Taking the Heat by Victoria Dahl Page B

with Gabe.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Dear Veronica,
    I’ve received an amazing job offer that would allow me to move from Wyoming to a big city on the West Coast. I’ve always wanted to live somewhere fast-paced, and even though the budget would be tight, I could swing it. But I haven’t mentioned this offer to anyone else. The problem is my fiancé. He can’t move and he would never want to live in the city. I love him with all my heart, but if I stay here and get married, I’ll never get to follow my other dreams. I’m only twenty-five. Maybe I’m not ready to live in Wyoming for the rest of my life.
    â€”Torn
    V ERONICA   STARED   AT the screen. She’d already opened this email three times. And closed it twice.
    She hadn’t received many letters this week. It was a slow time of year, but she wondered if the live Dear Veronica readings were cutting into the normal mail she received. Maybe people wanted to save up their questions for the live event. Regardless, she hadn’t yet found another letter that was compelling, sounded true and focused on a dilemma she hadn’t answered already.
    But she didn’t want to answer this one.
    She considered digging back through the letters she’d received months ago but felt like a worthless coward even thinking about it. This woman needed help, and she needed it quickly. So...
    Veronica opened a new text window, copied the letter into it and then stopped with her hands poised over the keyboard.
    Unless it was a subject she knew nothing about, she tried to go with her first instinct when answering a letter. Her gut response. Then she’d close the letter, let it sit for a few hours and go over the question and her answer more deliberately later. She’d found that the key to being a good advice writer was recognizing which of her responses were based on personal triggers and then working through it from there. You could never be completely objective or you’d lose all the style and insight people were looking for, but you couldn’t base every answer on “Here’s what I’d do.”
    And that was her problem with this letter. She wanted to respond by banging out in all caps, “ DON’T GIVE UP YOUR REAL LIFE FOR A FANTASY OF HAPPINESS IN THE BIG CITY, BECAUSE THE BIG CITY IS NOTHING BUT LIES AND LONELINESS. ”
    Yes, it was her first instinct, but it was maybe a tiny bit too subjective.
    She ordered herself not to close the text window, then flexed her fingers and rolled her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “Ready.” Then she dropped her hands to her lap and let her head fall back until she was staring at the ceiling.
    This woman had written in because she had dreams. Veronica knew what that was like. She’d lived for nothing but dreams for so long. Dreams that she could leave this place and find love and success and a spine. She’d wanted to find
herself
, as if her confidence and strength had been hidden in a scavenger hunt that wound through the dirty, damp streets of Manhattan. How many miles had she walked through the skyscrapers and the parks and the subway stations, looking for things that had never existed?
    She’d never been anyone. Just an amorphous, undefined
child
. Who the hell was she to tell this woman what to do with her life?
    Veronica closed the window and dragged the email into her Unanswered Letters folder. The letter behind it was still on the screen, yet another query stained with virtual tears over a cheating spouse. She got them every week. Some from men, some from women. Some were filled with nothing more than tortured suspicions. Some writers knew all the gritty details.
    Maybe she should answer this one despite that she’d published another two months before. It was clearly a common problem. Veronica told herself she should be happy she’d never had a partner, because that meant she’d never been cheated on or tormented by the fear that she