Wren Ashby

That’s Not What Happened

The first comment came in at 8:17 Thursday night.

Oh, I already hate Emily.

I laughed, mostly because someone had actually read the whole thing. A stranger. Not my mother, not one of my friends I’d texted the link to with way too many exclamation points and some version of you better read this because I will absolutely ask you about it later. An actual stranger had opened my story, made it all the way to the end, and already hated a fictional woman named Emily Vale.

I loved her immediately.

I clicked the little heart under the comment and refreshed the page. Nothing. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. Then I refreshed it again. Still nothing.

“Mara, stop.”

I shut the laptop. Made it maybe four seconds. Opened it again.

Two new comments.

“Well, shit.”

This was going to be a problem.

Three weeks earlier, I’d announced to the 1,843 people subscribed to my newsletter that I was about to do something either brilliant or incredibly stupid. Probably stupid. I was going to write a story in public, one chapter every Thursday for twelve weeks. No finished manuscript hiding safely on my computer, no editor, no publisher, no six months to stare at the same paragraph until I hated every word in it. Just me, the internet, and a new deadline every seven days.

I’d titled the announcement An Experiment in Bad Decisions, which got more engagement than anything I’d posted in months. Apparently people enjoy watching writers create unnecessary problems for themselves.

My writing career hadn’t exactly crashed. Sometimes I almost wished it had, a huge dramatic failure would’ve at least been interesting. Instead, mine had just sort of slowed down until nobody, including me, seemed to know what I was doing anymore. My first novel had done well enough that people called it successful, but not well enough that anybody was fighting over movie rights. The second sold fewer copies. The third had been sitting on my laptop for eleven months under the file name FINALBOOK3, which was pretty optimistic considering I’d rewritten the ending seven times and hated all of them.

Eventually my agent and I started using phrases like taking some time and waiting for the right project. Publishing language. Basically, nobody knew what the hell I was doing next. Including me.

So I started a newsletter and a blog. At first I wrote about books. Then writing. Then divorce. One night I wrote about how weirdly personal grocery shopping becomes after twelve years of buying someone else’s cereal, and people really liked that one, probably because it was honest, or depressing, maybe both. Slowly, people subscribed. A few hundred became a thousand. A thousand became almost two. It wasn’t some huge audience, but they were mine. They showed up. They commented, they emailed, sometimes they told me something I’d written made them laugh and sometimes they told me it made them cry, which felt slightly less fun but was probably better for my ego.

And when I asked if they’d read a thriller one chapter at a time, every Thursday, for twelve weeks, enough of them said yes that I made the questionable decision to promise them one.

The title came first. The Last Night at Blackwater. And the basic idea wasn’t exactly difficult to pinpoint, if you knew me. Twenty years ago, one of my best friends disappeared during a weekend away with the rest of us. Lena Hart.

I remembered the trip. Sort of. There were parts that were still perfectly normal in my head, Claire sitting on my bedroom floor before we left, telling me every shirt I owned was ugly. Nathan complaining that we had enough bags for a two week vacation instead of a weekend. Lena insisting we stop for snacks when we’d barely been on the road an hour. I remembered music playing too loud and somebody burning something in the kitchen. I remembered drinking. A lot. Claire and Lena got into an argument at some point, I knew that much, I couldn’t tell you what it was about.

Then Saturday night got messy. Not messy as in something dramatic happened and I remembered every terrible second of it, messy as in my memory pretty much fell apart. I knew we’d all been there. I knew Lena disappeared. I knew there were police and searches and questions afterward. But the actual night? Pieces. And some of those pieces I wasn’t even sure belonged to me anymore.

For years I blamed the alcohol. Then trauma. Then eventually enough time passed that I could blame that too. Twenty years can apparently turn your memory into complete shit.

I’d never really written about Lena. I’d mentioned losing a friend once or twice on the blog, but never the whole story, never the weekend, never what it was like having police officers ask the same question twelve different ways because maybe on the thirteenth try your brain would finally cooperate.

Blackwater wasn’t supposed to be Lena’s story either. That was the deal I’d made with myself, I could borrow the basic shape of what happened. Five friends go away. Four come home. Twenty years later, the past shows back up and ruins everything. The rest would be fiction. Different people, different place, different relationships, different secrets. Easy enough.

