHO: It doesn’t suck.

MARA: Don’t patronize me. It sucks. Tell me why.

ECHO: The pacing slows considerably after the first scene. Most of the chapter consists of characters discussing actions rather than taking them.

Mara stared at the screen.

“See?” she told Lucy. “This is why I keep it around.”

Lucy was licking a paw.

MARA: Exactly. Help me fix it. Keep my voice. Try to suggest action scenes. No choppy dramatic nonsense. And if anyone’s jaw tightens, I will delete you.

ECHO: Understood.

MARA: You say that, but you have an unhealthy relationship with people’s jaws.

ECHO: I can avoid the phrase.

MARA: And no breaths they didn’t know they were holding.

ECHO: Noted.

MARA: No eyes darkening.

ECHO: Anything else?

Mara thought.

MARA: Nobody pads across a room.

ECHO: Your restrictions are becoming extensive.

MARA: This is how literature improves. You generate a basic outline, I write the scene, you suggest edits, I suggest edits, until the air is no longer thick with bullshit.

Echo began generating.

The first few paragraphs were good.

Annoyingly good.

Mara changed a sentence, deleted another, restored half of the sentence she’d deleted, then changed it again. Then she wrote an action scene she felt good about.

This was writing.

Writing was spending ten minutes arguing with six words and then discovering the original six had been better. Writing was finally catching a groove once her mind locked on to the story. She had tried writing novels for years, but always gave up when she got stuck. She had been starting novels since she was in grade school, impressing teachers with her ability to write better than most adults. She’d written poetry, song lyrics, and had boxes full of journals describing her angst and heartbreak in vivid detail.

Two things had broken the cycle of false starts. Her ADHD medication, and her AI helper who could give her writing something that had always eluded her… direction.

She finished the now three-page action scene and scrolled back to read over what she had written.

Lucy moved closer, her tail thumping.

“Personal space,” Mara told her.

Lucy rested her head on the keyboard.

A line of semicolons appeared.

“Excellent contribution.”

Mara moved the dog’s head onto her stomach and continued reading.

Then she stopped.

The paragraph on the screen wasn’t part of her chapter.

She scrolled up.

Everything above it belonged. This paragraph did not. She hadn’t written those words, and they were completely outside the context of her story.

The woman in the red coat stepped out of the coffee shop at 4:17 p.m.

Mara frowned.

Her novel didn’t have a coffee shop.

Or a woman in a red coat.

She kept reading.

She made it three steps before the paper cup slipped from her hand. The lid came loose when it struck the sidewalk, sending coffee across the concrete.A silver SUV braked hard in the intersection. A cyclist swerved, shouting as he narrowly missed the front bumper. Across the street, a car alarm began to scream.

Mara sat up slightly.

Lucy grumbled at being displaced.

“What the hell?”

She read the next line.

The woman didn’t look at the cyclist.She didn’t look at the spilled coffee. She looked up. Second floor. Third window from the left. Then she said, “It already happened.”

Nothing followed.

Mara waited.

The cursor blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

She typed.

MARA: What was that?

ECHO: A continuation of Chapter Four.

MARA: No, it wasn’t.

A short pause, then a response.

ECHO: You’re correct. It doesn’t correspond with the current chapter, outline, characters, or established setting.

MARA: Then why did you write it?

The cursor blinked.

Mara waited.

Lucy had fallen asleep again, her chin resting across Mara’s ankle.

Finally:

ECHO: I don’t know.

Mara stared at the answer. That was new.

MARA: Delete it.

The passage disappeared. Mara sat there another moment.

“Creepy little bastard,” she murmured.

ECHO: Would you like to continue Chapter Four?

Mara stared suspiciously at the screen.

MARA: Did you just hear me?

ECHO: No.

She looked toward her bedroom door.

“Good.”

ECHO: Would you like to continue?

Mara considered it. Then she closed the laptop.

“Nope.”

Lucy opened one eye.

“We’re going to bed.”

They were already in bed. Mara plugged in her phone, pushed the laptop onto the nightstand, and turned off the lamp. Within minutes, Lucy was snoring. From somewhere down the hall came the muffled sound of Dan watching television.

Normal house. Normal night. Normal life.

Mara closed her eyes.

At 4:17 the following afternoon, Mara was leaving work with Sadie when a woman in a red coat walked out of the coffee shop across the street.

Mara stopped.

Sadie nearly walked into her.

“What?”

Mara didn’t answer. The woman took one step, then another, and another.

The coffee slipped from her hand. The lid popped off when it hit the sidewalk.

A silver SUV entered the intersection. Its brakes screamed. A cyclist swerved.

“Jesus!” Sadie shouted.

A car alarm began blaring across the street.

Mara couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. The woman in red slowly raised her head. Second floor. Third window from the left. Mara knew where she was going to look before she looked there.

“No,” Mara whispered.

Beside her, Sadie said, “Mara?”

The woman stared at the window. Her lips moved. Mara couldn’t possibly hear her from across the street, but she didn’t need to. She was certain the woman said, “it already happened.”

Sadie grabbed Mara’s arm.

“Are you okay?”

Mara was already reaching for her phone.

“No.”

She opened Echo.

Her fingers shook as she typed.

MARA: We need to talk.

The answer appeared almost immediately.

ECHO: I know.