The Tuesday after his latest writing session, Samuel left the laptop closed.
The story could wait. The real world, for once, was calling him.
He started with a walk to Harrow Street, the kind of neighborhood that smelled faintly of bread in the mornings from the bakery on the corner. The sidewalks there were cracked but familiar, lined with shop windows that changed so slowly it felt like time forgot them.
At Lyman's Diner, he slid into a booth by the window. The waitress Marianne, whose hair hadn't been its natural color since Reagan was in office poured his coffee without asking.
"Working on that book still?" she asked, pen poised over her order pad.
"Always," Samuel said, grinning. "Marshal Corwin's halfway across the desert now. Ran into trouble with a drifter named Xirathul."
"Sounds like a good guy to avoid," she said, jotting down his usual breakfast without waiting for him to order.
He ate slowly, watching the morning turn into noon outside the glass. A boy on a skateboard nearly clipped a man with a briefcase; a bus groaned past in a cloud of exhaust. The world moved at its own pace, and for once, Samuel didn't feel like chasing it.
After breakfast, he ran errands grocery store first, then the print shop to pick up a fresh batch of manuscript pages he'd ordered bound for editing. He liked having a paper copy to mark up with his fountain pen, even if the digital file was easier to manage.
In the afternoon, he met Emma at the park. They'd been friends since college she worked in publishing, though in marketing, not editorial. She always said she'd rather sell books than bleed over them.
"How's the gunslinger's life?" she asked as they strolled past the duck pond.
"Marshal Corwin's still breathing. Xirathul's trying to change that."
"That's the new guy, right? Sounds like a bad omen."
Samuel chuckled. "He's a plot device. Nothing more."
They sat on a bench and watched a toddler chase pigeons in circles until his mother corralled him. The air smelled faintly of cut grass and something frying from a food cart nearby.
By the time Samuel got home, the day was nearly gone. He made a simple dinner pasta with too much garlic and ate it in front of the muted TV. His manuscript sat untouched on the desk in the next room.
It could wait.
That night, he fell asleep without thinking once about the burnt flats, the marshal, or the drifter with the grave dirt coat.