“Yeah,” Whit said, smiling back. “Maybe you had a tiny little goblin or vampire costume.”
“Dad.” She took the picture frame back. “Can I keep it?”
Her face was eager and hopeful and, Whit realized with a pang, a little bit sad.
Whit looked to Albie, who was in seventh grade, as if asking his permission—but of course, it was the other way around.
“I’m sure Willa won’t mind,” he said.
Annie beamed and clasped the frame to her chest, giving it one last look before handing it back to her dad.
“Will you hold it for me?”
“I will.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She dabbed at one eye with a rapid hand and then ran off with Albie to join the other kids upstairs.
Whit looked at the picture, their youthful faces, remembering what it had been like before Helen was aNew York Timesbestselling author and he was aNew York Timesbestselling author’shusband. A relic from a different time. Something wriggled in his chest, and he let himself feel it for a moment: the grief and the longing for the woman he had only had for ten short years. But as he focused his eyes to assess his own face, it felt like part of him split in two. The Whit in the picture was exuberant, and the Whit of the present day felt a kinship with him that would have been impossible a month ago.
He missed his wife terribly. And he had tried to kiss Merritt tonight. Both things were somehow true.
But now he’d probably lost Merritt as well. He had looked for her all over Willa’s house for at least fifteen minutes, and then his text—Where’d you run off to?—had gone unanswered. Whit could play dumb only for so long before he had to face the obvious truth: he had scared her away. The almost kiss, out there on the porch, was born from a swell of feeling that seemed to have filled his whole body, and he’d acted rashly. He’d known it then, in the moment, known he was being stupid, unprofessional, presumptuous, and now he was reaping the cost.
When he was sure she was no longer inside, Whit wound his way to the front door. It was pointless, he knew, and yet still he peeked into the lane before him. It was empty but for a spiral of dead leaves floating on the wind.
Whit closed the door and pressed his forehead against the wood, trying to ignore the sound of laughter and the faint strains of the Kidz Bop version of “The Monster Mash” filtering down from where the children played above.
God he hated parties.
Chapter Fifteen
When Merritt woke up, she thought she was back in Texas. In the split second before her eyes cracked open, she pictured the clean, white studio apartment she’d shared with Mrs.Robinson, an elderly shelter cat. Mrs.Robinson and the graduate student—adorable at the time, perhaps slightly unsettling in hindsight. Then she remembered that Mrs.Robinson had died of some horrible worm disease, and she had dropped out, and now she was here, in a high wrought-iron bed in her mother’s guest room. The walls were painted a yellow Merritt found simultaneously infantilizing and suggestive of a nursing home. There was a whatnot full of knickknacks, and her bed had a crocheted quilt that had been made by a great-somebody in the past. But there was a window seat, beyond which was a grassy, tree-lined park where people sat on benches and played with their dogs and watched fireworks from blankets on the Fourth of July, and that was nice.
Merritt moved from her bed to sit by the window, allowing herself to feel like this was an accomplishment after the night she’d had. She brought Whit’s novel,The Hour of Matins, with her, though she didn’t feel like reading it, and eventually she found herself scrolling her phone.
After a half hour or so, she FaceTimed her friend Bebe—since last March, her sole confidant in theSerious Gamesnightmare—to regale her with the story of Willa’s party. As she waited for her to pick up, Merritt felt only slightly horrified by the unbrushed, unwashed person reflected in her phone, knowing Bebe wouldn’tcare. But Bebe didn’t answer. As Merritt wondered whether her friend was in class or off at some literary conference (the kind of thing you did when you were still in an MFA program), she felt even lonelier.
The knock at her door interrupting her loneliness was not necessarily welcome.
“Hi, honey,” her mom said from the doorway. Kathleen Pryor wore a Foothills Craft Club T-shirt and cargo shorts: her gardening outfit. “Want to come help me in the yard?”
Merritt opened her mouth to respond, but then let her reclining, bedraggled state speak for her. Kathleen laughed and moved forward to sit on the bed.
“You came home sooner than I expected you to last night,” she said in what Merritt recognized as hertreading lightlyvoice. When she had explained to her mother that she was joining Whit for a party, Kathleen had resorted to the practice she’d maintained since Merritt was in high school: she bit her tongue, but made a great show of doing it, so Merritt knew exactly what was going on in her head.
Now her mother sat waiting on the bed for an explanation, and Merritt, who every day made a concerted effort to distinguish her current existence from her adolescence, chose to give her one.
“The party, um, took a turn.”
Kathleen raised her eyebrows, and Merritt spent a moment ordering her thoughts. There were multiple ways in which this was true, but which “turn” should she expound on? It took only a few seconds to determine that, no, she would not be mentioning Ian Hoult and his investigation into the truth behind the novel, because Merritt and Kathleen had never yet discussedSerious Games—though she was sure her librarian mother was aware of its existence and had put two and two together. In classic Kathleen style, however, she had not mentioned it.
Instead, Merritt groaned, pushed her head back into a throw pillow, and then sat up to tell the story of Willa’s party. After sharing a few well-chosen details about the beginning of the evening, she explained to Kathleen that eventually she had stepped outside for air, waiting for Whit, who eventually came.
“And we almost, well...”
“Uh-oh...”
“...kissed.”
