by Elizabeth Droppers (@elizabethdroppers.bsky.social)
Adult Contemporary Romance
Agents can request additional materials via our Agent Request Form.
Query
Thank you for considering my manuscript. HAZEL DAVIES’S GOOD GOODBYE (85,000 words) is an adult contemporary romance. With a cozy coffee shop setting inspired by the bookstore in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin and a high-masking autistic protagonist in the vein of Flying Solo by Linda Holmes, the novel celebrates female entrepreneurship and neurodiversity.
Hazel Davies doesn’t enjoy change. Never has, never will. Traditions, like the shop’s annual Halloween party, are supposed to carry on into eternity. But Seamus, her best friend from college and current coffee shop employee, is ruining everything by moving November first. This is their last Halloween together, and it has to be the best yet.
Though devastated by Seamus’s impending move, Hazel struggles to put her feelings for him into words and instead channels all her energy into giving him a world-class send-off. She wants to be with him, but he’s leaving, so there’s no point in digging up the past. While orchestrating Seamus’s good goodbye, Hazel covertly contends with an uncooperative property manager who won’t provide an extension for the shop’s expiring commercial lease. As Seamus and Hazel’s friendly outings veer into ambiguous territory and the lease expiration draws nearer, Hazel realizes her heart is on the brink of being broken in more ways than one and her only chance at a happy ending requires finding the courage to speak.
I have an MFA in Creative Writing Fiction from Pacific University. My firsthand experiences of owning a small business and working as a barista inform the novel. As a neurodivergent person, I hope to add more positive neurodiversity representation to bookshelves. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan with my husband, toddler, and two mischievous mutts. My short stories have been featured in Hobart and The Scores: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. This is my debut novel.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
First Five Pages
Every Halloween, droves of customers flock to Margo’s Brew for lattes and cappuccinos as if bewitched by a spell Margo cast long ago. I’m not sure whether to love her witchy marketing genius or curse the extra labor decorating requires, but when I bought the shop five years ago, I took on the yolk of tradition with complete solemnity. Having fun is serious business.
Retrieving a tin cauldron large enough to make a grown man into soup from its corner of the storage shelves by myself is awkward. It bangs against the metal framing like a gong, the vibration moving through my hand and up my arms, a tingly tickling. Goosebumps bloom across my skin. I’m not sure where Margo found such a prop, but floor to ceiling, the back room is stuffed to the gills with her curated Halloween collection. Glass pumpkins and black cats. Dried cornstalks and raggedy scarecrows. An entire shelf is dedicated to candles—real candles with blackened wicks that I’ve never had the nerve to relight.
The cauldron bangs against the doorframe as I carry it into the shop’s main room. If Aster would just get off the phone, I’d have the second set of hands needed for the task.
But she’s still out front, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, phone to her ear. Mac is on the other end of the line, of course. We’d just started the ghosts when he called. It’s as if he can’t be left alone to watch Cam for more than a few hours without needing further instruction. Babies seem simple enough. Feed. Burp. Change diaper. Repeat. Aren’t paternal instincts a thing?
I wiggle my jaw to release the growing tension. Since noon, Aster has helped me turn out new centerpieces for the booths along the wall. Opaque vases of tall, dried grass dusted with purple spray paint. A skull with coins in its eyes. A skeletal hand cupping a tiny pumpkin. She’s more than earned a fifteen-minute break.
I set the cauldron by the pastry counter where it’ll serve as a prop for two weeks until it’s moved center stage and filled to overflowing with sweets on Halloween.
Near the entrance, two tulle ghosts hang from the ceiling. I spent last weekend cutting the fabric into squares, connecting foam balls to wire arms, and then combining the two. Aster was supposed to help but canceled last minute. Cam was teething. Something all babies do, I didn’t point out, but that was apparently reason enough.
I could pick up where Aster left off, climb the ladder and hang the ghosts, but they’re stacked on the table closest to the front door, and the last thing I want is for her to think I’m pressing near to covertly communicate need. Even though I do need her. And I’d like nothing more than to stash her phone in the cash safe for the remainder of the day.
