One Day in December

by Josie Silver

And then he looks down at me, and his eyes say all the things he cannot. His gaze holds mine as we dance slowly, and I silently tell him that I’ll always carry him in my heart, and he silently tells me that in another place, another time, we’d have been pretty damn close to perfect.

I’m someone who visualizes the whole manuscript as I write it, it’s like a movie playing in my head. This particular scene needed to feel late night and intimate, so it went through several rewrites – both Laurie and Jack were in other relationships, it was important to walk near the line without actually crossing it. But at the same time, we see them both at their most vulnerable and honest here, close to admitting things that couldn’t be said. My hope for the reader is that they feel both Laurie and Jack’s heartbreak during this scene, it certainly made me tearful as I wrote it.