The boat skips like a stone across the choppy water.
Sienna leans her elbows on the rail, squinting into the distance.
She’s of the mind that no trip should ever require three forms of transportation, and yet, here they are, on the far side of a red-eye flight (plus a layover), a three-hour drive, and thirty minutes at sea, and thanks to the fog, the end isn’t even in sight.
The boat hits a swell, and somewhere behind her Malcolm groans and heaves his guts over the side. It is a wretched sound, as if with enough force he might successfully turn himself inside out.
Sienna lifts her chin, lets the damp air mist her tired face.
She hasn’t been on a speedboat since Spring Break ’98. She vividly remembers standing at the bow, her arms aloft, reenacting her favorite part of Titanic with her college boyfriend, Brody, which was great until he went and ruined it by sticking his hand down her pants.
No chance of that happening today, thank goodness. Malcolm’s hands are otherwise occupied, clutching the railing as he loses what’s left of his breakfast.
To be fair to Malcolm – not that Sienna has any great desire to be fair to Malcolm right now – the North Sea is a lot rougher than the Gulf of Mexico.
She’s been in Scotland for approximately four hours, and so far her first impressions amount to gray, windy, and the kind of cold that paws at her clothes with about as much tact as Brody, all those years ago.
Malcolm, however, stepped off the plane, breathed in, and proceeded to let out a strange kind of roar, before bounding down the stairs and kissing the asphalt. Just like the pope.
‘The boat skips like a stone across the choppy water.’
Sienna repeats the words to herself, pleased with the turn of phrase. Description has always been her forte. That, and plot. And pacing. Which begs the question, of course, of what Malcolm contributes. A quippy line of dialogue here and there, perhaps. The occasional twist. But she knows.
Of course she knows.
If she’s the mind behind Penn Stonely, he’s the face.
Not that Sienna has ever been considered unattractive – but Malcolm’s photo was always the one at the back of their books, satisfying the public’s expectation of a crime writer. Equal parts gravitas, mystery, and charm.
He’s always had a power over people – including her. She used to shiver when he so much as looked at her with those dark eyes tucked beneath his brow. His voice, like rucked velvet, accent smooth until it snagged on the corner of a word and the Scottish brogue peeked out. A brogue that had grown thicker over the course of the three-hour car ride north, as Malcolm crooned about being back where his bones belonged. In the old country.
As if he missed it every day.
As if he hadn’t sworn off his entire homeland fifteen years ago, after the Edinburgh Incident.
Ever since they’d met, Sienna had been trying to convince Malcolm to swallow his pride and take her to Scotland, to no avail, and yet a single email from Arthur Fletch, and here they are. The past apparently forgotten at the first sight of heather and gorse, Malcolm waxing poetic over the hills and the glens and every sighting of a Highland coo.
The cows, with their majestic horns and shaggy reddish-brown fur, were in fact disarmingly cute, but Sienna resisted the urge to snap a photo. He didn’t need any more encouragement.
‘Skelbrae, ahead!’ the captain barks, his voice at once low and wind-whipped, less a caw than a hiss, like cold water over hot coals.
Another good line.
Sienna tugs out her phone, swipes open the notes app to write it down (her notebook is somewhere in her bag, but that’s fine, she keeps a running file, capturing little snippets, turns of phrase to use in future scenes, though she always lets Malcolm think the lines come off the cuff), just as the weak sun chooses that exact moment to break through the clouds, illuminating the island up ahead.
A jagged chunk of moss-lined rock surging out of the white-capped water. At first glance it looks like a sinking ship, one side jutting up into a cliff, the other sloping down into the sea.
A dark stone house – no, house isn’t the right word, more a fortress, a manse, a miniature castle – perches precariously at the top, so near the cliff’s edge, it looks like a strong wind would topple the whole thing into the churning water.
‘Is that not the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen?’
The stench of vomit wafts toward her with her husband. Sienna grimaces.
‘It’s certainly dramatic,’ she says. ‘But who would want to live there?’
The answer, of course, is Arthur Fletch.
Arthur Fletch, who went and bought not just the house but the entire island on which it sits, christening it the House That Petrarch Built after his most famous series and proving once again that few things are as bottomless as the male ego. Especially considering the house itself has clearly been here for centuries.
Malcolm wraps an arm around her shoulders.
‘Oh come on, admit it,’ he says, flashing her a cheeky smirk. ‘You’re a wee bit excited.’
Sienna is feeling many things right now, but excitement isn’t at the top of the list.
She’s tired from the flight, and the car, and the boat, and the fact that she didn’t sleep for two nights before they left.
She’s nervous about this whole weekend, of course, though she’d never admit it to Malcolm.
She’s worried about her dog – Edgar has really always been hers, not theirs, even if Malcolm insisted on naming him – a geriatric Chihuahua who’s been at death’s door no less than four times in the last year and will probably will give up the mortal coil out of spite while she’s away.