At least that’s what I’d thought.

Usually I planned everything. Timelines, character sheets, motives, secrets, who was lying, why they were lying, when the reader would find out they were lying. I basically built books like crime scenes. Blackwater didn’t happen like that. One Saturday morning I opened a blank document and typed there were five of us at Blackwater that weekend, and then I kept going. No outline. No master plan. No giant corkboard with red string, although honestly that would’ve made me look much more impressive. I just wrote.

By nine o’clock Thursday night, Chapter One had been live for three hours. I’d refreshed the page thirty-seven times. Possibly forty. There were twenty-six comments.

Emily is going to die, isn’t she?

Heart.

Calling it now: Ben is sleeping with Claire.

Heart. Wrong, but heart.

Why do I feel like the bracelet is important???

That one made me stop. Then smile. Good. I’d wanted someone to notice it. In the story, Emily wore a silver bracelet with five tiny charms around her wrist. I’d only described three. A key, a star, and something shaped like a bird. I hadn’t decided what the bracelet meant yet, which was another thing I wasn’t exactly advertising to the readers. I had no fucking clue where The Last Night at Blackwater was going. I knew Emily disappeared. I knew the four people who came home had lied about what happened. And I knew that twenty years later, one of them would get a letter with three words inside.

I remember everything.

Beyond that? Not much. And maybe that was why I was having fun with it. I wasn’t worrying about what my agent would think or whether somebody would figure out the ending fifty pages too early. I wasn’t trying to make the whole book fit into one neat little pitch. I was just writing, which, weirdly enough, was something I’d forgotten how to do.

I picked up my wine and reread the opening.

There were five of us at Blackwater that weekend. Only four of us came home. For twenty years, that’s been the part everyone remembers. They remember Emily Vale because she disappeared. They remember us because we didn’t.

What nobody remembers is the house. I do. I remember the porch light that never worked. The red blanket folded over the back of the sofa. The chipped blue mug Emily refused to drink from because she said the crack looked dirty. I remember the dock outside the kitchen window and the way the boards turned black when it rained. I remember the song playing from Claire’s phone while we unpacked groceries, although I couldn’t tell you the name now if my life depended on it.

And I remember Emily standing in the kitchen with that ridiculous silver bracelet around her wrist. Five charms. Five friends. She shook it at us and laughed. “One for each of you assholes.”

By Sunday morning, Emily was gone.

I stopped reading.

I liked the blue mug. Not because it was some brilliant clue, it wasn’t, that was why I liked it. Thrillers always remembered the big things. Blood, screaming, the knife on the floor, somebody standing in the woods looking suspicious for absolutely no reason. I liked that my narrator remembered a coffee mug. Something stupid and ordinary.

My phone buzzed beside me. Claire.

Read it. You’re insane.

I smiled. Of all nights. I hadn’t really talked to Claire in eight months. Even that barely counted, she’d texted me on my birthday. Happy birthday, bitch. We’re old. I’d replied: Speak for yourself. That was pretty much it.

There’d been a time when Claire and I talked every day. I couldn’t imagine going eight hours without hearing from her, much less eight months. Back then we were basically attached at the hip. Most of that summer existed in my head as random little snapshots, Claire dancing barefoot on somebody’s coffee table, Claire driving with the windows down screaming lyrics to whatever song we were obsessed with that week, Claire standing behind me with scissors over a bathroom sink because we’d decided at two in the morning that bangs were a good idea. They were not. Lena laughing so hard she could barely hold the other pair of scissors.

I smiled. Then something shifted.

For a second, I could see Lena more clearly. Long brown hair. Head thrown back laughing. Something silver flashed around her wrist.

My eyes moved back to the laptop. Five charms.

“Huh.”

Had Lena worn a bracelet? Probably. We all wore cheap silver jewelry back then, hoop earrings, tank tops, bracelets that turned your wrist green after two showers. I tried to picture hers. Nothing. Just that little flash of silver. Maybe that’s where Emily’s bracelet came from, writers did that all the time, you pulled little things out of your life without even realizing you’d kept them. Nothing weird about it.

