“I do!”
He was smiling, she could tell. He was happy.
Oh, she was happy, too.
“So do I,” she said at last. “I feel... I’ve wanted... but, I didn’t know if you would—”
“I didn’t know I would, either.”
Merritt laughed, and she thought to herself that it was really more of a giggle, and that that was allowed. This was the sort of thing you giggled over. There were so many factors at play—Whit had a daughter, he was a widower, they worked together—that the whole thing felt secretive and a bit high-school-ish. It felt thrilling and difficult to talk about in complete sentences.
“Listen,” he said, after they’d laughed a bit more about their awkwardness. “Evie and Édouard are leaving in two days. After that, we should get dinner—not a working dinner, but a real dinner. A date.”
She liked that he called it a date. She liked that it was his idea.That he was letting her know where things stood. Goodness, it was refreshing.
“I’d love that,” she said. “It’s a date.”
“It certainly is.”
They hung up, and here she was, back where she started: her body full of electricity and her mind full of Whit. She walked for another hour before finally going home to lie awake in bed, resisting the urge to pick up her phone and text him to say good night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Whit had called Merritt after carrying Annie to her bed. She had fallen asleep watchingThe Santa Clause, her second Christmas movie of the season, and Whit had felt momentarily crestfallen at failing in his plan to talk to her. But she looked so sweet and content that he allowed himself to be convinced she’d had a good day.
After a shower, he’d gotten into bed with his laptop, more eager than ever to read Merritt’s manuscript, which he’d been ingesting in large doses over the last few days. But within a minute of opening it, he thought,screw it, and called up the real thing. Only after the call had he let himself be satisfied with reading her words.
Now it was Friday, and they were writing again. Evie and Édouard had made the insane choice to bring Annie along with them for Black Friday shopping, so Whit and Merritt had the house entirely to themselves. They usually had it to themselves, but today there was potential in the space, as if what had happened was a secret and the house was waiting for them to slip up and spill the beans.
Whit had greeted her at the door, and Merritt had laughed at him, telling him he looked serious. She extended her hand as if expecting him to kiss it and said, “How do you do?” He shook it as if they were business partners, and she laughed at him again. But then she, too, had settled into a business-as-usual groove, and the two of them wrote and wrote all morning. Finally, Merritt cleared her throat.
“Okay,” she said, taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. She was sitting in her spot by the fire, with her legs tucked up under her, laptop balanced on the armrest, and she was cradling a cup of steaming tea in both hands.
“Okay?”
“I think it’s time,” she said, “to kill Ursula.”
“Oh,” Whit said, and despite his assurances of his trust in Merritt the day before, he did find himself hesitating.
“You’re hesitating.”
“I know. I am.”
“It is a big deal.”
“Exactly.”
Merritt took a deep breath, and Whit smiled at the way her bangs swooped up when she exhaled, and the indentation her teeth made on her bottom lip. He had always noticed these kinds of things about her, but now he was allowing himself to enjoy them.
“Does it feel,” she asked, “a little bit like killing someone else’s child?”
“Goodness, that’s dark.”
“You know what I mean. Helencreatedher, and now we’re...un-creating her.”
Whit shrugged. “The story has to go somewhere. That’s what stories do.”
“Okay, Mary Oliver.”