And somewhere beneath those three pervasive feelings, as well as hunger, and thirst, and a nausea that clearly pales compared to Malcolm’s, sure, she’s just a little excited.
‘Sisi,’ he murmurs, that pet name she’s always hated. ‘We are on the same page, aren’t we?’
Sienna turns in his arms and looks up, studying her husband of thirteen years.
The way his gray hair curls across his temples, in desperate need of a cut. He refuses, insisting it makes him look ten years younger like this. And the infuriating thing is that he’s right. No one ever seems to notice the wrinkles around his eyes, the slight sag under his chin. They don’t even seem to care that his teeth are crooked and several shades off white.
He’s a notorious flirt, always has been. Sienna has watched women, and even a few men, proposition him at writing conventions and conferences – when she’s standing right next to him. His coauthor. His wife. She never minded much – truth, at times, she even took some pleasure in it, knowing that for all that flirting, he was hers.
When she doesn’t answer the question, his voice goes gravel-low. ‘You promised me.’
Which is true. She did promise. Or at least, she agreed.
And she’s already beginning to regret it.
‘Mm-hm,’ she says, forcing herself to smile, a thin, tight-lipped thing, as she runs down one of her many mental lists, this one titled Ways to Dispose of a Body.
It soothes her more than meditation ever could.
And as the boat slices toward the island, and Malcolm squeezes her close and begins to hum a Scottish tune, Sienna wonders, not for the first time, whether she’s capable of murder.
*
Sienna turns her back on him.
Annoyance flickers through Malcolm – she knows how much he hates that—but then she points to a figure on the cliff.
‘Is that him?’
Malcolm squints, trying to make out the shape. He knows he needs glasses, now that fifty’s in the rearview mirror, but it seems like such an acquiescence, a surrendering to age, and he’s not about to go gently into that good night. To trade words like handsome for distinguished.
He can make out the man’s long coat, the wide-brimmed red hat on his head, one hand raised to keep it from being torn away by the wind.
Hard to tell for sure at this distance, but who else would it be?
‘Yep,’ he says, ‘that’ll be Arty.’
Malcolm waves up at the figure as the captain guides the speedboat toward the jetty, but the man on the cliff doesn’t wave back; he simply turns and trudges back in the direction of the house.
‘Hmm, must not have seen us.’ As Malcolm’s hand falls, he feels a fresh swell of nerves, rising like bile, an anxiety that’s been slowly mounting since they took off from JFK.
He’s vaguely terrified of being back. Not that he’d tell Sienna.
As the familiar greens and grays of the Scottish countryside slid by the car window, and Sisi oohed and ahhed over the long-haired coos, he kept replaying the incident that had precipitated his departure all those years before. One that had started with a bottle of Macallan smuggled into the author yurt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which somehow progressed to trading drunken insults with a Booker Prize winner, swinging a punch at said Booker Prize winner, then being manhandled out of the tent by a poet laureate before being permanently and unceremoniously banned from the festival. For life.
It had been a mortifying end to a terrible week – a poorly attended talk, a derisive comment about the state of Scottish fiction, his pride grievously wounded and his reputation in tatters.
But it’s time to put the whole affair to rest.
To move on. To move forward.
And he can’t think of a better way to close that old chapter, and start this new one, than in the company of Arthur Fletch.
A man famous for several things.
The first, of course, is his books, a mix of thriller and crime with his signature twists.
But the second, at least in bookish circles, is his salons.
Not for their frequency – he sometimes goes months, or years, between—but for the list of names that have come out of them. The kind of credential that finds its way into query letters and book submissions. A seal of approval. Who you know might not get you into the party, but it’ll certainly make someone answer the door.
‘Who else do you think he’s invited?’ asks Malcolm. ‘My money’s on that Pulitzer woman.’ Sienna stares at him blankly. ‘You know . . . the one with the hair? Probably a National Book Award winner or two . . . maybe he’s thrown in a poet just for kicks.’ He shakes his head. ‘Bloody poets . . . always thinking they’re better. Simply for using fewer words.’
‘Hmm . . . And when was the last time you met a poet?’ chides Sienna as the boat docks. For a moment he assumes she’s trying to taunt him, before remembering he never actually told her about the laureate’s involvement in the Edinburgh Incident.
The captain doesn’t kill the engine, only idles long enough for Malcolm to hoist their luggage onto the dock, which he insists on doing himself – Sienna’s always found him unfailingly chivalrous. His back twinges with the effort, but he doesn’t let on. Nothing a hot bath and a wee dram won’t fix, he thinks as the boat pulls away, having deposited the two of them on Skelbrae.
‘All those fancy famous writers,’ murmurs Sienna. ‘None of them are going to have the first clue who we are.’
‘Hey now, we deserve to be here,’ says Malcolm. ‘Penn Stonely has won awards!’
‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Of course we did. The Black Road Home won Stack Attack’s Thriller of the Year.’
