“No, no,” Whit laughed, “I’m joking. But I do need this to be a judgment-free zone.”
Merritt held her hands up and nodded. “Roger that.”
She transformed her face into the picture of understanding, but still, something was happening that Whit did not like. Their awkwardness had been excusable at first; to an outside observer, it might even have been endearing. But now it was merely uncomfortable, and the fault lay with him. He had invited this woman into his home—had essentially asked her to come in and judge him—and only now was that fact really dawning on him.
There was a pause, and then Merritt spoke again.
“What about in Helen’s office? Is there anything of value there?”
Whit bit his lip. He did not want to go there. He did not want to bring someone there. That felt... no. They would not be doing that today.
“I really don’t think so,” he said.
Merritt narrowed her eyes, blatantly reading him, then smiled again.
“Okay then.Ihave some notes.”
“Youdo?”
“I do.”
She opened one of her bags on the side table where they rested, slipped a single file folder from it, and waved it as evidence.
“Just a few of these and—”
“Afew? You’ve been on the job five minutes and already you’ve written exponentially more than I have over the last year?”
Merritt shrugged. “They’re just ideas.”
“Well, let’s see them.”
Whit’s torso expanded, making room for an unfamiliar sensation of hope. Maybe this would work. Maybe this would really work.
“Okay,” Merritt said, biting her own lip.
She waited again, then spoke all at once, as if the words had been Heimliched out of her: “Ijustgotnervous.”
“You what?”
She shrugged. “Suddenly, I am spine-chillingly nervous. What if you hate it all?”
“I will not hate it.”
“You could.”
“Merritt,” Whit said, stepping toward her. He stopped himself just before his raised, conciliatory hand would have touched her shoulder. “I could not possibly hate whatever you have come up with more than I’ve hatedmyinability to write anything at all.”
Slowly, she eased her teeth out of her bottom lip.
“Okay,” she said again, half-laughing. She looked around the room. “I hate to say this, but I think we might need to move back to the kitchen.”
Whit looked around, too. Clearly, she was right. What had he imagined? That the two of them would share the chair at his desk like kids who’d snuck into a crowded movie?
What was he thinking?
The man was in shambles, that much was obvious. But it was a charming degree of shambles, and Merritt’s repeated thought had beenI am going to be a writer. Though things felt immediately strained between them, the upper hand, it had seemed, was hers, because she was the one behaving so totally normal. Until this moment, when the two of them sat at the blocky wooden kitchen table, a steaming mug of tea apiece, her laptop freed from the tote bag and open in front of her, the backpack at her feet.
“So,” she said, hearing an unsteadiness in her voice that she hoped Whit, in his sudden-onset kookiness, had missed. “I’ve written out briefs for each of the main characters.”
