Page 9 of Enemy Daddy Next Door
Fiona takes a deep breath and looks me in the eye. “This next book can’t be heavy, Amy. No follow-up to the divorce.”
“No death,” Kris says pointedly.
“No violence,” Fiona adds.
“God, no.”
I look at the storyboard, my heart sagging in my chest. Sorry, I did my best. The story had already started coming alive inside me. Petunia being shuffled between her mom and dad’s houses, not knowing how to keep track of her own life. I never dealt with this, but…it’s the best I can do with the market.
At least I thought it was.
“So, back to the drawing board, kitty!” Kris says.
I hate it when she calls me “kitty”.
“We want something upbeat! Something positive. Something that has some quotes we can slap on a motivational poster and teachers can put in their classrooms.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea!” Fiona cries out. “You have some of those, don’t you, Amy?”
I don’t write books to put quotes on fucking posters. I write them because I want them to mean something. I want to help children understand how they feel. I want more kids not to have to walk around with the ache I have to carry with me at all times.
I force a smile and nod, “Absolutely.”
* * *
I look out the window. Thank god I had therapy right after that shit show of a pitch meeting. The yellow and red striped couch is super uncomfortable, but not more uncomfortable than my therapist’s stare when I don’t know the next thing to say.
I sigh. “Um, I don’t know. Just want to write what I want to write, I guess.” Jordan and I have already gone over the whole debacle at the office and worked through the feelings there. Now it’s just about biding time until we’re done.
“You’re holding something back, Amy.”
I look at Jordan with alarm in my eyes. “What?”
She smiles. “We’ve been working together for a lot of years, Amy. I can kind of tell.”
It’s true. I met Jordan when I was eighteen after my child therapist broke up with me (to be fair, I just aged out of child therapy, but still). Jordan was newly married. Now I’m a writer and Jordan’s a mom. I feel close to her even though we aren’t allowed to be friends or hang out outside of therapy. “I hate when you do that,” I say with a smile.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry, I…” I laugh. “You’re just right. And sometimes, I hate when you’re right.”
Jordan shrugs and turns to a new page on her legal pad. “So, what’s on your mind?”
I screw my forehead together and realize what’s buried underneath everything is something I simply don’t want to talk about. But if I can’t talk about it with my therapist, who can I talk with about it? “It’s about my neighbor.”
“Is he still bugging you?” Jordan asks.
It’s embarrassing how many times I’ve talked about Hunter in our meetings. I just can’t help it. He keeps grinding my gears. From blasting music in the middle of the day while I’m trying to draw in the yard to his cavalier attitude about his personal life, the man drives me mad.
This last infraction, though…I can’t seem to shake it. My heart beats with anxiety when I think about that woman coming through our gate. “He just…one of his conquests snuck out through our backyard. And I was out by the pool, so I had to, like, deal with her. I mean, she barely had a shirt on.”
“Hmm. That’s strange.”
“Right? It was so uncomfortable. Turns out he sent her out that way. Which is just so presumptive that he thinks he can just send people through our yard so that his daughter doesn’t see.”
“Why do you think it’s making you so upset?”
I haven’t even said as much, but she must be able to tell by the way my voice is going shrill as I give her more details. “I…I don’t know. But every time I think about it, it just makes me furious. Furious.”