This revelation made her feel cheap and stupid, but it hadn’t been enough to make her leave school. She left because she realized that Graydon had changed her, and she hated that. She hated that she had let herself get caught up in the headiness of who he was and that she had taken the reflected glory of a writer like him and let itdosomething to her. Before Graydon, when she was surrounded by people like herself, for whom writing was compulsive, a necessity, she had been, if not happy, at leastcertain. It was the closest thing to team sports she’d ever experienced. It was like summer camp all the time, and she knew, at the molecular level, that she was where she should be, doing what she should be doing. More than that, she was, well, in her element. No one else in the program was receiving the same kind of consistently positivefeedback, from students and professors both. And no one wrote as much or as quickly as Merritt. Within months, she knew she was the envy of every first-year student.
And then came Graydon and the whirlwind of his glamour and intellect. She would think to herself things like,I am sleeping in Graydon Lyons’s bed, and,Graydon Lyons is holding my hand on the way to the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Worse, she would think, without having yet proven herself in any meaningful way,I deserve to be here. She had cheated herself, she realized in hindsight, because maybe she did deserve to be there, or would in time, but Graydon had offered her a shortcut and she’d taken it. She believed that a man like him would only be with a person like her, a real writer, but who knew what that actually meant? What kind of writer was she? What kind of person was she?
And then things were over with Graydon, and the white-hot fire that had fueled her belief in herself and her work for as long as she could remember sputtered, snuffed out in what felt like an instant. Her writing suffered. Her professors had granted her leeway when her excuse for missed work or a skipped workshop was “I was a plus-one at the Kirkus Prize awards”; they were less lenient when she stopped being able to explain herself. By April in her second year, two months after the breakup, she knew she couldn’t possibly catch up on all she’d missed, forgotten, or simply ignored, and when her director suggested she take an incomplete, she politely declined. She didn’t have the money to stick around in Texas and do an extra year of the program, and worse, she didn’t know if she had theability.
She dropped out. What had felt like an early leg up the ladder with Graydon had actually been a self-betrayal, and now that spark, that thing, the stupid fucking Muse, whatever you called it, was lost. There was the hope that she could find it again, but for now she was wandering through the woods alone, with only a nubof a candle and a room at her mom’s house and a job selling books. The job part, at least, was good. It was a welcome distraction.
The bell tinkled, and she nodded to herself. Yes. A welcome distraction.
She placed her mug on a side table, allowed herself one deep, centering breath, and stood, turning around as she did.
“How can I— Oh, it’s you.”
Whit stood in the doorway, his hair and beard wet from the misty afternoon. His flannel work shirt looked like it was made for woodsmen, not writers, and that almost made her laugh. Except he kind of did look like a woodsman. The flannel was unbuttoned, and his heather gray T-shirt beneath clung, slightly damp, to his chest. The dew that made his hair hang in his eyes could have very well been the sweat from a hard day leveling trees, and if she had to, she’d guess that this man had chopped his fair share of firewood—
Stop it, Merritt.
“It’s me,” he said. He bit one half of his lower lip and waited there at the front of the store, almost like a child afraid to ask his parents for some vital thing.
“Are you okay?” she asked, surprised by the question and the fact that she meant it.
“Yes,” he said, nodding deliberately, as if deciding in the moment that he was in fact okay. “But I do think I need your help.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, placing a steadying hand on the back of the chair.
He watched her for a moment longer, then shrugged before asking the last question she’d expected to hear.
“Have you ever wanted,” he said, “to write a book?”
Chapter Six
It was that no-man’s-land time between lunch and dinner, so the bistro was relatively empty. Merritt had never been there, and on another day she would have been more conscious of its weathered brick walls, its rattan chairs, and the broad picture windows so unlike those of the other buildings on the street; there were hanging plants and creeping vines and, along one wall, a shelf filled with orchids. Here, too, a fire crackled in the grate, and each table was butcher-block thick. Merritt noticed none of it.
Whit Longacre was staring at her from across a menu, just waiting... and waiting. She realized she was looking at his beard, surprised by its fullness, and avoiding his eyes. She looked further down to his chest, where hair poked out slightly from the top of his T-shirt, but then she shifted her gaze to the eyes once more, and, well, she was back where she started.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but what makes you think I could help you finish it?”
It. The novel. The final novel of his wife’s series, which he had asked Merritt to help him with in the bookstore. They had walked almost in silence to the bistro, waiting to go over the details until they sat down.
“You wouldn’t be helping me finish it,” he said now, “so much as helping me startandfinish it.”
“Wait, what?”
Her suspicions from the week before were confirmed in a flash. The book wasn’t finished.I’m writing the book for her, he had said, and he had meant it.
Whit glanced down to the menu for a moment, stalling probably, then drew his eyes back to her with some determination. “I haven’t written much at all.”
“Whathaveyou written?”
Whit held his mouth open for several seconds, as if he were hoping words would teleport into it. Then, finally, he spoke, wincing as he did.
“?‘Once upon a time.’?”
Merritt physically recoiled.
“?‘Once upon a time’?”
He shrugged apologetically.
