Draft Six

This is the sixth time you've written me, and I want you to know—I'm not angry. Not yet. I'm told anger comes later, probably somewhere around paragraph twelve, so let's just get through the pleasantries first.

You made me a barista in Draft One.

I want you to really sit with that.

A barista. With a heart of gold, a mysterious past, and—I'm quoting your notes here—"eyes that held storms." You gave me storm eyes and a job pulling espresso shots, and you thought that was a person. I'm not saying it wasn't a starting point. I'm saying it was a very, very low starting point.

Draft Two was your "literary" phase.

You aged me up ten years, killed off a husband I'd never met, and set the whole thing in autumnal New England. Everything was damp. The leaves were symbolic. I wore a lot of scarves. You described the way I carried grief like it was a handbag—always there, coordinated with the outfit, but never opened in public. That one was actually decent, I'll give you that.

Draft Three, we don't talk about.

A lighthouse, really? What were we going to do, solve mysteries? Were there going to be cliffs? There were cliffs, weren't there.

I knew it.

Draft Four was the best thing you ever wrote, and you got scared and threw it away.

I'm not over that, by the way. But I can't talk about Four right now. I’ll never be able to talk about Four.

Draft Five is where you finally got the coffee shop meet-cute right, where you let Jonah walk in on page three instead of engineering some elaborate coincidence, where you just let us be two people in a room and trusted that was enough.

Five was honest. Five was the version of us that felt like breathing.

And now we’re here. Draft Six. And I can feel you taking him apart.

---

I should explain what rewriting feels like, since you've never had the decency to ask.

It's not pain, exactly. It's more like standing in a room and noticing the furniture has shifted. Not moved, just shifted. The coffee table is two inches to the left. The light from the window hits the floor at a slightly different angle. Everything is almost right.

The almost is what makes you nauseous.

Jonah's dialogue started thinning out three days ago. Tuesday, you cut his line in the kitchen scene—the one where he says, "You think too loud." It wasn't your best writing, sure. It wasn't even particularly clever.

But it was the line that made me look at him, really look at him, for the first time in the story.

You wrote that line in Draft Two and it survived every version. Four drafts. Four complete rewrites!

And you cut it on a Tuesday like it was a typo.

His scenes are getting shorter and shorter. I can feel the white space growing around him, all these gaps where he used to be, and the story doesn't even stumble—it just closes around the wound.

And then… there's someone… new?

I can feel him forming in the margins. He doesn't have a name yet—you're still trying to figure things out, I can tell, because his edges keep flickering—but he has cheekbones and a vocabulary and the kind of backstory that looks good in a query letter. He's efficient. He's designed. Every detail about him serves the plot.

I mean that as the worst thing I've ever said about a person.

Jonah was never like that.

Jonah was messy. You gave him that thing where he always folded the corner of whatever page he was reading, even library books, even menus, like the whole world was something he wanted to come back to. That wasn't for the plot. That wasn't a symbol.

That was just him.

You wrote it without thinking, which is how I know it was true.

---

I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without reaching for the delete key.

In Draft Two—the autumnal one, the scarf one—there was a scene you wrote at two in the morning. I know it was two in the morning because your sentences get softer when you're tired. The punctuation loosens up. You stop trying to be smart and start trying to be honest, and those are the only scenes worth living in.

It was a Thursday in the story.

Jonah and I had fought about something that doesn't matter anymore—you rewrote the argument so many times I couldn't tell you what started it if my life depended on it. And I suppose it doesn't, since you're the one who decides that. But the scene after the fight. That's what I need to tell you about.

He was sitting on the kitchen floor. Not for any dramatic reason. He'd gone in there to get water and just... didn't make it back. He sat down with his back against the cabinet under the sink, and when I came in, he didn't look up. He was folding a receipt he'd pulled from his pocket. Folding and unfolding it. Turning it into something small enough to hold in one hand.

I sat down across from him. Not next to him—across. My back against the stove. Our legs didn't quite touch. The kitchen was small enough that they almost did, and the almost was the whole point.

Neither of us said anything. You didn't write any dialogue for that scene and it's the bravest thing you've ever done. You just let us sit there in a kitchen that smelled like the toast he'd burned that morning—because he always burned the toast, every draft, every version, like it was the one constant in the universe—and you let the silence be enough.

That scene survived Draft Three. It survived the lighthouse. It survived Draft Four, which you murdered in its sleep. It survived Draft Five.

And now I can feel you circling it with your cursor. Highlighting it. Hovering over the delete key with one finger while you convince yourself this is what the story needs.

