This weekend’s story came from something I’ve noticed for years.
We can spend enormous amounts of time making something useful, beautiful, or meaningful, then somehow expect people to discover it without our ever telling them it exists.
Skylar is about to discover she isn’t the only woman in Echo Canyon who has done exactly that.
Part 1 — What’s That?
Skylar had been sitting at the far end of Riley’s veranda for nearly an hour with a stack of papers in front of her and the determined expression of someone who did not want to be interrupted.
Which, naturally, made everyone curious.
Riley had noticed first. She came through the veranda doors carrying a pitcher of iced tea, glanced toward Skylar, then looked at Quinn.
“Do you know what she’s doing?”
Quinn didn’t look up from the book in her lap. “No.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No.”
Riley set the pitcher on the table. “You investigated people for a living.”
“Used to.”
“And now you’re retired, so you’ve stopped being curious?”
Quinn turned a page. “No. I’ve learned that if you wait long enough, people usually tell you what they’re doing.”
Across the veranda, Skylar looked up. “I can hear you.”
“I know,” Quinn said.
Skylar shook her head and went back to her papers.
Raven arrived a few minutes later with Val, and whatever hope Skylar had of being left alone disappeared completely.
Val took one look at the stack in front of her. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
Riley laughed. “That’s exactly what she told me.”
“I did not.”
“You said you were working on something.”
“That is not the same as saying nothing.”
“It’s close.”
Raven pulled out a chair. “Is this private?”
Skylar paused. “No.”
“Then what is it?”
Skylar gathered the loose pages into a neater stack. “It’s just something I’ve been putting together.”
Quinn finally closed her book.
Riley pointed at Skylar. “See? There it is. That word.”
“What word?”
“Just.”
Skylar frowned. “I said it’s just something I’ve been putting together.”
“Yes. Which means it is absolutely not just something.”
Val laughed and sat down beside Raven. “I’m with Riley on this one. What did you write?”
Skylar looked around the table as though calculating whether there was still a way out.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she said.
“No one wants coffee,” Riley said.
“I do,” Raven said.
Riley looked at her. “You’re not helping.”
“I can want coffee and still want to know what Skylar wrote.”
Skylar sighed. “It’s a small guide.”
There was a brief silence.
Quinn leaned back. “A guide to what?”
“Writing.”
Riley blinked. “Writing what?”
“Stories. Memoir. Family history. Anything, really.”
Val reached for the top page, but Skylar put her hand over it.
“It isn’t finished.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“You didn’t ask a question.”
“Fine. May I see it?”
Skylar hesitated, then slid the stack toward her.
Val read the title page. “Starting With What You Know.”
Raven leaned closer. “That’s good.”
“It’s temporary.”
“How long is temporary?” Riley asked.
Skylar looked mildly annoyed. “I don’t know.”
Quinn reached over and lifted part of the stack with two fingers. “This is quite a lot of temporary.”
“It isn’t that long.”
Riley took the pages from Quinn and began counting.
Skylar stared at her. “Seriously?”
“You brought this onto my veranda.”
“I did not realize there would be an audit.”
“Forty-three.”
“Forty-nine.”
Part 2 — One Person at a Time
Everyone looked at Skylar.
She frowned. “I haven’t printed the last six pages yet.”
Riley set the stack down. “Skylar, you wrote forty-nine pages.”
“Yes.”
“And you called it a small guide.”
“It is a small guide.”
“Compared to what?”
“My novels.”
“That is not a reasonable comparison.”
Skylar reached for the pages again. “Can I have it back?”
“No.”
Riley opened to the first page.
Skylar gave her a look. “You’re impossible.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
Quinn laughed. “So have I.”
Raven got up to get the coffee herself, leaving the rest of them gathered around Skylar’s pages. By the time she returned, Riley was halfway through the table of contents.
“Finding the story,” Riley read aloud. “Where to begin. What belongs. What doesn’t. Writing what you remember. Writing what you don’t remember.”
She looked up. “This is good.”
“You haven’t read it.”
“I’ve read enough to know it isn’t nothing.”
“I never said it was nothing.”
“You nearly did.”
Skylar took the coffee Raven handed her. “I started it because a woman at one of my talks told me she wanted to write about her mother. She’d been talking about doing it for years, but every time she sat down, she thought she had to start with the day her mother was born.”
