We Called It Therapy After Dark novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Write Your Own

The line for the book launch went out the library doors and down the block, and Ebba had put herself in charge of it.

"Single file," she told the street, in the voice she had used on the children's room for thirty years. "Books out, please. No running."

Nobody ran.

The Duluth Public Library had a reading room with a stained-glass window of a ship, and tonight it held two hundred folding chairs and a long table with my name on a stack of white covers.

ANJA DAHLQUIST. THE NIGHT NOTEBOOKS.

Under that, in smaller type: "Some of these are his."

I sat behind the table with a pen in my hand and Roan standing at my left shoulder, in the one good suit he owned.

"You look terrified," he said.

"I am terrified."

"You look good terrified."

"Stop being charming at me in public."

"I can't help it. It's a medical condition."

The first person in line was a man in a plaid shirt.

He held his copy against his chest with both arms.

"Eight months," he said. "Sober. I wanted to tell you in person."

I put my pen down and took his hand across the table.

"Congratulations," I said.

"I brought this."

He took a folded square of paper from his pocket and opened it.

It was a photograph of a bathroom mirror, with a sentence written across it in dry-erase marker.

Say the scary thing at three in the morning. It weighs less in the dark.

"My sister wrote it for me," he said. "She's the respiratory tech."

"I know her."

"She said it was yours."

"It's his," I said, and tipped my head at Roan.

The man looked up.

Roan's ears had gone red.

"Then I'd like you both to sign it," the man said.

I wrote on the page: "Say it anyway. N."

Roan took the pen and added under it, in his blocky capitals: "It does weigh less. J."

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