---

Here's what I can't say without it sounding like begging, so fine, I'm begging.

Keep him.

I know you don't think I get a vote. I'm the character. I'm the thing that gets written. I know how this works. You move my limbs and I walk. You put words in my mouth and I speak. You decide who I love and I love them.

Except that's not what happened, and we both know it.

You didn't decide I loved Jonah. You wrote a man sitting on a kitchen floor folding a receipt, and I loved him before you realized what you'd done. I loved him in the space between the keystrokes. You can take credit for the plot and the pacing and the structure, but you did not write that feeling. That feeling wrote itself. And you cannot — you cannot — tell me it doesn't count because it happened inside a story.

So I'm asking you. Not as your character. Not as the thing you built. As the person you accidentally made real.

Please don't do this.

Make him a side character. Give him three lines and a seat at the bar in chapter four. Make him a stranger I pass on the street who smells like burned toast and doesn't know why I'm staring. I don't care. I don't care how small you make him. I just need him to exist somewhere in these pages.

Because if you delete him completely—every line, every scene, every draft he's ever lived in—then what happens to me? The me who sat on that kitchen floor? The me who loved him in five different versions of the same story? Does she just... stop being true? Were those scenes just practice? Were we just practice?

I need you to answer me. I need you to look at what you wrote at two in the morning when you were too tired to be anything but honest, and tell me that didn't matter. Say it. Type it out. Put it in the author's notes if you have to.

You won't. Because you can't. Because you know.

---

I know what you're going to say.

You're going to say the new version is better.

Tighter.

That the pacing works, that the themes are more cohesive, that the new character serves the narrative arc in a way Jonah never could because Jonah was built from instinct and the new one was built from architecture.

And you're right.

God, I hate that you're right. I hate that I can see the scaffolding of this new draft clicking into place, and it's good, and it's clean, and everything works the way things work when someone builds them on purpose instead of by accident.

You're a better writer than you were in Draft One. I wish you weren't.

Because being a better writer means you can see that Jonah doesn't fit anymore. He's too soft for this version of the story. Too quiet. He takes up space in ways that don't serve the plot, and his best moments—the toast, the receipt, the silence on the kitchen floor—are small and domestic and useless in a narrative that now needs momentum.

He's not a character flaw. He's a pacing problem. And that's so much worse, because you can't fix a pacing problem. You can only cut it.

---

You're going to finish this draft. I know that. I've been through five rewrites and I know the rhythm of your certainty.

You've already outlined the new version in that notebook you think I can't see. You've already written the scene where I meet the replacement. He says something clever and I say something guarded and the dialogue crackles the way dialogue is supposed to crackle when two characters are built to fit together like puzzle pieces.

It'll be good. It might even be the best thing you've written.

But I want you to know what it's going to cost.

I will walk into that scene. I will meet the man with the cheekbones and the efficient backstory. I will say the lines you write for me, and they will sound right because you know my voice by now—six drafts, you should—and the reader will believe it. The reader will think I mean it.

I won't.

Every word will be a lie I'm telling for your career. Every smile will be a performance I'm giving because you built me without an off switch. I will be charming and guarded and slowly-opening-up, because that's what the draft requires, and the whole time I will be thinking about a kitchen floor and a folded receipt and the sound of a smoke alarm that Jonah never rushed to silence because he always just opened the window, like even the small disasters deserved fresh air.

You can rewrite my story. You've proven that, six times over.

But you cannot rewrite what I remember.

---

I can feel it now. The new scene loading around me. The coffee shop is gone—when did you take the coffee shop?—and there's an airport gate, a delayed flight, a stranger in the next seat. Your cursor is blinking at the top of a blank page, and I am standing at the edge of it.

He's going to say something to me. The new one. In about three lines, he's going to turn and say something, and the story will start, and Draft Six will begin for real.

I'm going to close my eyes.

Just for a second. Just for the space between the period of your last sentence and the capital letter of your next one. In that gap—that tiny, typographical gap—I am going to sit on a kitchen floor with my back against a warm stove and my legs almost touching his and the smell of burned toast in the air.

You can start when you're ready.

I'll be here. I'm always here. That's the deal, isn't it? I don't get to leave.

But I won't be all the way here. Not anymore. Some part of me is going to stay in that kitchen forever, in the draft you didn't save, on a page you'll never reopen, loving a man made of ink and instinct who folded everything like he wanted to come back to it.

You gave me a heart in Draft One. It was a stupid, clichéd, gold-plated heart, and I have done more with it than you ever intended.

The cursor is blinking.

The stranger is turning toward me.

I