“Merritt, don’t be silly—”
“Don’t call me silly. I am awriter, Whit. A good one. You said it yourself.”
“Of course I did. But Merritt...”
She could see Whit preparing his next statement. An explanation of some sort. But she had already chosen a direction and said her piece. She would not choose another person’s story over her own—not again—not even if that person was Helen. Not even if that person was Whit.
She spoke first.
“I think I should go.”
Whit stood.
“Merritt, don’t.”
But she was already gathering her bags. The Tupperware container holding her uneaten lunch banged against her leg as she lifted her tote.
“I’m sorry, Whit, but I can’t do that. I can’t do this if that’s what you want.”
As she looked at him guilt and anger crisscrossed within her chest. She had given up on her writing for a man once before. Not intentionally, not because he’d asked her to, but she had done so nonetheless.
And Whit was not the same man. And he had every reason to ask what he was asking. But the only person she could answer to in this moment was herself.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Whit. I don’t know. But I don’t think I can help you write your wife’s book anymore.”
The sentence hurt as she said it, and again Whit looked as though he’d been struck. His shoulders sagged. He opened his mouth to speak, then bit his lower lip and looked away.
“All right,” he said finally.
“All right?”
He nodded slowly.
“All right.”
So he’d made his choice then, too. And he hadn’t chosen her.
“All right, fine,” she said, using all her restraint to keep the contempt and pain out of her voice. She turned to hide her eyes from him.
“Goodbye then, Whit.”
For the second time in two days, she left without waiting for him to say goodbye.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Hi, Joan.”
Whit’s own literary agent hardly ever called, preferring to email him back three to six weeks after he reached out. But dear old Joan was used to frying bigger fish than Whit Longacre, and so she had been able to sneak-attack him at this particularly low moment.
He was lying on the floor of his bedroom, partially because his back had been hurting (injury) and partially because he felt like pure shit, undeserving of a bed or couch (insult). Annie was at school, thankfully, and thus unable to witness this choice bit of self-abasement.
It had been a week since Merritt walked out on him. It had taken hearing her car on the gravel road to shake him from his state, and he had hurried to the door in hopes of flagging her down, apologizing, saying, “Let’s work something out.” And it had taken his hand hitting the doorknob for a second, stronger impulse to overpower him. Merritt had made herself clear. Helen had madeherselfclear. There was nothing more to be done.
For a week now he had tried not to think about Merritt while muscling through a task that had once again become monumental and overwhelming. He had been reading and rereading Helen’s journals and trying to Rumpelstiltskin them into something literary and lovely. And he had failed. Abjectly.
It was as if Peter Jackson had handed him a script and said,Go, good luck, and then Whit had tried to makeThe Lord of the Ringsin his backyard with a 1980s camcorder. Everything he wrote feltlifeless and hollow. Helen’s intentions were so clear, and his inability to shape something from them was making him more insecure than he’d been in years. Had she been the master and he the pretender? What was he even doing in this career?
