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Hey, you!

Hello from my little piece of the Midwest United States, where I'm in the grips of start-of-school chaos. My older son is beginning first grade and my younger son is beginning preschool. They're both so excited! When I was a kid, I mourned the end of summer. Even when I was very young, I didn't like school. I'm not sure why that was. I think I just wanted the freedom to do what I liked, and resented the rigid schedule and curriculum. I definitely got bored often, and I definitely hated PE.

My older son has basically had the opposite reaction to school. He was sad when Kindergarten ended, and he's ecstatic to go back to school. He loves PE and is dubious about reading, but basically enjoys every subject, and he's everyone's friend. I can only hope his little brother has the same kind of experience, although they're very different kids, so it's hard to say.

I won't go on too much more about my kids, as I know that not everyone wants to hear parents go on and on. But I will leave you with this screenshot from my smart speaker announcements, which captures the parenthood moment I'm in so very perfectly. 😆

Publication anniversary celebration 🥳

My publication anniversary was August 11, the same day that the second edition of Jaywalking released! There's still time for you to enter to win a paperback or request a bookmark. If you're interested, just fill out this survey. Every entrant who indicates they want one will get a bookmark. This giveaway is only open to mailing list subscribers.

What I'm reading

I just finished reading a very fun mm fantasy romance by Tavia Lark, The Necromancer's Light. I liked the cover, and then I was sold by the description, which includes hurt/comfort and a touch-starved character. Those two things in combination with a fantasy setting are pretty impossible for me to resist! If you're like me, I'd encourage you to check out the book.

What I'm writing

My current project is kind of a secret, but I can tell you that it's got some fun tropes, like age gap (imagine that! 🙃 me, writing age gap!), a famous character, and a grumpy/sunshine vibe. I'm hoping to finish it up this month, though I won't be able to tell you about it until the start of next year.

In September, I'll be writing the next Wild Ones book while also promoting the release of book three. I can't believe it's almost time for Burning Season to go out into the world. The manuscript went off to the editor for its second round of edits, and should be back any day. That means that we're just days away from distribution of advanced review copies. I'm still taking applications for ARCs. If you are interested in receiving an early e-book copy of the book, and would consider leaving an honest review if you enjoy it, then please fill out this request form.

I've also been working on Night & Day over on Discord, and chapter three is at the bottom of this email, ready for you to read. If you need to catch up, scroll to the end of past emails for Chapter One and Chapter Two.

Free fantasy story from me, coming next week!

In my next email I'll be telling you about a new free short story that you can grab as part of a multi-author giveaway of brand new stories. This is the story I wrote in the Undertow universe. If you remember, Undertow was our last newsletter serial story, which I'm currently revising with hopes to extend it into a trilogy. You can return to the ancient, dystopian fantasy world of Sihr next week, and meet a pair of rival divers who have to put aside the heartbreak and history between them and work together to find a priceless treasure.

Have a great week!

xo,

Rachel

Website | Rachel's Party Barn on Facebook | Instagram | Discord

Books by Rachel Ember

Long Winter | Signs of Spring | Burning Season

Jaywalking | Sleepwalker

***

NIGHT & DAY

Chapter Three

Ty

Ty had turned off his phone for his interview, a tip he'd picked up on the same website that had given him the advice about what to wear. Not knowing if he'd gotten a text from one of his siblings, even for just twenty minutes, would normally have him on edge. But the high he was riding from meeting Jonathan and Isabel—or, that was, getting the job, of course—distracted him all the way to the bus stop.

There, he saw a girl perched on the bench who was about his little sister Sam's age, and who looked like her, too. The passing reminder of her made him abruptly conscious of the phone he’d left silenced in his pocket like it was heavy as a stone. He dug into his pocket as the bus pulled up, and was scrolling his text messages as he trudged up the stairs and found a seat.

Surprisingly, not one of his sisters had texted him. Granted, it had only been a half-hour since his last message from Sam, an all-caps GOOD LUCK and string of emojis, but having three sisters who relied on him to varying degrees meant that there was usually an open line of communication with at least one of them in any given hour. The break in normalcy, that not one of the three of them needed his attention even for just a half-hour, felt strange.

Sitting back in the seat, he decided to enjoy this rare moment, and gratefully closed his eyes. The bus seat was almost uncomfortably warm with the sunlight pouring through the window to heat the vinyl. But Ty had always liked that too-hot feeling; it made him relaxed and sleepy, the way he imagined a sauna would.

He thought back over the interview again. Interview felt like a strange word for the conversation he’d had with Jonathan. Had Ty answered a single question from any of the lists of Common Interview Questions he’d anxiously read over the night before? He was pretty sure he hadn’t. But he must have done something right, because Jonathan had wanted him to start immediately.

