“I just feel like, knowing what I know about her, that—”
“But that’s just it, Merritt. You don’t know her. You might know her books, but you didn’t know her.”
How did he keep finding new words to sting her with?
“This was the last thing she asked me to do, and you’re asking me to betray that wish. When I think about what she would have thought if she knew...”
“Knew what?”
“Knew that I askedyouto come and help me make up this bastardized version of what she wanted.”
Merritt winced but quickly crossed her arms, refusing to show any feeling but indignation.
“So that’s it?”
Whit looked up.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just supposed to throw out everything we’ve done. Everything we...”
Merritt trailed off when she felt her voice begin to falter. She would not do it this way. She waited to see what Whit had to say next.
He pressed on his eyes with his fingertips.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding completely exhausted. “I don’t know what to do, Merritt. I’m back where I started.”
“But you have me now.” Merritt was pacing as she spoke, ignoring the personal pronoun he’d chosen. “Let’s call the publisher. Call your agent, whatever, I don’t know how it works. Let’s ask for more time. We can try to blend Helen’s vision with ours, maybe, and—”
“Merritt.”
He was grasping her wrist in his hand and looking at her fromhis seat. His ocean blue eyes seemed deep and yawning. He was giving up.
“What?”
She waited, dreading his answer.
“We can’t.”
She pulled her hand away.
“Whit—”
“We have to start over from the beginning—”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not doing that.”
Whit’s eyebrows crinkled. Now he was the one who looked like he’d been slapped.
“What do you mean?”
The thought shot across her mind, like a meteor streaking across the sky: If she said these next words, that would be it. The job would be over. The money that had changed her life and made it possible to imagine herself writing full-time would disappear. She said them anyway.
“I’m not writing someone else’s story.”
“What? We were always writing someone else’s story—”
“You know what I mean. I won’t do it. I’m not doing some paint-by-numbers novel. I never would have agreed to do that.”
