Behind her was Hart House, as elegant and grand every time she looked at it. The village had to be the prettiest in England.
She and Arthur and Maxine and George would be best friends all their lives and have children together. She’d write part of the time in England, and of course give in to Maxine’s demands that she run a writers’ retreat here.
And they’d live part of the time on her side of the pond. She could certainly be as flexible as she wanted to be and Arthur had intimated he could be, too. Although she hadn’t put him to the test by asking him.
But the solution was perfect. Frighteningly so. Joe, the other bartender, would likely be thrilled to take over the pub part of the year.
And perfect scared the hell out of her. Life was messy and fraught with disaster. In her books, the minute things were going too well was the time her characters should be looking over their shoulder because terror, disaster, and death were creeping up behind them as sure as it was chapter four.
She didn’t hear herself hailed until a hand grasped her shoulder. She swung round to find Maxine, out of breath and half laughing. “I had to chase you miles, yelling your name. What’s up?” Then the smile faded. “Oh, honey. What’s wrong? You look like shit.”
“I feel like shit.”
“Is it Arthur?”
“Of course it’s Arthur. Who else can wreck a perfectly good day like the man you’re in love with?”
“Don’t tell me he doesn’t love you back, because if you tell me that then one of you is lying.”
“Oh,”-Meg flapped her hands-“of course he loves me. It would be so much easier if he didn’t. Or I didn’t.”
She kicked a stone out of her path and into the water, plop. Bringing the greedy-assed swans floating back.
“Ah,” Maxine said, in the tone of a woman who had been there. “It’s the go or stay dilemma, isn’t it?”
“No. There’s no dilemma. My life is in Seattle. Arthur’s is here.”
“So what are you going to do? Walk away from a guy who makes you glow?”
“No…” She glanced up. “I glow?”
“Like Rudolph’s nose.”
“Oh.”
“If it’s any consolation, Arthur’s glowing, too.”
“I left a man who was controlling. Who made me lose confidence in myself. It was so bad I stopped being able to write. I can’t go through that again.”
“I’ve sure seen how much your confidence has been suffering since you got here. And the writing’s definitely not going well.”
“Gaaaggggh!” Meg yelled, so the swans, who were still hanging around the bank, floated off with their beaks in the air. “Weren’t you scared?”
“Of course I was. I still am when I realize that no one in this country understands the concept of the Super Bowl. And these people fry bread. In bacon fat. I’m telling you, you look at an English breakfast and your arteries clog.”
Meg smiled. “I can’t move to a foreign country for a man. I can’t.”
“Have you asked him to move to the States?”
She thought about how he’d dared her to do exactly that this morning and panic washed over her anew. “How can I ask that of him? His whole life is here.”
“Seems to me that he has the right to decide for himself what’s important.”
“I wish I hadn’t come here. There was a darling stone cottage in Wales.”
Maxine laughed at her. “No, you don’t. You’re a big girl, Meg. Act like one.”
And finally, in despair, she stalked back to Stag Cottage and did exactly that. She acted like a big girl. She wrote the final chapter that she’d been putting off because it seemed symbolic that when her story ended, when the villain she’d recognized the moment she saw Arthur, was no more, then her romance would as effectively be over.
And Arthur was a villain. He’d stabbed her in the heart as effectively as her murderous psycho.
Her computer hummed and the words danced in front of her eyes for a few minutes. She felt like a drowning woman with her life flashing before her eyes as she wrote herself to The End.
Meg wasn’t one to plot her books ahead. She knew writers who had systems, with color-coded charts and diaries for their characters. She admired that kind of organization and knew she would never write a book if she charted the whole thing out first, and already knew her characters intimately.
For her, that was the point of writing the book. It was the voyage of discovery as she came to know these people and their story. Sure, she was the one creating the world and the people in it, but she discovered that world by writing it.
So she typed her villain to his justly deserved doom.
And never had she killed off a villain more unwillingly.
But there he was, as she’d always imagined the last chapter. He had the heroine with her back, literally and figuratively, to the wall. He’d toy with her a little. Because he had the luxury of time and privacy, and because he believed that she of all people would appreciate his brilliance, his subtlety, his daring.
He’d been her patient. He’d had her attention, her clinical diagnoses, occasionally her smile. But he’d never had her respect. He wanted it, ferociously.
And when he didn’t get it, he grew angry, exactly as the psychiatrist had hoped. Her only chance to get out alive was to use her knowledge of his diseased mind against him. So she taunted him, shamed him, ridiculed him. It was a dangerous tactic, but she didn’t have any other weapon.
Finally, he snapped. She’d been watching his eyes, so she knew the second he lost control. When he rushed at her, he was no longer the cool madman, but an overgrown boy in a vicious tantrum. She kneed him hard in the balls as he came at her.
It wasn’t enough to save her from the knife, but the move saved her life. By the time the police arrived, she had her attacker at gunpoint, having retrieved her handgun from her purse, and called the cops from the cell in her purse while she staunched her bleeding arm with her Hermes scarf.
When the detective with whom she was having an on-again, off-again affair arrived on the scene, there was some catchy banter about women and their purses. He offered her a lift to the hospital. She said only if he hung around to see her home.
Behind them, the villain was carted away, raving and furious.
But he wasn’t dead.
Chapter Eleven
Meg stared at the page, the final page of her novel.
It wasn’t often that the ending surprised her. Not like this. How could the villain not be dead? All along, she’d envisioned that final desperate fight. The psychiatrist would get to her bag, she’d reach in it for her gun, which she shouldn’t even have in her purse, but the detective had warned her to be extra careful and so she’d tucked it in there that morning.
Of course, the weapon had fallen to the bottom under the lipsticks and the pack of tissue. Oh, there it was-no, shit, that was her sunglasses case.
And the madman would be almost upon her when she’d grab the gun, fumbling for the safety, and boom, she’d shoot him through the bottom of her Fendi bag. Shot through the heart, they’d discover in the autopsy, in a nice bit of irony.
How could it not have ended that way?
Meg read the final scene again, her hands shaking, from too much coffee probably.
Had she cheated? This new final scene, was it some manipulation by her own psyche?
She reread the entire chapter. And then she saw what she’d missed with her clever bit of shot-through-the-heart irony. The quick, clean death wasn’t enough of a punishment for this guy. No. Prison. Lack of control. No privacy. Being looked down on, ordered, insulted. Forced to perform menial tasks. Oh, how her villain would suffer. It was a much more fitting punishment.
Her new ending was the perfect one.