I typed Claire back. Good insane or call a therapist insane?

Her answer came almost immediately. Too early to tell.

“There she is.” Helpful. She hearted the message. Apparently our emotional reunion was complete.

A few minutes later, my phone buzzed again. New comment.

Absolutely hooked. Thursday is officially ruined for me now because I have to wait a week.

I smiled. That was exactly what I’d wanted. Not the ruined Thursday part. Although maybe a little.

I missed this. I missed people caring what happened next. Publishing a novel was so weird because you spent a year, sometimes longer, alone with something. You loved it, hated it, changed it, sent it away, got notes, changed it again. Then strangers finally read it and you had to act normal while secretly wanting to stand over their shoulder the entire time.

This was different. People were guessing while I was still figuring it out myself. They noticed things. They picked sides. Someone had already decided Emily never existed. I replied to that one.

Interesting. 👀

She existed. Probably.

I poured another inch of wine. Then I noticed my coffee mug sitting beside the laptop. Blue ceramic. Chip along the rim.

I stared at it. Then at the story.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

It wasn’t even the same blue. At least I didn’t think it was. I picked it up and carried it to the sink anyway, mostly because now it was annoying me.

At 10:14, I should’ve gone to bed. Instead, I was reading Chapter One again. Writers do this after publishing something, we pretend we’re checking for typos. We’re not. We’re trying to reread the story as our readers would. It never works.

I reached the part where the five friends arrived at Blackwater. Emily came through the door last. She complained about the smell. Ben told her old houses were supposed to smell weird. Claire opened the windows. The narrator found the red blanket. Nothing particularly exciting. Except I could see the room. Perfectly.

That made me stop. The setup came from Lena. The house wasn’t supposed to. I knew we’d stayed in a house somewhere near the water that weekend, I remembered a porch, I remembered mosquitoes because Claire complained about them for what felt like six straight hours. But if someone had asked me to describe the inside? Absolutely not. The weekend had become one of those boxes of old pictures where everything was still technically there, but half of it had fallen out of order. And Saturday night was worse. Some things I remembered because the police told me I’d said them. Some because Claire remembered them. Nathan had his version. Owen had his. After enough interviews and newspaper articles and twenty years of thinking about the same night, it was hard to know which pieces had started out as mine.

So no, Blackwater wasn’t supposed to be that house.

I scrolled back up. Fireplace on the left. Two windows facing the water. Kitchen through an archway. Stairs beside the front door.

I closed my eyes. And suddenly I could see an upstairs hallway. Dark wood floor. Three doors. One at the very end.

My eyes opened.

“What the hell?”

I hadn’t written the hallway. I wasn’t even sure where it had come from.

My phone buzzed and I jumped hard enough to nearly knock over my wine.

“Shit.”

Another comment. Ben did it. I’m putting this here now so I can come back in twelve weeks and brag.

I laughed, mostly because I needed to. Heart. Refresh. Thirty-one comments.

I shut the laptop. This time I meant it. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, checked the front door, then checked the back door, because apparently writing one thriller had turned me into someone’s eighty year old grandmother. I shut off the kitchen light and made it halfway down the hall before realizing my phone was still beside the laptop.

“Of course it is.”

I went back. Three new notifications. I should’ve ignored them.

Of course I didn’t.

Two comments. One new subscriber.

@LenaLived subscribed to Mara Voss.

I stared at the screen. For a second, the name didn’t quite register. Then it did.

Lena.

I opened the profile. No picture. No bio. The account had been created that day. One subscription.

Mine.

“Okay. That’s creepy.”

I immediately told myself to stop being dramatic. Lena wasn’t exactly an unheard of name. Maybe this Lena survived cancer. Maybe she survived a shitty marriage. Maybe Lena was her dog. Hell, maybe the person’s name wasn’t Lena at all. There were about fifty perfectly reasonable explanations.

I just couldn’t think of one I actually liked.

I clicked out of the profile. Another notification appeared.

@LenaLived commented on Chapter One of The Last Night at Blackwater.

I opened it.

Four words.

That’s not what happened.