Ty had agreed to the immediate start without really thinking it through. He still had his shift at the cafe this afternoon, and he needed to check on Sam and make sure she understood she'd be putting herself on the school bus the next morning. He'd barely have time to eat a bowl of cereal if he wanted to be back by eight p.m., which would be the beginning of his first shift watching the baby.

He remembered Isabel's sweet little sleeping face as he'd eased her down into her crib before he'd left, and that when he'd taken a pen from Jonathan to sign some forms that apparently had to do with taxes but that he honestly hadn't even bothered to skim, their fingers had brushed against one another.

***

After work at the cafe, Ty rushed home, determined to shower away the smell of greasy food and find something decent to wear back to Jonathan’s house. He’d had a crappy shift and a part of him wished he’d given into the urge to just walk out, instead of giving his two weeks’ notice. But Ty wasn’t the type to abandon a commitment, even one waiting tables at a shitty restaurant, so he knew that he’d see it through no matter how much the manager yelled at him or how crummy it paid.

The closest bus stop to the house where Ty had grown up was four blocks away. which wasn't bad in good weather, but he was in such a hurry that he had to fight the urge to break into a jog. He'd texted Sam from the bus and knew she was at home, but when his phone buzzed again as he reached the sagging wooden steps to the front porch, Sam hadn't been the one to text him.

It was his middle sister, Danielle. I hear congrats are in order?!

Ty sighed. Someone who didn't know his middle sister might read that text and think she was happy for him, but Ty knew her too well to believe her feelings were that simple. And in fact, by the time he'd let himself into the house, kicking Sam's discarded shoes out of his way so that he could take off his own, he had another text from her.

I don't understand why you wouldn't tell me about this? I had to find out from Sam? And I didn't even know you were looking for a job. What happened with the cafe?

No one was in the living room, but Ty heard blaring music coming from upstairs that told him where Sam must be. He had never been sure whether she actually liked the heavy metal she listened to all the time, or if it just fit the tough-girl aesthetic she'd suddenly begun performing right around her thirteenth birthday.

With the ease of long habit, Ty composed a placating text to Danielle with one hand while he assembled a bowl of cereal for himself with the other. He wrinkled his nose at the stack of dishes in the sink that meant his parents were around somewhere, then he reminded himself that it was good they were here. He wouldn't want Sam to be home alone tonight, and they'd been doing a lot better ever since his dad's arrest eight months earlier.

It was funny, that an arrest could be a good thing, but his parents had gotten away with so much for so long it was like they'd become totally detached from the potential consequences of breaking the law. And now that Dad was on probation, they were both trying to walk the straight and narrow—or as close as they were able to get, being the people who they were. A part of Ty missed the days when he didn't even know where they were for weeks on end. Maybe it was stressful trying to keep everything together without them, especially when he was still technically a kid himself, but if they were gone, at least that meant they weren't spending his tip money on beer instead of groceries, or throwing parties in the living room when the girls were trying to sleep.

He glanced down at his text to Danielle for a quick proofread before he hit send.

I really didn't think I had a chance at the job. Just did the interview on a whim. Big surprise! It'll pay better than the cafe and free me up for classes during the day. So, yay!

Sometimes he imagined Danielle as the grouchy character haunted by a raincloud in a cartoon, and himself as the determinedly cheerful character who stuck an umbrella over the grouchy character's head, whether it was welcome or not.

The music from upstairs abruptly turned off, and there was a thunder of feet on the stairs as Sam came down. She whipped into the room, dyed-black hair flying out behind her like a banner, her grin huge. She made as though to hug him, then noticed he was holding a bowl of cereal in one hand and his phone in the other, and just jumped up and down instead.

"This is so great!"

He smiled at her. "Yeah, I think so, too." He paused and bit his lip. "I hope so, anyway. I knew it was a long bus ride from here, but it's even longer than I thought."

"But it's close to the school," she said. "You can go straight from there to class in the morning, right?"

He nodded cautiously. "Assuming I get in."

"You'll get in!" She rolled her eyes. "So, when do you start?"

He swallowed a mouthful of cereal, realizing mid-swallow that it was pretty stale. "Actually, he'd like me to start tonight."

"He? You mean the dad?"

"Yeah." Ty frowned to himself, setting down the cereal bowl with a grimace of distaste, and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. "I only met Jonathan, her dad."

Ty was only now realizing that maybe that was strange. Should he have asked about another parent? If he'd thought about it in advance, he probably would have assumed he'd be meeting two parents. That was the typical thing. But it hadn't occurred to him while he was there to wonder, and reflecting now, he was almost sure that Jonathan was the only parent in little Isabel's life. There hadn't been signs of another adult in the house.

"That seems like super short notice. Are you getting, I don't know, emergency pay?"

Ty raised an eyebrow. "Is that a thing?"

