Whit had imagined this kind of interaction. It felt like everyone he had spoken to for the last year had known him and Helen personally, before her death. Everyone except Merritt. This was only the second time someone had learned who he was and then, owing to his wife’s fame and her vibrant fan base, realized what that meant. He had been prepared for something nebulously gross. He’d thought fans like this woman, like Merritt, would ask invasive questions or overwhelm him with their sympathy or their secondhand grief, but that simply was not what had happened.
The woman was really seeing him, and she wasn’t ogling him or quizzing him. This woman who loved his wife’s stories enough to permanently ink a memento from them onto her skin was looking at him like he was a person.
“Thank you,” Whit said after a beat. “I guess you really liked her books?”
The woman’s mouth opened slightly. She touched her tattoo again, this time keeping her hand there.
“Do you know the character Christabel? Of course you do.”
Whit laughed.
“In the third book, when her brother dies...”
She clicked off the e-reader that had been resting on her lap, then touched her lips with her thumb.
“My brother died,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded.
“He died, and then I read that book, and there’s a part where she talks about how she’s fighting for him now, you know, in her journey to the castle beneath the waterfall. And she says, ‘I don’t know if the dead can feel pride, but I’m not taking any chances.’?”
Whit nodded, letting her speak. The woman did a miniature shrug, lifting her hands from her lap slightly.
“It just meant something to me. I don’t know what I think about God or heaven or whatever, but most days I try to live in a way where I think my brother would be proud of me.”
She touched her tattoo once again and added, “She gave me that. Your wife.”
Whit looked at her.
“What was your brother’s name?”
“Ethan.”
Whit nodded.
“Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“Thanks for asking. I like talking about him.”
He smiled. “I like talking about her, too. Listen, can I ask you something else?”
The woman’s eyes brightened. “Sure,” she said with enthusiasm.
“How do you think the series ends?”
She seemed confused, so Whit kept speaking.
“I mean, do you have a feeling about what should happen? When all is said and done? Am I making sense?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I just don’t know what my answer should be. I mean, in the end, it’s a story about the things we do for the people we love. Isn’t it? Whatever else happens, I think that would be the point.”
She waited, as if wondering whether she’d said the correct thing.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He had spent the last fifteen months trying to write this book for Helen, whom he loved. It had been such a burden at first, coterminous with his grief. But then something had changed, and it wasn’t just Merritt. The book had sort of saved him, he realized. It had helped him write again; it had given him something vital to accomplish. And Helen, who loved him, who thought of him even as she was dying, had given him that.
