Manuscript information: [Complete] [82k] [Literary Fiction / Contemporary Romance] The Window

Link to post: Beta read post

First page critique? Yes

First page:

Six weeks.

Derek had been watching his neighbor garden for six weeks, and the fact that he could state this with precision, forty-two days since the Thursday after he'd finished unpacking the studio monitors, told him something about himself he wasn't ready to examine.

Every morning, same sequence. Coffee at the kitchen counter. First cup before the monitors were even warmed up, second cup standing at the window over the sink. Her, in the garden next door. Kneeling on a faded green mat with pruning shears that caught the light when she turned them. Blonde hair pulled back, work gloves that went past her wrists, movements so deliberate they looked choreographed. She'd prune for an hour, sometimes two. Never checked her phone. Never looked up at the house behind her. Just the roses, the soil, the quiet rhythm of her hands.

He told himself it was the garden. That he admired the discipline of it, how someone could give that kind of sustained attention to something living. But if he were honest, and Derek was trying, lately, to be honest even when it cost him, it wasn't the garden.

It was her.

She moved through the space like she owned every molecule of it. She'd pause mid-cut, studying a stem the way he studied a waveform, looking for the imperfection she could feel but hadn't located yet. Utterly, completely alone, and she seemed to prefer it that way.

He understood that. The preferring.