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“Not entirely. I know you have deadlines, and I know you’re usually writing more than one book a year. I’ve seen you talk about your characters and your research in your social media posts. I assume there’s more to it than sitting down and letting the words appear.”

I laughed. “If only. As an indie author, my deadlines are mostly the submission dates I set when I put a book up for preorder or schedule it through a retailer or distributor. I have to make sure the manuscript is finished, edited, and ready to go by the dates I’ve committed to. No editor is sitting over my shoulder telling me to hurry up, but if I miss my own deadlines, I can make a mess of my publishing schedule.”

“That sounds like a lot of responsibility.”

“It is. Some days I can write several thousand words before lunch. Other days I spend two hours trying to get one sentence right, and then I decide the sentence is terrible and delete the whole thing.”

“That sounds frustrating.”

“It is. Especially when I have a deadline looming and my fictional witch is refusing to cooperate. She owns a café, and you’d think that would make it easy to come up with a murder or two, but apparently she has standards.”

He smiled. “I’m glad you’re doing something you love.”

The simplicity of the statement caught me off guard. I’d spent so long imagining the conversation we might have if we ever spoke again that I’d forgotten how it felt to talk to him about the small things. The ordinary things. He’d always been interested in what I was doing, even when it was something he didn’t understand, and he’d always listened as though my enthusiasm mattered.

I looked down at my cup before he could see too much on my face.

“It took a while to get here,” I admitted. “I had a few different jobs before I started making enough from the books to treat writing as my main work. I still have to keep an eye on sales and deadlines, and I worry about whether the next book will do as well as the last one. It’s not exactly a predictable career.”

“Nothing worth doing is always predictable.”

“That sounds suspiciously like something from a motivational calendar.”

He laughed, and the sound was so familiar that for a moment I was eighteen again, sitting beside him in a booth at Dixie’s while he tried to convince me that I could do anything I put my mind to. I’d believed him then. I wasn’t sure what to believe now.

“How did you come to write your first book?” he asked. “I knew you were an avid reader, but I don’t remember you ever saying you wanted to be a writer.”

“I don’t think I knew myself back then. I was always making up stories in my head, but there’s a difference between imagining something and deciding you can turn it into a book other people might actually want to read. Eventually, I got tired of wondering whether I could do it and decided to try. The first one took forever, and I had no idea what I was doing, but I finished it. Then I wrote another.”

“And now you have a career.”

“Now I have a career,” I agreed, though I couldn’t quite suppress my smile. “It still surprises me sometimes.”

He watched me with an expression that was so openly pleased for me that I had to look down at my coffee again.

“What about you?” I asked. “How did you end up choosing law enforcement?”

“Not exactly a lifelong plan. When I was looking at the Air Force, the recruiter talked about a few different options, and then the staff at MEPS pointed me toward military police. It sounded like a reasonable choice. I’d get training, a steady paycheck, and experience I could use in civilian life if the military didn’t work out for me. I figured I could do worse.”

“And?”

“And I found out I loved the job.” He smiled faintly. “Being an MP was a good fit, even when it was difficult. I liked having work where I knew what was expected of me and where the decisions mattered. I learned a lot about people, about keeping my head when things went wrong, and about making decisions when there wasn’t an easy answer.”

The waitress returned then with my breakfast, setting down a plate piled with eggs, bacon, and toast. The smell made my stomach rumble, and I was grateful for something to do with my hands besides clutch my coffee cup.

“Thank you, June,” I said.

She gave me a quick smile, then reached across the table and set a small plate of extra toast and a couple of strips of bacon in front of Josiah.

He looked at the food, then at her. “Thank you.”

June merely smiled and sauntered away without a word of explanation. Neither of us commented on the fact that she’d just fed the sheriff anyway. I suspected she’d decided he looked as though he needed a proper breakfast, and that was that.

Josiah picked up a slice of toast and reached for the butter. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The Air Force.”

I cut into my eggs, grateful that the arrival of food had saved me from having to respond to the way he’d been looking at me. “You were telling me how you ended up as an MP.”

“Right. I liked the work, so when I left the Air Force, I wanted to continue doing something similar. Baltimore gave me that opportunity. It was different from military service, of course, but there were things I liked about being a police officer. Helping people. Solving problems. Being useful when someone needed help.”