“How else could I find out your address? Nobody knows who you are. Like you said, not even Alex.”

“That's by design,” Liam says. “I don't want anyone knowing what I do.”

“Why?” I ask.

He raises his hand in my face and asks, “You’re a reporter, right?”

I nod.

“Whatever I tell you is off the record.”

I let out a deep sigh.

Shit.

Those are the magic words. Now he can tell me his deepest secret like that he is actually the Golden State killer and I don’t have the right to print it. At least, not ethically and not under my name.

I feel myself starting to freak out, but I take a few deep breaths and tell myself to calm down.

It doesn't matter.

So, what if everything that he says right now is off the record?

We have developed a rapport.

Maybe I can get him to change his mind.

“Okay,” I say. “It's off the record.”

Still, Liam hesitates. I lift my hands up in the air to show him that my hands are empty.

“I'm not recording anything. You can take a look at my phone,” I say, pulling it out of my back pocket. “Can I ask you something? Why don't you want anyone to know that you’re D. B. Carter? You're famous. There are millions of people around the world who love your work. Yet, no one knows who you really are.”

“You have asked and answered your own question.”

He starts to walk away and I'm not sure if I should follow him. So, I stand here, in his backyard next to his horse who is feverishly drinking from the trough.

“Your horse is beautiful,” I add as he heads up the stairs.

I see his dog through the enormous living room window, barking up a storm. Surprisingly, the house is so well insulated that I can barely hear her at all.

“Are you coming in or not?” Liam asks.

He doesn't wait for me to answer and disappears into the house.

Not wanting to push my luck, I follow him inside.

25

Emma

The back entrance leads through a small foyer, where Liam takes off his boots and leaves them haphazardly in the middle of the floor. As soon as I walk over the threshold, the dog runs up to me, yelping, but Liam places his hand on her head, and she immediately calms down.

“This is Skylar,” he says. “She's a little protective of me, but she's friendly. Don't worry, she won't bite.”

I lean over to try to pet her, but she bursts out into another cacophony of barks.

“You might want to give her some time,” he advises.

I decide to not approach her again until she calms down.

Liam leads me to the large kitchen island made of marble and reinforced with steel and offers me something to drink. There's a farmhouse sink with one of those modern, spring-like faucets installed in the island and when I tell him that I want some water, he grabs a Mason jar and flips on the filtered water setting on the faucet. When I bring it to my lips, it tastes cool and delicious like it's straight out of the spring.

“Good, right?” he asks.

I nod.

“I have a well on the property, one of the few around here so that's natural spring water.”

“Wow, it's some of the best water I've ever had.”

“Yeah, it's one of the reasons I bought this property.”

I look around the enormous open floor concept containing both the kitchen and the living room in one. There are huge skylights up above in the twenty foot ceiling, illuminating every nook and cranny. The walls are mostly bare, except for a few gigantic canvases. One is of a woman's nude body, facing away from the painter, done in an abstract style with hues of blue and violet.

“These are beautiful,” I say, looking around the space.

There's a large modern chandelier the shape of an enormous hexagon hanging in the kitchen. The floors are the color of cool oak, covered with a few distressed looking rugs. Along one wall sits a modern midcentury couch and along the other is a plush chaise lounge in linen white.

“I love the way that your house is designed,” I say.

“Thank you.” He nods. “I did it myself.”

I raise my eyebrow, surprised. It looks like something that could have a whole architectural spread in Coast magazine. I'm tempted to suggest that I pitch him and his home for the cover story.

I'm tempted, but I'm not stupid.

He's already suspicious of me and if I bring up another story angle, I know that he won't let this go any further.

I need him to trust me. I have to put him at ease. The problem is that I feel like I'm going to pass out every time he looks at me.

“I'm sorry if I was a little rude earlier,” Liam says, opening the double doors to his wide subzero refrigerator and pulling out a box of blueberries.

He raises some to my eye level and shrugs, asking, “Do you want any?”

After such a long drive, I'm feeling quite peckish and I give him a vigorous nod.

After he washes the blueberries in the sink, he transfers them to a glazed bowl with small little imperfections along the sides which makes it look like it was handmade. If the berries looked good before, now they are completely irresistible. I grab a few and pop them in my mouth.

“I'm sorry that I just showed up here. The thing is that I had no idea that you would be who I would find here. I thought that maybe D. B. Carter was actually this Matt Lipinski and he was testing me.”

“You know, that wasn't really smart. Coming out to the desert all by yourself to knock on a stranger's door. What if it had been a trick? What if he was just trying to get you to come to his house… For…”

His voice trails off, but we both know the threat that women face from strange men.

“I know, but I told my sister where I was going and I was going to stay in touch. Besides, I looked up the house and it looked quite nice.”

“Yes, rich people never commit crimes,” he says sarcastically and we both laugh.

“So… Can I ask you a few questions?”

He shrugs and tosses a blueberry in his mouth.

“How long have you been writing as D. B. Carter?”

“Five years or is it six? It's been a while.”

“How did you get started?”

“Like any writer. I started with short stories and essays that I submitted to what feels like hundreds of literary magazines. Some got accepted, fewer got published. None made money.”

“So, what happened?”

“I got sick of it. I went to this writers’ conference and I attended a talk by a fantasy writer who was self-publishing. I knew that the Kindle existed and people were doing self-publishing, but I didn't realize how successful you could be. He went over the basics of marketing, nothing too intricate, but what really caught my attention was the fact that he said that he made as much money from writing in his first year as he did from working his full-time job as a chemistry teacher. I saw that as a way to do what I really wanted to do.”

“Yeah, I know that feeling,” I say, nodding.

“I wanted to make a living at it. I wanted people to read my books. Before I went to the conference, I wrote a book and submitted it to forty-five different literary agents, most of whom didn't have the decency to get back to me. I figured that I had nothing to lose so I might as well just try to publish and market it myself. So, that's what I did. As soon as the first one came out, I was already done with the second and halfway through writing the third. When I did research on independent publishing, I realized that it's all about content. The readers who like these kinds of books are feverish for more titles. They just want to read them all. Well, I decided that if that's what they wanted, then that's what I'm going to give them.”