The Quiet Tenant

by Clémence Michallon

The Civic obeys him until it doesn’t. He presses the gas pedal, but the car struggles to keep up. There’s a buzzing sound. The transmission. He grabs for the gearshift, tries to jerk it into fourth. It’s stuck.

Back when I first wrote the final car chase, I did not have my driver's license. I took (and passed, thank you very much) my road test the summer after The Quiet Tenant sold to my publisher. But that means that when I was working on the first draft, and for the first few times I reworked the driving scenes, I had little real-life experience to rely on. I asked my husband a lot of questions. If I recall correctly, it was his idea that Emily's car might stall because of its manual transmission. Later on, after I passed my road test, I felt that I was able to revisit those scenes with a bit more of an idea of what I was talking about.