I’ve Been Sitting on This Story. Not Anymore.
For most of my adult life, I’ve told other people’s stories.
I’ve built them, packaged them, pitched them, sold them. I’ve worked in television development and production for years — shaping narratives, building series arcs, sitting in edit bays, structuring emotion for an audience I could never see.
I know how to make a story move.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped writing my own. I succumbed to the content machine and focused on what I could sell. And I was good at it.
Then I got injured.
The cinematic kind of injury. The kind where I should be dead but I’m not. But life as I knew it died. The quiet kind of death. The kind that puts the brakes on your life without warning. The kind that forces stillness.
And I am not good at stillness.
Recovery meant long stretches alone — physically limited, mentally restless. No sets. No pitch rooms. No chaos. Just silence and time.
Too much time.
When you work in television, your brain is trained to build. Even when you’re trying not to, you’re structuring scenes in your head. You’re rewriting conversations. You’re imagining the next turn.
During recovery, I found myself drifting — not into anxiety, but into story.
A woman.
A secret.
A fracture no one else could see.
A bloom that wasn’t meant to survive.
The Last Bloom started as something to occupy my mind while my body healed. I told myself it was just an outlet. A distraction. A way to use the mental energy that had nowhere else to go.
But the deeper I went, the more I realized this wasn’t just a side project. It was something I had been circling for years.
Television teaches you to think in stakes. In act breaks. In character turns. In escalation. Writing this novel felt like taking everything I’ve learned about building tension and stripping away the camera. Especially when I was forced to create it in an unconventional way.
My injury also meant no screens. My brain could not handle computers. My eyes shutting down after short stints in front of the keyboard. I turned to dictation. Using my autistic son’s adaptive software to speak my story into words.
Just voice.
Just interiority.
Just consequence.
This story is wilder than anything I’ve produced.
More bold.
More intimate.
And more unsettling.
And I’ve been sitting on it.
Polishing.
Questioning.
Hesitating.
Until now.
I’m releasing The Last Bloom here — chapter by chapter — before it goes anywhere else.
Because I want it to live in real time.
Because I want to feel the rhythm of an audience again.
Because some stories don’t belong in a development deck first.
They belong on the page.
New chapters will drop weekly.
This is the beginning.
And I’m done sitting on it.
1
The storm hit the fields first.
You could always tell by the way the wheat moved—how the stalks dipped all at once, like something heavy had passed over them. Sassy Carruthers watched the motion through the kitchen window, elbow-deep in suds, the last of Donna’s dinner dishes slick in her hands. The sky outside was the color of old bruises, and thunder rolled low across the flat land like a warning.
If you grew up out here, you learned to read the sky early. You learned to tell the difference between a storm that would pass and one that meant go get the candles, check the radio, put gas in the truck. Sassy had always been good at that—reading the weather, reading people, reading things they wished she wouldn’t.
She’d never been good at pretending not to see.
Donna didn’t notice the storm.
Or pretended not to.
She sat at the table tracing circles on the scarred wood with one finger, eyes glassy in that way that made Sassy’s stomach tighten. On good days, Donna baked pies and sang along to her favorite songs and remembered the punch lines before the setup. On bad days, she got lost standing in her own kitchen.
Lately, the bad days were winning.
“Momma?” Sassy asked carefully. “You take your pills tonight?”
Donna blinked, slow and disoriented, like someone surfacing from deep water.
“What time is it?” she murmured.
“Six-thirty.”
Donna’s gaze drifted toward the window. “Feels later.”
“It’s the storm,” Sassy said. “Makes everything heavier.”
It was the kind of thing Donna used to say to her when she was small and frightened of thunder. Now Sassy said it back, the words worn soft from traveling both directions.
Donna hummed, unconvinced.
Sassy rinsed the last plate and put it in the rack. The house around them was a patchwork of their lives—Donna’s floral curtains, Sassy’s battered boots by the back door, a stack of library books on the counter waiting to be returned. There was a time she’d imagined leaving all of it behind—moving to a town where people didn’t know her mother’s problems or her own last name.
But that was before the diagnosis. Before naps turned into lost hours. Before Sassy came home one afternoon and found the stove on and Donna sitting at the table staring at nothing.
