He smiled, and then left the room, choosing not to interrogate why exactly the end of this conversation felt less like a victorious walk-off and more like a retreat.
Chapter Seventeen
Merritt had been lying, of course. Kathleen did have a doctor’s appointment, but not the kind she needed a ride to. Some small part of Merritt felt a twinge of guilt, trotting out her mother in this way and implying that she was older and more fragile than she was, but as she typed out the text message Merritt had been mainly focusing her energy on making sense of her own choices. She had delayed seeing Whit because of her confession about Graydon and because of the almost-kiss. Everything suddenly felt complicated.
Now, on Tuesday, Whit was at his writing group, and she was an hour away from finishing her long shift at Goodenough Books. It was the actual day of Halloween, and she had chosen manual labor in an effort to exhaust herself too much to worry about how she had put her wonderful new job at risk. She had unloaded boxes, rearranged the furniture by the fireplace, and, in the break room, organized the boxes to which decorations would be returned tomorrow, on November1. She’d also brought the “General Fall” decoration crate out of storage and sifted through it to arrange its insides by type: turkey-based, cornucopian, vaguely pilgrim, leafy. Now she was reshelving books, dusting as she went, and intermittently helping customers while Huong worked the register.
When the bell above the door rang as she was crouching behind a shelf of manga, she had a vision of Whit entering with his sister. Merritt imagined her to be a beardless, more prototypically feminine version of her brother, and she wondered what he’d told her. In Merritt’s mind, Whit had been the oneabout to do the kissing, but with the passage of time since the party, things felt fuzzier. What would the sister think? That Merritt was making a move on her grieving, single-dad brother? Or worse, what if Whit hadn’t mentioned her at all? She was annoyed by how embarrassed the thought made her, and she scolded herself into remaining cautious and holding her chin high in defiance.
“There you are,” said a man who was not Whit.
Ian Hoult, dressed today in a gray sweater with chartreuse stripes and faded green corduroys that clashed horribly.
“I knew I recognized you from somewhere,” he continued as he walked in her direction, “but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until I got home and slept on it. Isn’t that the way of things?”
Ian leaned on the chest-high shelf Merritt stood behind, peering at her with a troubling level of interest.
“Merritt, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And your name was...?”
He let only the vaguest look of surprise trace itself over his face.
“Ian Hoult. You have some of my books over there.”
He nodded nonchalantly toward thefictionsection.
“Oh,” Merritt said in her falsely cheerful customer service tone, “do we have some books on hold for you? I can grab them from the back, and then Huong will get you checked out.”
She pointed over his shoulder, and Huong, who had been openly watching the interaction, raised her hand in a gleeful wave.
“I—well, no, I’m actually a novelist.”
“Oh,” Merritt said, as if perplexed. “I thought you wrote for, um, was itNewsweek? And I think you said you were an adjunct somewhere?”
Ian’s eyes bulged as if he’d been shocked.
“For theAtlantic,” he corrected her, his voice clipped. Thenhe seemed to remember himself. “And yes, I was alsoinvitedto teach some courses at Plymouth College. But my primarythingis fiction.”
Merritt nodded like she would if Ian were a child announcing grand, unrealistic plans for when he grew up.
“How neat.”
Again, Ian looked physically pained. “Yes. Neat. Well.”
He stood up straight.
“Well, I’m actually here on a mission,” he said, as if Merritt were the one keeping him talking. “I think I told you I’m writing an exposé about Graydon Lyons and his newest book,Serious Games?”
An electric bolt shot out from Merritt’s gut to the end of each extremity. He had figured it out. This was the final moment before she was exposed once and for all.
“Yes,” she said, softly.
“Well, I realized something.”
Merritt’s body was one large heartbeat.
“Yes?”
