The unwritten rewrite

The Email That Changed Everything

Zoe Buchanan’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, frozen mid-air as though she were an overly dramatic movie hacker. In reality, she was just trying to press “send” on her latest manuscript, but her brain had other plans—mostly involving self-doubt and memories of the disastrous pancake incident six years ago.

The manuscript in front of her was Second Chances, a sweeping romance novel about rekindled love. It should have been perfect. She was Zoe Buchanan, after all—queen of happily-ever-afters, literary wizard of tearjerking love stories, owner of an embarrassingly large collection of scented candles named after fictional boyfriends. 

But as she stared at the glowing words on her screen, they felt wrong. Like wearing a sequin dress to a yoga class: technically acceptable, but deeply unsettling. 

Every sentence she’d written felt like a lie, disconnected from what she was actually feeling. The problem wasn’t the book. It was her.

Nothing in her life felt fixed—not her career, not her apartment with its perpetually leaky faucet, and certainly not her heart. 

She hadn’t had a second chance at anything —least of all love. Six years had passed since Noah Hall walked out of her life.Six years since the boy she thought she would marry vanished into a world that didn't include her, leaving nothing behind but a Spotify playlist that still made her cry.They’d been inseparable—childhood sweethearts, best friends, soulmates in a way that felt practically nauseating to everyone else. And then, just like that, he was gone.

The breakup had been dramatic—a public fight at a diner that ended with her storming out and him refusing to chase her. She had thrown a stack of pancakes at him. He had dodged. It had been messy. The kind of mess that involved whispers in the neighborhood and pitying glances from strangers. 

She spent years trying to fill the void he left with accolades, wine subscriptions, and pretending to enjoy yoga. But every time she went to bed, Noah’s face haunted her dreams, his voice taunting her with stupid inside jokes about waffles.

And every relationship since then has been a car crash—sometimes literally, if you counted the guy who hit her Honda during a failed parking lot date. 

Her hands trembled as she finally forced herself to hit “send,” the email swooshing off to her editor like an arrow shot from the bow of regret. 

“There. It’s done,” she muttered, staring at her laptop screen as if it would suddenly give her a gold star for effort. No such luck. 

She exhaled slowly, steadying herself. She had everything, right? A legion of fans who adored her, books that topped charts, and a collection of fancy pens she never used. But none of it mattered when she was alone with her thoughts.

Zoe leaned back in her chair, her apartment unnervingly quiet except for the faint drip, drip, drip of her kitchen faucet. She had meant to fix it weeks ago but kept getting distracted by existential crises and reruns of The Great British Bake Off . 

Out of habit, she reached for her phone and started scrolling through social media. The algorithm seemed to know she was emotionally vulnerable because the first post she saw was a meme on  how “your ex is probably happier than you.” She snorted and scrolled faster, pausing to like a video of a cat in a tuxedo. 

Then her thumb froze mid-scroll. 

Noah Hall Gets Engaged to Longtime Girlfriend. A New Chapter in His Life Begins.

Her stomach dropped like she’d just been asked to do karaoke at a family wedding. 

Noah. Engaged.