Fine, it wasn’t the Edgars, or the Daggers, but it was something to be chosen. And by readers, no less. Sienna wouldn’t shut up about the fact it was only a blog, with 327 subscribers, especially when they asked for a video acceptance speech. He’d stepped up to the plate while she sat seething at his side like a feral cat, couldn’t even muster a smile for the fans.
Last time he checked – which he doesn’t do often – the video had twenty-nine views. And four comments. Three of which were even positive.
Sienna nods. ‘Right,’ she says dryly. ‘How could I forget?’
Malcolm hoists up their bags and sets off down the jetty, shouldering the burden the way he did that day, the way he so often does, as Penn Stoneley, when Sienna refuses to do her bit.
There’s one other boat moored at the jetty. Though it’s about as fitting to call the vessel in question a boat as the castle overhead a house.
‘Ha!’ says Malcolm. ‘Classic Fletch.’
The yacht’s name is inscribed on the side in a font he recognizes as American Typewriter: The Royalty Check.
Sienna rolls her eyes. ‘Wow, classy,’ she says, and Malcolm catches the sarcasm—he always does, but he refuses to take the bait.
Then they reach the edge of the dock, and the real work starts.
He can’t tell if the path ahead used to be a set of stone stairs and has since decayed into a rocky slope, or a rocky hill from which someone has chiseled out steps. Either way, it’s treacherous. As they make their way up the slope, bits of rock and shale crumble under their feet, skittering back down the hill.
‘Not exactly safe, is it?’ says Sienna, but Malcolm doesn’t answer. It’s taking all his focus to keep his balance, and not let on that he’s already feeling winded. In fact, his chest is getting tight, and his left arm is tingling, and oh god, he cannot have a heart attack. Not here, not now, on the cusp of everything he’s worked so hard for, the doors to the inner sanctum of publishing in sight if not in reach.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Sienna, looking genuinely worried, and he musters a brave smile, as sweat runs down his neck.
‘Peachy!’ he says, as they trek upward toward the waiting house.
At last the hellish ascent is over, giving way to a flat pebbled drive.
He stops, mostly to catch his breath, and looks up, basking in the view.
Some great hand has swept the fog away, exposing a blue expanse of sea, the Scottish mainland in the distance. From here he can see not only the castle but a quaint little cottage across the drive, and a path – not a proper road but a swath of dirt wide enough for a cart, or two bodies walking side by side – unspooling like a ribbon down the gentler slope before curving out of sight.
The surrounding grass is overgrown, throwing runners across the path, and he catches a flash of movement, a small animal darting through the tangled green – a rabbit, or maybe a stoat? – there and then gone, swallowed again by the grass.
Before Malcolm thinks to mention it – Sienna has a fondness for small creatures, hence the bloody Chihuahua, which as far as he’s concerned doesn’t deserve to be called a dog – his eye is drawn up to the castle.
My god, the castle.
It looked so impressive at a distance, Malcolm honestly feared it might lose some of its grandeur up close and be revealed as a modest if oversize house, locked in a battle with age and elements, sinking and, like a body, slowly losing.
But he needn’t have worried.
Up close it is even grander, all turrets and peaked roofs, two wings and a dozen windows and a stained-glass transom over the doorway, one of those ornate thresholds where the door parts in the middle, swinging open like a pair of gates.
Malcolm shakes his head in wonder.
‘So this is what fifty million copies sold will buy you.’
‘Not how I’d spend the money,’ says Sienna as they cross the drive.
‘Speak for yourself,’ says Malcolm, lifting the bags and trailing in her wake.
‘I was,’ she mutters, climbing the steps.
Fletch’s initials are carved into the wooden door, along with the same words that appear at the front of every book.
He who holds the pen tells the truth.
Magnificent, thinks Malcolm as he rings the bell, the sound echoing through the cavernous house. He shifts the luggage to one hand and clasps Sienna’s with the other, a silent reminder that they’re in this together.
‘This is going to change everything,’ he says.
Sienna’s hand tenses in his. She glances over, clearly about to speak, but to Malcolm’s relief, the door swings open first.
The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke is out on the 7th April 2026. Get you copy here.
Synopsis
Six authors. One private island. Seventy-two hours to write the ending that will change their lives.
‘This is a house of novelists, not murderers. You dream up crimes. You don’t commit them.’
‘But a writer has. And so, who better than a writer to catch them?’
World famous author Arthur Fletch is dead. His final novel, the most anticipated book in history, remains unfinished. But the ending won’t write itself.
Fletch’s publisher, Merriweather Press, has invited six authors to Fletch’s private island in Scotland. Authors whose books have never had the big marketing budgets or publicity opportunities. In other words, midlist. And they’re about to be presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.
Whoever writes a worthy ending will receive one million dollars, and a further one million dollars for a new three-book contract.
They have just seventy-two hours, with no access to the outside world, just a typewriter and a blank page. All they have to do is write…
Starting is often the hardest part. But getting to the end could be murder.
