Despite her now-free afternoons, Merritt’s days were as regimented as ever. She worked every morning at the bookshop, taking up extra shifts on the weekend, ostensibly to help Diana manage the holiday shoppers but in actuality trying, impossibly, to make up the money she’d lost when she quit working for Whit. She had gone back to eating lunch in her car, usually listening to an audiobook or watching a mindless half-hour comedy on her phone. She would checkThe Atlantic’s website, just to make sure the cease-and-desist letter that Édouard had sent was still doing its work. Then she drove to Carafe, where she wrote feverishly—except on Tuesdays, when she knew Whit’s writing group met there. She did not acknowledge this even to herself, choosing instead to believe that Tuesdays could be a perfectly normal day of rest for the nonreligious.
She wrote reams and reams. The words surged out of her now, and occasionally, shedidthink of Whit, wishing he could help her once more with her pacing and plotting. But then she would craft something, a little gem of a phrase, an image that seemed topull at her heart from within the computer screen, and she would think,Forget him, and stumble onward.
Merritt was invigorated. She was writing, for the first time, entirely for herself, according to a private purpose. She did not spare a thought for what people like Graydon Lyons or her writing professors might think. She did not consider agents, editors, or publishers. She did not paint by numbers, and she did not waste time missing Whit.
Her writing was all hers.
She felt alive again.
Whit’s time in the Cayman Islands, to put it mildly, blew. They stayed at an all-inclusive resort that had seen better days. Whit’s father, who greeted his children and granddaughter in the hotel lobby wearing a white Tony Soprano–style shirt, told them he had “a surprise” for them. That surprise was named Sherry Hatzilakos, a bleached-blond, wire-thin woman whom Ned Longacre had met in the waiting room at the dermatologist’s office four months earlier. She wore a floral wrap dress with a plunging neckline, and when she held out her left engagement-ring-ed hand for them to shake, Evie’s throat made a guttural warning noise that would have brought tears to the eyes of the person who did sound mixing for thePredatorfilm franchise.
Things did not get better. Their rooms were cramped and felt constantly damp. The food was plentiful but mediocre. The drinks were weak. And they spent their days on a beach that, it turned out, was really more suited for launching boats full of scuba divers than for swimming with an eight-year-old. Meanwhile, Ned and Sherry, who sold crystals on Facebook Marketplace, giggled and canoodled like teenagers.
Whit was furious with his father for springing a surprise stepmom and stepgrandmother on them, and that made him grumpy around everyone else. Édouard got food poisoning on the first night, so Evie was busy tending to him for forty-eight hours, while Whit, somehow depressed and antsy and lethargic all at once, alternated between watching Annie swim alone in the ocean and watching Annie swim alone in the pool.
The worst part came after Annie was asleep, when Whit would slide open their glass balcony door with meticulous, squeak-avoidant slowness, then step out to sit on the world’s most uncomfortable patio furniture. His goal every night was to write, but he was sun-tired and irritable, and usually he ended up watching the ocean and thinking about how much he wished Merritt was there. She would have made the Sherry situation funny. She would have delighted Annie with conversations about books and, he imagined, really good sandcastles and games to play in the surf. She would have been helpful to Evie during Édouard’s illness, she would have charmed Ned Longacre’s socks off, and she would have been kind to Sherry, toward whom Whit could not help but be cold.
Merritt would have helped him finish the book, too, but he thought of that only once and then not again.
On the fourth day of their six-day trip, Evie and Édouard were finally back in commission. Evie and Whit were alone at the beach, lounging under two umbrellas, while Édouard and Annie attempted to snorkel.
After a long-time-coming and utterly brutal debrief about their dad’s idiocy, with a deep dive into Sherry’s crystal-centric Facebook posts, Evie began to needle her brother.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
She was watching the waves, but still it felt as though she was glaring at him.
“Something tells me you already know.”
She nodded. “I have a source on the inside.”
“How did she seem to you?” he asked, meaning Annie.
Evie understood. “She’s okay. She’ll be just fine.”
“Okay,” Whit sighed, saying no more.
“So it’s just over then?” Evie continued. “Professionally and romantically?”
“It is.”
He explained about the journals and the disagreement, impossible to be surmounted.
Evie sighed, clearly disappointed. “I’m sorry, Whit. What are you going to do?”
“About the book?” he asked. “I really don’t know.”
“Well, allow me to change the subject. Here’s this.”
Evie reached in her bag and tossed Whit something. His stomach dropped.Serious Gamesstared up at him from his lap, its book jacket a little worse for wear.
“What did you think?”
“Well.” Whit couldn’t see Evie’s eyes behind her big round sunglasses, and he waited eagerly for her next words. “From the first page, I was prepared for it to be some joyless, humorless, crude thing with an insufferably stupid narrator, and honestly, it sort of is some of those things.”
Whit found that he was smiling.
“But then—”
