“What?”
“Is your car broken down again? Like the last time you picked me up?”
“Oh,” Merritt said with a laugh. “No. Your dad and I were trying to figure something out about the book, and we figured we could talk about it on the way to getting you. Although we didn’t actually talk about it, did we?”
“Not a word,” Whit said, but his brain had hooked on Annie’s question. He needed to talk to her about him and Merritt, but he dreaded the idea. How much had she pieced together already? Evie had told Annie that they were just friends, but that was weeks ago. Ithadbeen true at the time. But now...
“What are you trying to figure out?” Annie asked.
Whit glanced at her in the rearview mirror. They hadn’t spoken much about what it was he and Merritt were doing, though he knew she understood. She had not yet read the Greenwood Castle Saga—Helen had insisted that Annie wait until she was ten or eleven to do so—but she was familiar with the world of the books, as most kids were.
“Well,” he said, realizing that Merritt was deferring to him, “we’re almost finished with the story, and there’s a character whom we think—well, we think it might be best for the story if that character died.”
Annie’s eyes went big.
Oh God.Was she thinking about death? About Helen’s death?
Oh God.
But then her face turned playfully angry.
“Aw, that’smean, Dad.”
Whit laughed. “Yes, it sort of is. But it seems like the right thing.”
“Is that what Mom wanted to happen?”
They were on the driveway now. Whit sighed and slowed the car to a stop before answering. He turned around to look at Annie, noting the way Merritt sat tactfully still.
“Well, sweetie, we don’t really know. We just have to do our best and make the smartest guesses we can, because Mom didn’t leave anything behind saying what she wanted.”
He wasn’t sure how these words would affect Annie, who sat straight and eager, her reddish hair down, looking longer than he could remember it ever looking before. In the instant before she responded, he was struck by the knowledge that she was getting older all the time. She looked so big.
The face she did end up making was not what he had expected. Her eyebrows furrowed, and her scrunched-up cheeks made her eyes go squinty. She was surprised, maybe even indignant.
“Yes, she did,” Annie said, with a little spice in her voice.
Ah, Whit thought,indignant it is.
Then her words caught up to him.
“What?” he said, more loudly than he’d meant to. “What do you mean?”
“Yeah,” Annie said brightly now. “I’ll show you.”
She got out of the car, and Whit looked to Merritt, whose face was curious. But nothing like the cold shadow that passed over and into Whit. He got out of the car and followed Annie into the house. Upstairs he went, with Merritt close behind him.
Then they were in Annie’s lavender room, standing amid the round paper lanterns and several discarded items of dirty clothes flung across the wood floor. Annie walked directly to the Larkin secretary desk where she kept her mother’s knickknacks and the picture from the Halloween party. For the first time in Whit’s presence, she lowered the drop-front panel—the part that actually made the shelf into a desk. Then she stepped aside.
“See?”
Whit moved forward, feeling his heart beat with every step. The weight of the cold shadow seemed to double.
At the desk, he reached out his hand to rub the spines of ten or so Moleskine journals, all in different colors, worn and lined up like—well, like exactly what he and Merritt had been looking for. He grabbed one at random—a red one—and held it in his hands, turning it over without opening it.
And suddenly he knew the truth he’d been avoiding for over two months: he didn’t want these to exist. That first year after Helen died, he would have given anything to find this treasure trove. It would have made everything so much easier. Finding them now was like rebuilding a car engine through trial and error only to learn that you lived next door to a world-class mechanic. This collection of journals was theI Ching, the Key to All Mythologies. This was it.
But ever since he’d met Merritt he’d been okay with the possibility that there was no such store of answers. He’d been glad—grateful to do this withher, to build this story with Merritt. He had thought he needed notes or guideposts, when in fact he only needed her.
