“But she also wantedyouto write the book.That’swhat she put in the will. Nothing about the journals. Nothing about how the book was supposed to end. She just wantedyouto do it, ‘by any means you deem necessary.’?”
“Merritt—”
“No, Whit,” she said. Her hands flew to either side of her head, then she stepped forward and actually grabbed him by the lapels of his robe. “Whit, don’t you get it? Shegaveher life’s work toyou. Because she loved you and she believed in you and she thought... when she realized she couldn’t finish her story herself... you were the person she thought of.”
The words hit Whit like a battering ram against the sides of an iron ship: hard, but dull.
Merritt gave the lapels a tug.
“Do you hear me, Whit? She gave the story to you, and now you’re letting it go, so somestrangercan swoop in and make God knows what of her life’s work. All because of a deadline? A deadline that passedtwo daysago?”
Exhaustion. That was Whit’s primary feeling, his central thought. He was exhausted.Thiswas exhausting. The story was out of his hands now, and that had devastated him, but it had also freed him of an unrelenting burden. And letting it go had meant letting Merritt go, too, but now she was here, trying to storm back into the picture, to force their story over the transom of the publisher’s locked and barred door.
“Merritt, they don’t want me. You don’t know what it’s been like. They’re glad to be rid of me. They have no reason to listen—”
“Then we make them listen, Whit. Honestly, do you hear yourself?”
He closed his eyes again, weary, weary, weary.
“I do. Merritt, I think you should go.”
She was crying now, shaking her head and biting her lip. Sheslipped her fingertips under her glasses to rub at her eyes, then gave a big, final sniff.
“I got you so wrong.”
She swallowed.
Whit didn’t know what to say.
Without another word, she walked out the door, leaving Whit standing there, the manuscript still in his hand.
In the car, Merritt checked her hair in the mirror, reapplied a layer of sensible lipstick, and took one deep, steadying breath. Then she texted Ian Hoult a second time. A simple three-word text.
I’m ready now.
Chapter Thirty-One
That evening Merritt sat in a booth beneath a window overlooking the harbor. The village was situated so that the sea was largely out of view from the shops and cafés that formed its heart. The harbor was reserved for restaurants and bars like the one she was in now, sipping on a dry martini, which she had decided was a respectable drink (if a little boring).
She had chosen the bar, the Blue Mollusk, because, though she’d heard of it, she had never heard of anyone she knew actually going there. Unlike the crab shacks and dives that dotted the street on either side of it, the Blue Mollusk had recently been redecorated and now featured striking Prussian blue walls, a copper-topped bar, and velvety cushioned booths. In the cloudy, refracted light of the coast, it was a good place for a clandestine meeting with an author–turned–investigative reporter.
When Ian arrived, Merritt suppressed an eye roll. Under his coat, he wore baggy khakis and a baggy gray button-up, and she wondered whether he had prepared for this meeting by googling “What do journalists wear?”
“Merritt Pryor,” he said, too loud, from the doorway, before gesturing at the bar in an I’m-going-to-get-a-drink way.
Merritt nodded back and resisted checking her phone. She’d almost brought a book to read but had thought better of it, worried that it might make its way into Ian’s article. It seemed wiser not to give Ian a chance to describe her in a way that invited readers to close-read her literary choices. As he stood at the bar now, waiting to order, Merritt went over her plan.
She was going to take control of her story. She’d start by admitting to having dated Graydon Lyons. There was no shame in that. On the subject of the book, she had a line prepared:You know, I haven’t read the book, so it’s really impossible for me to say whether Isabel is based off of me or one of the many grad students it turns out Graydon has been with over the years.
She was proud of that line. It gave the impression of taking the high road, of being unbothered, while also focusing on the truth that had been unjustly ignored by everyone but Ian—that Graydon Lyons had skeletons in his own closet.
Then—and this was the part she was so eager for—she was going to shift the conversation to her own writing. To what, in the end, Graydon had not been able to take from her. Always, she had planned to do this, but the exhilarating new kicker was that, three days prior, Merritt had signed a contract to be represented by someone at the agency where Willa’s literary agent worked. They’d spoken on the phone twice now, and the woman loved her work. She had the most wonderful ideas for revisions and thought they would be able to take Merritt’s manuscript to editors in the next two months or so.
After signing, Merritt had emailed her new agent about Ian Hoult’s article and her impending conversation with him. Though she had new ulterior motives for the conversation, she kept them to herself, and her agent had agreed with her initial plan: she would tell Ian about the book, in hopes of stirring up interest in the publishing world.
Merritt smiled to herself as she watched the bartender slide Ian his Manhattan. She had heard Graydon talk about other writers he knew, people he felt had leveraged their relationships with him to land book deals, speaking gigs, professorships. He spoke of these people with contempt, but only ever privately, always conscious of the need to maintain his image as an evolved, generous human male.
A year or two from now, Graydon might find some other young woman, whom he would tell about Merritt. He might make up some story about her using his name to climb the ladder, never mind the fact that he’d used her whole identity. But at least Merritt would have a voice.