Returning to the back room, I’m confronted by the dull, dark eyes of Frankenstein’s monster. Halloween 2019, before the world shut down and squeaking by became a victory, we made the annual party Monster Mash themed. With composite board, Aster and I had fashioned a large replica of the monster’s head, giving him black hair, pale green skin, and a gaping mouth. We skipped the jaw and chin altogether, opting instead for Seamus to rig fog machines on either side of the doorway so customers stepped through the monster’s mouth and into the shop on a river of clouds. We were so proud, and ignorant in our pride, that we printed and hung a poster-sized picture of our college trio standing in the monster’s maw, grinning as if good things lasted forever, as if nothing would ever change. In the picture, Seamus’s hand presses against my waist as he hugs me a little too close, and his other arm drapes across Aster’s shoulders.
Tears come to my eyes at seeing us so happy not so long ago.
Aster said this year’s theme—A Ghostly Goodbye—was too on the nose, but I don’t agree. I’ve never been good at pretending when it comes to things that matter. Sorrow hangs on me like a sheet. It’s not that I thought Seamus would be here forever. The ephemeral nature of life is woven into my bones. But I didn’t think he’d go so soon.
“Hazel.” Aster pops into the doorway, and I jump, a shock jolting my heart. “Sorry,” she says, not seeming to notice the sheen of tears in my eyes. “Can we keep with the ghosts?”
After a lifetime of being scolded for getting off task, annoyance flares at the implication that I’m the one dawdling.
Aster checks her watch, a habit she picked up in the last year, as if every second together is borrowed time.
“Are you done on the phone?” I ask lightly.
Her expression flattens. Her bangs may be longer and the mole on her cheek may occasionally sprout thick hair, but Aster’s face retains its youthful ire.
“Don’t,” she warns.
I smile, playing innocent. “What?”
“Mac is my partner. He can call whenever he wants.”
Which happens to be all the time, but I hold that comment back, half because it won’t get me anywhere good and half because being jealous of my best friend’s husband is pathetic.
“You could’ve kept at it,” Aster chides, her tone grating. “Hanging ghosts isn’t a two-person job.”
“But using a ladder is.” I leave the back room, striding across the black-and-white checked tiles, and pluck a ghost from the table. “I got the cauldron out.”
She raises her eyebrows, silently asking if that was all I could manage during her interlude. I hover on the edge of explaining that I didn’t want to be near the storefront, hounding her with my presence, but the logic that seemed so clear earlier gets tangled as I try to put it into words. No matter how much Aster loves me, she’ll never get what it’s like to live in a brain that is constantly second-guessing how every action or statement will be perceived.
Aster eyes the pile of ghosts with a skeptical expression. “How many did you make?”
“Thirty.”
She takes a sharp inhale as if dropping into icy water, and irritation boils beneath my skin. It’s one thing for her to ditch out on party prep, but it’s nearly treason to act like decorating is a burden. My face grows hot with hurt, but she turns away, heading to the ladder. Growing up in Cheboygan, we were inseparable, nearly sisters, but in the present, Aster, my Hazel-whisperer, the person who could deduce my innermost thoughts by simply looking into my eyes, doesn’t see me anymore.
I’m caught between wanting to tell her to leave and feeling shame over the impulse. This isn’t her coffee shop. She isn’t being—hasn’t ever been—paid for her labor. But the hurt is real and raw. It’s not about decorating. It’s about my demotion in her world.
“Hazel, are we thinking—?” Aster is at the top of the ladder, holding the ghost’s fishing line to the ceiling. “Too low?”
A white Ford Escape pulls up to the curb. The yellow Norwegian maple is resplendent in full color. Bright as sunshine. And I feel an invisible tug toward the car, toward the driver’s side door opening, the man stepping out. At least the three of us will be back together, setting up the shop, one last time. For a few hours, I can pretend everything is as it should be.
“Hazel,” Aster says in an earth-to-Hazel tone.
“Hmm?” I turn back, hopeful she doesn’t catch the pang of longing in my expression yet at the same time wishing she’d look closely enough to notice.
“Is this a good height?” The ghost sways uneasily.
In my periphery, the shop door swings open, and I consciously resist the urge to look.
“Hazel, please. Tell me,” Aster says, growing frustrated. “I can’t read your mind.”
“It looks good. It looks great,” I say too quickly.
“Haze. Aster.” Seamus’s voice booms into the space, filling every corner of the shop, and the rising sensation in my core is so acute it’s nearly comical. “Sorry I’m late.” He smiles, a bright flash of teeth, and then slaps a flat palm against his closed fist. “I got caught up.”