Val smiled. “That sounds familiar.”
“So I told her not to start there. Start with the kitchen table. Start with the dress her mother always wore on Sundays. Start with something she could see clearly.”
Raven settled back into her chair. “And?”
“She emailed me later and said she’d written twelve pages.”
Riley’s expression softened. “So you made this for her.”
“Not exactly. I sent her a few thoughts. Then somebody else asked me something similar. Then someone else.”
Quinn looked at the stack again. “And forty-nine pages later?”
Skylar smiled despite herself. “It grew.”
“Apparently.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
Riley shook her head. “You say that like planned things are more legitimate.”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“You imply a lot.”
Skylar took a drink of coffee. “You’re very argumentative today, Riley.”
“I’m enjoying myself.”
Val flipped through several pages. “So what do you do with it?”
Skylar shrugged. “Nothing much.”
Riley closed her eyes briefly. “There’s that phrase again.”
“I give it to people.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do people get it?”
“If I meet someone who tells me they want to write something and they don’t know where to begin, I send it to them.”
Quinn’s eyebrows rose. “You personally send a forty-nine-page writing guide to individual people?”
“Yes.”
“One at a time?”
“Yes.”
“How many times have you done this?”
Skylar looked toward the garden. “I don’t know.”
Quinn waited.
Skylar looked back. “Maybe thirty.”
Riley stared at her. “You have given this to thirty people?”
“Approximately.”
“And have you ever told anyone else it exists?”
Skylar took another sip of coffee. “No.”
Val laughed.
Raven shook her head.
Quinn looked around the table. “Apparently Echo Canyon has a marketing problem.”
Part 3 — The Things We Don’t Say
That broke them.
Even Skylar laughed. “I am not marketing it.”
“That,” Quinn said, “appears to be the problem.”
“I’m not trying to sell it.”
Riley leaned forward. “Who said anything about selling it?”
Skylar opened her mouth, then stopped.
Riley continued. “You’re acting as though telling people something exists automatically turns you into somebody standing on a street corner shouting about it.”
“I am not acting like that.”
“You are a little.”
“I give it to people who need it.”
“And how are the people who need it supposed to know you have it?”
Skylar didn’t answer.
Raven picked up the guide and turned several pages.
“You know what’s interesting?”
Skylar looked at her. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
Raven smiled. “You remind me of me.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“For years, I thought people knew what I did at the ranch.”
Riley nodded. “I remember.”
Raven looked toward the canyon beyond the garden. “People knew I worked with problem horses. What they didn’t always understand was that I wasn’t simply taking a difficult horse and fixing it. Most of the time, I needed the owner there too. I needed to see what was happening between them. What the horse had learned. What the person was doing without realizing it. Where the communication had broken down.”
Quinn nodded. “Because the horse wasn’t the whole problem.”
“Usually not.” Raven smiled. “Sometimes the horse was barely the problem at all.”
Val laughed.
“But I assumed people understood that because I understood it. I lived inside that work every day. Then someone would call and ask if they could drop off a horse for me to straighten out and pick it up a week later.”
Skylar smiled. “I’m guessing that went well.”
“Not particularly. Eventually I realized they weren’t misunderstanding what I did. I had never really explained it.”
Skylar looked down at her pages. “That’s different.”
“Why?”
“You run a ranch.”
“And you wrote a guide.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No,” Raven said. “But assuming people somehow know what you never told them might be.”
Skylar looked at her pages again. “I’m not hiding it.”
Quinn rested one elbow on the table. “Then what would you call it?”
“I don’t know. I simply don’t talk about it.”
“That is a very sophisticated definition of hiding.”
Skylar pointed at her. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“Retirement has given me time.”
Riley was still looking at the guide.
“I’ve done it too,” she said. “There’s a courtyard project in Sabáka I spent nearly a year designing. If anyone complimented it, I talked about the team. All true. But I never once said, ‘I designed that.’”
Skylar looked at her. “Why not?”
Riley shrugged. “At the time? I think saying it out loud felt too much like asking for credit.”
“That is different.”
Riley laughed. “You really need all of us to be different, don’t you?”