She wrinkled her nose. "I don't know. Maybe? It's like holiday pay and overtime." She spread the fingers of both hands and slotted them together. "Combined."

Ty laughed and shook his head. "I'm not going to ask him to pay me extra. I'm glad to be paid at all. Will you be okay getting yourself to school tomorrow? I'll be here when you get home."

She gave an exaggerated nod. "Yes. I keep telling you. I'm not a kid anymore."

"You are literally and legally a kid," he countered, sliding his own fingers together in the same way she had hers. "Combined."

"You don't even make any sense," she muttered, but he could tell she was fighting a smile as he brushed past her, pausing to mess up her sleek black hair.

"I'm going to grab some of my stuff and get back over there."

Ty was halfway up the stairs when  the door to his parents' bedroom opened and his mother stepped out in a bathrobe, yawning and rubbing a knuckle into one of her eyes.

"Oh, hey, honey," she said, smiling warmly at the sight of him. He gave her a tense smile in return, scanning her out of habit for signs of intoxication. She smelled like stale cigarette smoke and by the way she flinched away from the light in the hall when he flipped it on, he could tell that she was hungover. That was no surprise...his parents still hadn't been home from wherever they'd gone to party when Ty woke up that morning.

"You get paid on Friday, don't you?" she asked, still smiling as she leaned back against the wall to make room for him to go by. "I'm going to need your part of the rent, as soon as you have it. No rush."

Ty paused with his hand on his bedroom door. He should just mutter a "yes, I'll get it to you on Friday" and leave it at that. There was no point in fighting with her.

And yet, he usually couldn’t stop himself, and this moment was no exception. He looked at her over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow. "We agreed I wasn't paying rent the rest of the year. Because of the oboe. Remember?"

His mother's smile wavered, but didn't fade away completely. She let out a breathy little laugh. "I told you we couldn't afford that oboe. There was no reason that your sister couldn't play the one that belongs to the school. Those instruments were good enough for the rest of you kids."

In fact, Sam was the only member of the family who'd ever played anything but a recorder, but Ty wouldn't expect either of his parents to remember their childhoods in that level of detail. He rubbed his forehead and spoke through gritted teeth, even knowing he was wasting his breath. "Another student broke the school's oboe, and they decided not to replace it. I know that you remember. We talked about it for hours."

They'd yelled about it for hours, actually. In the end, his parents had agreed to let Ty offset the cost of the oboe against his future rent, but he should have known that they wouldn't hold up their end of the deal. He was probably lucky to have gotten the first month out of them. It would be different if there was rent to pay on the house, but there wasn't. It had been Ty's grandparents', and his mother had inherited it from them when they died. There wasn’t even a mortgage to pay, because his parents were fortunately too mystified by banks to try to apply for one. 

Still, Ty was an adult, and he did live with them, so for the most part he didn't mind forking over two hundred bucks a month for the privilege of putting food in the refrigerator that they'd eat and being the sole payer of the utility bills because otherwise they'd end up turned off.

"I'm sorry that you misunderstood us, Ty," she said, her smile finally gone and leaving behind a sort of sorrowful grimace, like she was a righteously aggrieved parent of an ungrateful child, which Ty knew was pretty much the story that she told herself about him. His mother was an expert in self-deceit, and after exhausting himself getting mad at her about it as a teenager and into his early twenties, usually Ty didn't let himself get worked up about it anymore. "We're going to need that money, one way or the other. You're a grown man now, and if you're going to live here, you'll have to contribute."

Ty squeezed his eyes closed, counted down from five, and forced out a, "Fine. Friday." He couldn't bring himself to look at her, so he said the rest of what she needed to know over his shoulder as he went into his room. "I'm starting a new job, so I won't be here in the mornings to help Sam." He didn't wait for an answer; he barely refrained from slamming his door behind him.

Twenty minutes later Ty had packed and escaped the house without seeing his parents again. He found Sam waiting for him on the stoop, listening to music so loud in her earbuds he could hear it from the doorway. He tugged the left one gently out of her ear with a frown.

"Those are bad for your eardrums," he said.

"That's such a dad thing to say," Sam scoffed, but she took out the other earbud too and left them strung over her shoulders. "You're going?"

"Yeah." He hugged her. "If something goes wrong here, you know what to do."

She nodded.

"I want you to actually say it," he insisted, suddenly wondering what he was thinking, leaving her here with their parents for a whole night, all the way across the metro where it would take forever to get back to her.

"Don't look at me like that," she snapped. "I'm fine. This is fine. And what I'll do if something goes wrong is text you, then go to the QuikTrip, then wait there until you come." She counted the steps off on her fingers and her voice adopted the rhythm of reciting something rote. Then she put one of her little, surprisingly strong arms around his neck and squeezed him so hard it kind of hurt. That was the way Sam hugged. "See you tomorrow."