But it wasn’t as though Whit only needed a little mentoring or guidance. He needed someone to teach him how to write again. In the time since Helen had gotten sick, he’d started three separate mysteries of his own—two attempts at sequels and one stand-alone—and all of it had been derivative, lifeless garbage. Even he didn’t care who had done the murders. He tried a contemporary literary thing without any bloodshed, but it was about a widower and his daughter and every word he typed nauseated him.
Far worse than failing at his own writing, though, was the experience of sitting himself down to work on Helen’s book. Both cognitive and fine motor function left his body. He couldn’t type. He could remember nothing about the first four books in the series, despite having read them all. There was just so muchstuffin them; each was nearly twice as long as his longest novel, and each relied on a complex magic system and an arcane class structure, with continual nods to Helen’s novellas and her fans’ theories. And beneath all of that was the sense that Helen had known, since page1 of book1, how the saga would end.
He had found a few charts and a half-erased whiteboard in her office, but the truly shocking thing, what no one could believe, including the editor, the agent, and Whit himself, was this: nowhere had she written down the hard-and-fast ending of the years-long tale. Helen hadn’t discussed it with the publishing people, so implicit was their trust in her and so private her writing process. He had searched her computer, the drawers in her office, her car, her bedside table, and found nothing. Whit didn’t even have a title to go by.
“Didn’t she ever mention...” the editor, Shreya, would start on their occasional phone calls.
“No,” Whit would sigh. “She was very tight-lipped during the actual drafting. It was usually only after the first go-round was completed that we’d talk about it at all.”
But even in those conversations, he and Helen hadn’t gone into much detail. They worked in different literary worlds: he wrote for adults, she for children and teenagers (and, she always reminded him, women in their twenties and thirties). Scratch that, she wrote foreveryone, and he wrote for people who had opinions aboutMasterpiece Theatreand for the one woman at theLos Angeles Review of Bookswho usually liked his stuff okay. Helen’s worlds were infused with a cozy kind of magic, a dark but defeatable evil, and a unique lightning-in-a-bottle Greenwood Castle sensibility, while Whit’s books were grim and rainy. Sometimes the mysterywas solved only after someone beloved died, and a few times it wasn’t solved at all.
So why him? That was what really ate at him. Apart from the fact that they were married, and that they had loved each other, once very powerfully, he could think of no good reason why she had left him with this task. He was baffled, and beneath that, if he could manage to crack the shell that usually kept his own emotions concealed from view, he also felt a steely anger. How could she do this? Why hadn’t she told him? Why had she been so withholding about so many things?
Willa coughed and drew Whit’s attention from his closed laptop to her wary eyes.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I ask you a terrible question?”
Whit’s stomach dropped like it did when he knew someone was about to mention Helen. But he only said, “Of course.”
“How’s the actual writing going?”
Relieved, Whit mimed getting shot. Willa smiled.
“It isn’t going,” he admitted. Once again. “Days and days of blank documents.”
“Have you tried writing by hand?”
“Yes.”
“Writing in different places?”
“Yes.”
“Changing the time of day? Writing in the evening instead of the morning, that kind of thing?”
“Yes, Willa.”
She nodded, thinking. “I have a friend who lights a candle whenever she’s ready to write. She says it sets the tone and tells your brain you’ve entered ‘the writing space.’?”
“That is very woo-woo of you.”
“Not me,” Willa corrected, raising a finger. “My friend. Have you tried typing in Comic Sans?”
Annoyance crept into Whit’s voice for the first time. “Have Iwhat?”
She shrugged. “It’s a thing. People on the internet say it makes them type faster.”
Whit breathed deeply into tented hands.
“I don’t think we’re that desperate yet.”
Willa made a face that said,I think we are very close to being that desperate.
The coffee shop inhaled a cold breath as the front door opened, and Willa’s insightful look turned to one of dread.
“Incoming.”
Whit’s irritation spiked. He knew before turning to look that it would be Ian Hoult. Ian the Terrible. The man’s eyes searched the room lazily before landing on Willa and Whit, and then he made a show of reluctantly walking their way, as if they were waving him over against his will rather than trying not to make eye contact.
