Whit laughed, and Merritt did, too. She looked out the window, her eyes glinting for a moment in the sunlight.
“I just wish there was a way to know whether Helen would’ve approved,” Merritt said.
“I can assure you, there’s not. I’ve looked everywhere.”
Merritt nodded, unsatisfied. Whit thought about Helen’s study high at the top of the house. He hadn’t disturbed it in months and months, but now he had an idea. He briefly wondered whetherit was a betrayal, and then he wondered whether that mattered, whether such things could even be betrayals when the person to be betrayed was gone. But he had kissed this woman. He had already taken the first step in whatever direction they were going. Had already taken many steps, in fact.
He decided.
“Would it make you feel better to look around?”
Merritt’s eyes zipped to his. “What?”
“In her study. Upstairs.”
Whit watched Merritt’s face open up with what could only be described as obvious appetite. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth hung open slightly. He almost laughed.
“I don’t know, Whit, would that be an invasion...”
“Of what? Her privacy?”
Merritt shrugged.
Whit thought. Would it?
“She left me the book. It’s mine to finish.Oursnow. I think it’s our right. I think it’s what she would have expected.”
“But, you would be bringing another... bringing someone else into her space, and—”
“—and finishing the book. I think that’s the main thing.”
Whit was less sure than he sounded, but more sure than he would have been two months ago. This moment was internally tense, and there was something compelling about that. Tension meant he was feeling something, two somethings even, and being pulled between them. Tension meant he was alive. He stood up, signaling his resolution.
“Listen,” he said, his voice soft and full, “the only reason the book is in the state it is—the only reason the end is in sight—isyou.”
“That’s not true, Whit—”
“Itistrue, and you know it. You have saved this book, andyou’re as entitled as anyone to do what we have to do as we search for the proper ending. Let’s go have a look.”
Merritt smiled, holding his eyes in hers. When she stood up in agreement, he grabbed her hand, pulled, and they kissed again. A gentle, comfortable thing, her soft lips against his, as he took in the smell of her hair and the Ivory soap and amber oil on her skin. And still his belly dropped, and his head felt light and airy.
When she pulled away, she was smiling. “Whit, please, I’m working.”
He nodded.
“Come on. The ivory tower awaits.”
Merritt’s heart rate increased as she followed Whit up two flights of stairs, the first one wide with a well-trod oxblood runner down its center, the second narrower, like the passageway to servants’ quarters in a period drama. She was nervous. She had anticipated something like this, an almost forbidden glimpse behind the curtain, all those weeks ago when she and Whit had spoken over their meal at the bistro. She was going to see, finally, where Helen had worked. Where she had crafted the books that had saved Merritt in more ways than one, had made her into a writer with a dream.
And here they were, at a wooden door painted the gray-blue color of a raincloud, and there was a golden emblem like a door knocker about where a peephole might have been: a kestrel with a spoon in its beak. Just like the necklaces, worn by the characters Ursula, Rupert, and Christabel, that had become the symbol of the Greenwood Castle books in the real world as well.
This was it. The inner sanctum.
Merritt took a deep breath and tried to hide it.
Inside was a square room, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet,with windows all around, like a lighthouse. The ceiling was peaked and paneled with wood slats; on either side of the doorway and along the right and left walls were low bookshelves that went from floor to window. A built-in desk lined much of the far wall, and the space in the middle was covered by a rug patterned in emerald and seafoam and sage greens. It was cold up here, and Merritt noted the quilt draped over the back of the desk chair and the space heater at its feet.
It was like stepping into a keepsake box. The room was lovely, exactly the kind of place Merritt would’ve liked to write in, but it was also sad in its disuse, its emptiness, its bygoneness. She spun slowly in a circle and looked through the windows, where she could see the hillside, a strip of the sea, and the peaks of the buildings in the village. So this was what Helen had seen as she thought and imagined and wrote and revised.
