Whit put the book back on the shelf.
“All right,” Merritt said, trying to will herself into agreement. She returned to the books, thinking about Sleeping Beauty and the baby giant, too. If they were to honor (what they assumed to be) Helen’s wishes by weaving allusions to the fairy tale or the cryptic note into the plot, they would have to unravel much of the winding story they’d settled on, unmaking some of the magic she and Whit had managed to create, and who knew what would be lost in the process.We just have to be okay not knowing.
“Can I ask something that might seem invasive?” she said, sitting on the ground with her back against the desk.
Whit looked up from a book on the language of flowers. He pretended to think with squinted eyes, and then nodded firmly.
“Yes.”
“How did sheleavethe book to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know she’d done it? Did you talk about it?”
Whit, who was also seated on the floor, shook his head quickly. “Oh, no. It was a complete surprise. There wasn’t a reading of the will like they do in the movies, because nobody expected any bombshells. I knew everything was going to me and Annie, and it more or less did. She left some money for a scholarship at Annie’s school, and she gave some to the creative writing program at our alma mater, and we all thought that was going to be that.”
Whit shrugged. He was looking up at the windows, and his eyes shone in the midday light. Merritt could tell he was remembering with the lucidity that came with big, life-changing moments.
“Then the lawyer—this elderly man straight out of central casting, with the exact voice you think of when you hear ‘elderly man’—called me into his office and told me there had been a late addendum, or whatever you call it in legalese, and he looked atme, and I won’t say Iknewwhat he was about to say, but this great sense of foreboding washed over me.”
“Had you thought about it?”
“About what?”
Merritt considered her words before speaking. “About how there was still one book left to be written? That someone would have to do something, or else leave the series unfinished?”
“Honestly? No. I think—Iknow—that’s what most of her fans would have thought about—”
Merritt blushed, despite the fact that Whit was neither looking at her nor speaking with any unkindness about “fans” like her.
“—but I think I was still in shock. Even when you know it’s coming...”
He trailed off, cleared his throat.
“And I was mostly worrying about Annie all the time.”
Merritt closed her eyes for a moment, feeling these words like a physical rebuke.
“Of course you were,” she said, and Whit gave her a quick, appreciative smile before drawing his eyes back to the light.
“Anyway, the lawyer read off what she had written. I could find it somewhere, but I remember it pretty well. ‘In addition to the management of my estate (including all existing social media handles, all future editions, the approval of film rights, and so on and so forth), I leave the completion of the fifth and final novel in the Greenwood Castle Saga to my husband, Whitman Howard Longacre, using whatever means he deems necessary and appropriate.’ Something like that. The real legal force has to do with her contract, which says her estate will decide who completes the book in the event of her death. And you’re looking at her estate.”
Merritt felt relief whistle through her limbs. “She said that, though, about ‘whatever means’?”
Whit nodded. “Yup.”
“So we could use AI?”
Whit narrowed his eyes. “I donotdeem that necessary and appropriate.”
They laughed together for a moment, and then Whit rubbed his brows.
“Is it hard,” Merritt asked, “being up here?”
Whit looked around more thoroughly before he spoke.
“I think it’s not as hard as it could be. I almost never came in here when she was alive, she was so private. It’d be like if she had been an accountant and I had to collect her things from her office or something after. I don’t know that it would affect me very much. It’s more thethingsthemselves. That quilt. Her aunt made her that for her college dorm room.”