Leaving stopped being an option the same day Donna forgot how to get to the grocery store.
Now Sassy was the one who worked extra shifts, who handled bills, who argued with doctors over generic prescriptions, who carried a key to every locked drawer in the house. The girl who’d once wanted to go anywhere had become the girl who couldn’t afford to be more than twenty minutes away.
She dried her hands and crossed to the table. “Finish your tea? I’ll make you another.”
Donna’s hand shot out, surprising them both. She grabbed Sassy’s wrist with startling strength.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want tea.”
Sassy froze, studying her. Donna hadn’t always been fragile. There were pictures—hidden deep in boxes—of a woman who looked like she could burn the world down if she wanted. Sassy had her jawline, her eyes, her stubborn streak. On the days Donna drifted too far, Sassy sometimes caught her staring like she was trying to decide if that was comforting or dangerous.
“Okay,” Sassy said softly. “Then what do you want?”
Donna leaned forward, her breath warm on Sassy’s skin.
“Someone was here today.”
“Who?” she asked.
Donna’s eyes went distant, the brief spark of awareness swallowed by something hazy and unreachable.
“I… I don’t remember,” she said.
Her grip loosened.
Sassy forced a smile; the practiced one she used on nurses and nosy neighbors. “It’s alright, Momma.”
She said it because that was her job now: make Donna feel safe, make other people feel reassured, make the world look less frayed around the edges than it really was. Sassy Carruthers, professional calmer-down of situations. She could talk a cashier out of calling security, talk Jimmy out of throwing a punch, talk Donna out of walking outside in her nightgown in the middle of January.
But she didn’t believe her own words tonight.
Not with the storm coming in and that look in Donna’s eyes.
Lightning flashed, slicing through the world outside the window.
In that brief burst of light, Sassy saw it.
A mark on the wooden frame of the kitchen window—right where the paint had always peeled but the wood itself had been smooth yesterday. She furrowed her brow and her eyes locked in as she stepped closer. The overhead light didn’t quite reach the frame, but her eyes had always been good in the dark. She brushed her fingers over the spot.
A symbol.
Two loops, crossed through the center. Like a sideways figure-eight with a line tearing through the middle.
Her breath caught.
It hadn’t been there before. Not this morning when she opened the curtains. Not all the afternoons she’d leaned in this very spot to watch the wheat or Jimmy’s beat-up truck pull into the driveway.
The wood around it felt raw, slightly raised. Splinters caught on her fingertips.
Fresh.
Sassy swallowed.
There were stupid explanations. Kids, maybe. Bored teenagers from town, if any of them had bothered to drive this far out. Some drifter passing through, leaving marks on houses like a stray dog lifting his leg on fence posts.
But the symbol didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like a claim.
She rubbed her thumb across it, like she could erase it with enough stubbornness.
It didn’t fade.
Behind her, Donna kept tracing circles on the table.
“Storm’s getting closer,” Donna said so gently the words barely left her lips. As if she was speaking in a dream.
Sassy let her hand fall from the frame and stared out at the dark, roiling sky.
She’d grown up thinking the worst thing a storm could do was tear up their roof or flatten the wheat.
Tonight, with her mother slipping in and out of herself and a strange mark carved into their house, she felt a different kind of weather moving in—one she couldn’t track on any radar.
Something was coming.
And for the first time in a long time, Sassy had the uneasy sense that the life she’d built—the careful routines, the small-town job at the grocery store, the secret stack of applications she never mailed—wasn’t a real life at all.
Just a pause.
Just a waiting room.
Lightning flashed again, catching on the carved lines of the symbol, making it look for a second like it was glowing.
“Who are you?” she whispered to no one.
The thunder answered, rolling low and long over the fields.
2
The storm broke loose just after dark, dragging sheets of rain sideways across the yard. The old farmhouse creaked the way it always did when weather pushed against its bones, the wood settling like a woman sighing in her sleep.
Sassy stood at the edge of the living room, arms wrapped around herself, watching Donna drift from corner to corner like she’d misplaced something but couldn’t remember what it was.
Lately, the forgetting came in waves.
Tonight, it felt more like a tide pulling her mother out into deeper water.
“You want to sit down awhile?” Sassy asked gently.