“I’m simply saying that I didn’t write this because I wanted people to notice me.”
Riley’s voice softened. “I know.”
That quieted the table.
Skylar looked down at her coffee. “I wrote it because people kept telling me they had stories and didn’t know what to do with them.”
Val nodded. “And you knew how to help.”
“I knew some things that might help.”
Riley smiled. “There’s another one.”
Skylar looked up. “What now?”
“Some things.”
“They are some things.”
“You’ve published books.”
“That doesn’t mean I know everything.”
“No one said you did.”
Riley pushed the guide back toward her. “But you know enough to have helped thirty people.”
Skylar rested her fingertips on the cover page.
“That isn’t the same as announcing I have something worth reading.”
Raven was quiet for a moment. “Why not?”
Skylar didn’t answer.
Quinn watched her carefully but did not push.
Val turned a few pages. “If another writer had made this, and you thought it could help people, would you tell someone about it?”
“Of course.”
“Then why is it different because you made it?”
Skylar looked at her.
For once, Val didn’t add anything else.
Skylar traced one finger along the edge of the pages.
“I suppose I thought if it was good enough, people would find it.”
No one said anything for a few seconds.
Then Riley asked, very simply, “How?”
Part 4 — How?
Skylar looked at her.
Riley didn’t say anything else.
Neither did anyone.
Skylar looked down at the pages beneath her hand. She had written every one of them because somebody had needed help beginning. One woman had wanted to write about her mother. Someone else had been afraid her memories were too ordinary. Another had carried a story for years because she didn’t know where the first sentence belonged.
Whenever one of them found Skylar, she knew what to give them.
She had never thought very much about the ones who never found her.
The veranda had gone quiet enough that she could hear water moving somewhere in Riley’s garden.
Skylar glanced from one woman to another, almost as though one of them might rescue her with an answer.
No one did.
Finally she laughed, but more softly this time. “That is an extremely irritating question.”
“It’s only one word,” Riley said.
“That doesn’t make it less irritating.”
Raven smiled. “I think it may be the whole problem.”
Skylar looked at her.
Raven didn’t explain.
She didn’t need to.
Quinn picked up her book again. “So now what?”
“There it is,” Skylar said.
“What?”
“The inevitable moment where all of you turn this into a project.”
Riley laughed. “I am not making it a project.”
“You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you start rearranging other people’s lives.”
“I do not have a look.”
Every woman at the table stared at her.
Riley sighed. “Fine.”
Skylar smiled.
Quinn leaned forward. “Would you be willing to do one thing?”
Skylar narrowed her eyes. “That depends.”
“Tell somebody it exists.”
Skylar waited.
“That’s the whole thing?”
“That’s the whole thing.”
Riley nodded. “You don’t have to decide what it becomes. Just stop making people discover it by accident.”
Val tapped the stack. “You wrote something because you thought it might help people. Let it help people.”
Skylar looked at the pages for a long moment.
Then she asked, “How many people?”
Riley grinned. “Oh, now we’re negotiating.”
“I’m setting boundaries.”
“Fine. Three.”
“Three what?”
“Three people. Tell three people.”
“I’ve already told four of you.”
“That does not count. We caught you.”
Skylar laughed. “Very well. Three.”
Riley stood and reached for the guide.
Skylar pulled it toward herself. “What are you doing?”
“I know three people.”
“You are not taking my only copy.”
“You said there are thirty people who already have it.”
“Digitally.”
“Then send me one.”
Skylar shook her head, but she was smiling now. “You see what happens? I tell four people and suddenly people want it.”
Quinn laughed. “That does seem to be how knowing something exists works.”
That quieted Skylar again.
She looked down at the pages she had spent so many hours writing, then back at Riley.
“All right. I’ll send it to you.”
Riley smiled. “And the other three?”
Skylar sighed. “I said I’d tell three people. I didn’t say I’d enjoy it.”
“You might.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
The others laughed, and Skylar gathered the pages into a neat stack.
For years, she had believed good work would somehow find its way to the people who needed it.
Maybe it could.
But first, someone had to know it existed.
—-
Are you keeping something you’ve created secret? Share it now!
That’s all for this Weekend Story.
But not for the women.
If you’d like to stay with them a little longer, you can join me inside.