An inadequate explanation, but Seamus has always been short on words. I’d typically harass him for his laxity, but everything changed in August. Being attracted to Seamus has always been a thing—since the moment we met freshman year, gangly and awkward at eighteen—but I thought, similar to growing up near lakes the size of inland seas, I’d grow immune to his beauty overtime. And I did. The live wire of longing dulled to a sort of companionable zing. One of my best friends just happened to be a guy I’d dated for a minute in college. Someone I accidentally kissed from time to time over the intervening years. And that was fine. We were fine. Until August, when he broke the news about moving to Nashville November first.
“Hazel, do you have the next one?” Aster asks, already having moved the ladder to another spot, but the solitary ghost looks lonesome.
“What’s wrong?” Aster asks, locking in on me.
“I mean…” I shrug. “She looks lonely. I was envisioning pairs. Maybe a trio or two.”
Aster makes a sound of irritation low in her throat, a sort of growling.
“Aster, if you have to go, you can just go,” I say, unable to stop myself. Her mood is poisoning the afternoon. I expect her to catch herself, snap out of it, and say sorry. Then we can work as a team and stage the shop together.
But her shoulders deflate and sadness fills her eyes. A flash of pain amidst the relief. She asks with surprise, “Can I?”
A terrible sinking tears through me. How have I become the tyrant with the keys? Why is she so sad?
“Yes, please. We’ll be fine.” I give my best false smile, but she has to know I need help. I can’t set up the entire shop alone. I’d call Esme if she wasn’t already working overtime this week.
Aster sighs and smiles, glancing at Seamus. I have the oddest sense of her transferring the responsibility of my well-being to him. Ever since we picked up Seamus in college, our duo becoming a trio, Aster has tapped him in when it suits her. “You’ve got the lights?”
Seamus nods. Though the overall theme changes, Seamus runs special order purple holiday lights along the ceiling every year. Who will hang them when he’s gone? Me, I guess, though I’ll need a taller ladder.
Aster waves at us with both her hands, an infantile gesture she picked up from Cam.
“Love you,” I call as she heads for the door because I can’t help myself.
“Love you more,” she says her line in our bit, even though the words are blatantly untrue. The scales have been tipped in her direction for years.
The second she’s out the door, I release a bottled scream and turn to Seamus. “Tell me I’m being ridiculous.”
He picks up a ghost and nonchalantly nods. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“The shop won’t decorate itself,” I say, throwing my head back, but what I really mean is I miss Aster, the way we used to be two years ago before she got married and had a child.
“I don’t want to toot by own horn, but…” he gestures at himself, my helpmate at the ready.
“You’ve been gone all day.” And will permanently vacate the premises in fifteen.
“Got to pay the bills,” he says with an air of sarcasm because playing guitar on a friend’s album will get him a hundred bucks at best. But at least he got to spend the day in a recording studio. Seamus emanates lightness, a soul-happy ease. The world could be on fire, but if Seamus got to play music as it all burned, he’d be all right.
Just Seamus and I alone for an afternoon. It’s exactly what I want, but all the wanting makes me self-conscious and glues my teeth together. If Aster were here, conversation would flow effortlessly. She’d ask how the move is coming along, what shows he has lined up in Tennessee, but I don’t walk to talk about anything related to his departure. I don’t want to imagine him living, breathing, and singing somewhere else in two weeks.
Dragging the ladder back to the solitary ghost, I add a second smaller one next to her, hanging them so close together their hands touch. The worst part about Cam is his cuteness. The unending rolls along his arms and legs. His pudgy baby cheeks. Of course she loves him most.
I sigh and look at Seamus. From the top of the ladder, the crown of his head in full view, the swirling pattern of dark hair against pale scalp. From this vantage point, he seems more human than usual, almost vulnerable, and for a second, I feel unafraid of liking him or his impending move.
My jaw loosens and I say, “Thanks for being here.” Words like icebergs. I like you and you’re leaving, hidden beneath the waterline.
Seamus smiles, the skin crinkling around his eyes. “No problem.”
He turns on the shop’s music, and we work in companionable silence, moving the ladder around the space, hanging ghosts. I don’t tell him the two by the door—one slightly ahead of the other, about to part ways—are him and I. After hanging the tiny Cam next to Aster, I add Mac, the three of them holding hands.
It might be odd to christen ghosts after people I love, but if you love someone, they’re everywhere all the time. Love is a haunting.