Donna didn’t answer. She wandered toward the hallway, fingers brushing the wallpaper the way a child might touch the walls of a house she didn’t quite trust.
“Momma?” Sassy followed her. “I asked you something.”
Donna stopped. Turned. For a heartbeat her eyes were clear—unnervingly so.
“You don’t hear it?” she whispered.
“Hear what?”
Donna leaned closer, pressing two fingers to the hollow of Sassy’s throat like she was checking for a pulse.
“The humming.”
Sassy stiffened.
There was no humming. Just rain, wind, the rattling of old windowpanes.
“What kind of humming?” Sassy pressed.
Donna shook her head like the question knocked something loose. “I can’t… I can’t catch it.”
She drifted away again, leaving Sassy frozen in the hall.
Humming.
The word crawled under her skin. Donna had used it before—once last winter in her sleep, muttering about women in the forest and songs that never ended. Sassy had chalked it up to dementia then.
Tonight, it didn’t feel like dementia. It felt like remembering.
Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the lights. Sassy forced herself into motion. “Come on. Let’s get you ready for bed.”
Donna let herself be guided to her room, pliant and tired. Sassy helped her change into her nightgown, smoothed her thinning hair, tucked the blankets around her. The familiar motions soothed them both.
Then Donna’s hand shot out again, gripping Sassy’s wrist with surprising urgency.
“You shouldn’t stay here tonight,” she whispered.
Sassy blinked. “Why not?”
Donna swallowed, eyes darting to the doorway as if someone stood just beyond it.
“They know.”
“Know what?” Sassy’s voice came out thinner than she liked.
Donna’s fingers dug in. “You’re starting to look like her.”
Sassy’s blood went cold.
“Look like who, Momma?”
But the moment snapped. Donna’s face dropped, shoulders sagging as she sank back into the pillows with a sigh that sounded more like retreat than rest.
Sassy stepped into the hallway, chest tight. Donna’s words echoed in her head.
You’re starting to look like her.
A mother?
A memory?
A ghost?
Sassy didn’t know.
She grabbed her jacket and stepped out onto the porch, needing air that didn’t taste like fear. The rain had softened into a mist that clung to her skin. Slowly coating her hair and forming small, glistening ringlets around her face. She reached for the carved symbol on the kitchen window frame, tracing the grooves again.
Still raw. Still wrong.
“Who are you?” she whispered to whoever had left it.
Headlights swept the driveway.
Jimmy’s truck rolled to a stop.
He climbed out, rain soaking the shoulders of his shirt, the brim of his cap darkening.
“Sass?” he called softly. “Everything okay?”
She opened her mouth to say yes—because that’s what she usually said, because she’d spent half her life making sure people didn’t worry about her.
What came out was shaky instead:
“No.”
Jimmy’s expression changed instantly.
He jogged up the steps, pushing wet hair off his forehead. “What happened?”
Sassy motioned to the carved frame. “Have you ever seen this before?”
Jimmy leaned in, squinting. “No. Where’d it come from?”
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t here this morning.”
Jimmy’s jaw hardened. “You think someone was on your porch?”
“I think someone was close enough to touch the house.”
Lightning flashed, turning his eyes to sharp chips of color.
“You want me to have a look around?” he asked.
“Probably just some kids messing around,” Sassy said it to reassure herself as much as Jimmy. But something felt off. She couldn’t understand what. But she felt it.
Jimmy didn’t believe her; she could see it in the way his mouth flattened.
He reached out, fingers warm on her elbow. “Let’s go inside.”
The house felt heavier when they stepped back through the door—like they weren’t alone anymore, even though every room looked the same.
Jimmy glanced toward the living room. “Where’s your mom?”
“In bed.”
A floorboard creaked—deep in the house, past the kitchen.
Jimmy straightened. “You expecting anyone?”
“No.”
Another creak.
His hand went automatically to the holster at his hip. He often visited Sassy before or after his shift, which meant he had his gun on him. This is the first time Sassy was happy he had it.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
Sassy’s lungs tightened as she followed.
The hallway felt longer than it had an hour ago.
Another creak.
This time, closer.
Jimmy raised his gun. “Sassy, go back to your mom’s room. Lock the door.”