“Okay.”
They hugged. It was a sad, pained, stiff-armed thing (their first hug), and then the hall was empty but for him and Evie. And he was thinking a stupid thing (that he missed Merritt and wanted to call her) when he heard Evie clear her throat.
He turned to her, and she was on him in a flash.
“Somethinghappened.”
“What?”
Her eyes were glowing. “I know it did, something happened between you two.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh my God, look at your face. Youkissed, didn’t you?”
“Shh!” Whit hissed, conscious that his daughter had just gone upstairs.
“Didn’t you? They probably just got into their car, I can just go out there and ask her if you—”
“Yes, fine, yes, we kissed. Nowshut up.”
Evie clapped her hands together above her head and then raised them even higher, as if she were someone praying dramatically in an opera.
“Thank you, God. Thank you.”
Whit let himself laugh. “Oh, shut up.”
Merritt spent the car ride home urging herself toact normal, act normal, act normal. Kathleen did most of the talking, going on about what a lovely job Evie had done with the food and the house, and how it must be good for Whit and Annie to have her around, and then they talked about Édouard, and Merritt did contributethen because, as she’d told Whit, it was hard not to fawn over him, and because he had done that rare thing of being both handsome and perfectly unobjectionable all night long. He had beenfunny, even, over their pie à la mode. A perfectly nice man who also happened to be shockingly enjoyable to look at.
That was one reason Merritt knew she had it bad: she was daydreaming about a world in which a man like Édouard was aside character. The whole day felt tremendously normal, natural, and then she had kissed Whit, and he’d kissed her back, and here she was, having to act unfazed as her mom pulled into her garage.
“I think I’ll go on a walk,” she said when they walked into the kitchen.
“It’s after eight and in the forties,” her mother said, surprised. “And dark.”
“I’ll bundle up.”
Merritt quickly donned some long johns, and as soon as her booted foot hit the sidewalk, she knew she’d made the right decision. The brick-lined streets glowed orange in the light of the lampposts and set her mind to imagining this village a hundred, two hundred years ago, lit up then by actual flames brought by men with long, curved sticks, when women like her would be inside, fast asleep, or perhaps writing furiously by the light of their candles. Playing whist—whatever that was—or sitting at the pianoforte. And yes, these were just things heroines did in novels by Jane Austen and the Brontës, and who knew whether the same was true of old New Englanders. The point was that the walking was expelling the live-wire energy roiling in her body, and thinking about nineteenth-century ladies and horse-drawn carriages was taking her mind away from Whit Longacre—until her phone buzzed and it was him.
To her mind, there were two opposing possibilities: either he was merely calling because they’d failed to set a time to meet up tomorrow, or he was calling with regret, with anger, with greatgrief and a sense that he’d betrayed his late wife. Merritt felt an urge to answer and spit out an apology before he even spoke, but he was too quick.
“I’m sorry—”
There it was. Already.
“—for calling so soon,” he continued. “Maybe it’s more, I don’t know,smoothto wait a bit, but I just needed to talk to you.”
Oh.
“Are you okay?” he said, surprising her again. “I mean, was that okay? Do you feel okay about what happened?”
“Do you?”
She winced as she waited the space of a breath for him to respond.
“Yes. I do.”
“You do?”
