“We have to start over.”
She had mostly expected this. She had known it would come to some version of this, and still the words were a metal rod through her chest.
“Whit, wait a minute. The book is due in a month. We’re already cutting it close as it is. I’m not sure starting over is—”
“Merritt, please.”
He looked deeply troubled. Sad. Her heart dropped.
“We were wrong,” he said. “We were so wrong. She—Helen imagined it all differently. New and different characters, different conflicts and revelations. It’s all so different.”
Merritt bobbed her head from side to side as if deliberating.
“I mean, of course it is, Whit,” she said after a moment. “We always knew that was probably true.”
“No, but now we know it’sactuallytrue.”
He was leaning his hands on the table now, so that his head was lower than before. More like a cornered animal that might pounce out of desperation.
“Right, but Whit—”
“What?”
Merritt took an involuntary step back. His voice was harsher than she’d ever heard it before.
No, she told herself, remembering what she’d felt the night before. She straightened her spine, pushed her shoulders back, and spoke in a level, self-assured voice.
“I read it over last night,” she explained. “I reread everything we’ve written.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say, Whit, other than that it’s really good. It’s... it’s a perfect ending to the series. Itwillbe a perfect ending, when we finish it, and I think wehaveto finish it. Even apart from the deadline, it just... it deserves to be finished. To be published. It’s good. It’s the right ending to the story.”
Whit looked to the ceiling and shook his head.
“How can you say that? It’s not what she wanted.”
“But our story is—”
“It’s notourstory, Merritt, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s her story. It’s been hers all along. You and I have just been playing pretend. Writing fan fiction. We haven’t made anythingreal.”
The last word came as a slap.
An echo of an echo reminded her that this man was grieving. These journals had reopened the cuts he’d been healing from. She knew that.
But her work deserved more than this.
“Whit,” she said, moving away from the table, “I know how you’re feeling—”
“You don’t.”
She took the response in stride. “You’re right. I just mean, I understand. This feels like it changes everything, and of course, it affects what we’ve done. But it doesn’t change that we’ve written something wonderful, something we should be proud of, and something I really believe Helen would be proud of, too.”
She knew the final words were wrong as she said them.
“How could you possibly know that, Merritt?”
He had been cold and burdened, and now he looked beatendown, a shell of the man she’d met back in her mother’s library. He slumped into a kitchen chair at last as Merritt spoke again.
