But here, in this moment, with my flaws, secrets, and lies laid out for me like a puzzle seconds from being solved, I finally understood. I would’ve run either way. I would’ve done anything but stick around and try to love her.
My fingers fell to another cluster of note cards. Each of them, scribbled with a trope. The ones from our seaside brunch with Meredith were there, but so were others. Ones that had been more quietly embedded in our story.Against all odds. Everyone’s connected. Rich people behaving badly. All grown up. Just one bed.
My hand dropped another inch.Meddlesome ghost.I tried not to laugh or cry or sink to the floor.
“Clever,” I said.
Meredith stood a few feet behind me. When I turned, she cracked a tempered smile. “It was right there,” she said, “on that list Katie gave you in the pizza parlor.”
I traced the trope again. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
“I mean, you can cry. You can cook. You even drink. If you’re a ghost, then how...”
“I know,” she said, walking toward the window. Outside, the sun had begun to set, and the Atlantic glimmered gold. “Only wine, though. And it’s not supposed to make sense, really. It doesn’t have to. You know that. You write speculative fiction, after all.”
I rubbed my temples. “But... but what about Selma? She sent us here. We talked to her all the time.”
Meredith pressed her hand to the glass. “Selma,” she said, “has been living with Alan for over twenty years. She and him both know. Alan’s art business dried up long ago. He made a few bad investments with the money he had left—some hotel on the Lower East Side, a golf enterprise in Saudi Arabia, who knows. He hasn’t worked since his fortieth birthday. He and Selma have been raising chickens and growing heirloom lettuces in godforsaken California ever since.”
“What do you mean,they know? Selma—she found my short story. She got my manuscript from my old agent. I queried him myself in college. That was years ago.”
Meredith turned then. The evening light, beaming right through her. Was this why we couldn’t enter this place? Not just because she was writing our story but because here, the truth showed?
“I saw you and Katie,” she said, “at Michael’s funeral. He had mentioned to me after group one night that he knew you two had a thing. He wasn’t sure if anything had happened yet, but he knew it would eventually. At his service, I spotted you instantly. You look so much like your father. I saw you, and I saw the way you were watching Katie. I know a love story, Tyler, when I see one.
“I had wanted to talk to you that afternoon. I had come to speak to you—to introduce myself. To offer my condolences and maybe help you understand who your father really was. But your mother spotted me first. I saw what was happening with Carolyn. I overheard it all—you and Katie, being torn apart. An angry parent, turning cruel. Turning their back on love. That, I’m afraid, is its own tale as old as time. I was drinking heavily then—it had beenyears since I’d last seen your father. I’d spent millions on private investigators, trying to track him down.
“I know you may not believe me, but I saw the connection between you and Katie and instantly saw myself in it. I was you, Tyler. Your father was a Katie. I know you can’t comprehend that, but he put it all on the line for me. He didn’t care what anyone thought. He didn’t care if it made him a bad husband. He just wanted love.”
I nearly laughed at that. Didn’t she realize how selfish she sounded? Romanticizing my father’s dedication to her like it was anything other than his turning his back on us? But somehow, it made sense. And so I let her continue. I let her pace around this strange, time-swept place and explain herself.
“I got this idea in my head,” she said, “that if I could just get you and Katie to secure your happily ever after, maybe that would bring me some peace, some closure. Perhaps not enough to stop drinking, to become a good person, but enough to know I’d done one meaningful thing in my pathetic little life.”
My hands were on my head. “But Selma... I still don’t understand that part. How is she in on this?”
Meredith chuckled. “Selma and Alan came to check on me about a week after Michael passed. I was still reviewing my ghostwriters’ manuscripts then. I still had a hand in my books and my business. I had missed a couple of deadlines and failed to return a few voicemails. As I mentioned, my drinking had gotten quite bad. The two of them came out to the Hamptons to make sure I was all right.
“Do not be mistaken. This was not because they cared for me. This was because I was their cash cow. And so, hungry for more, they arrived in their blue jeans and their farm boots, fresh off a charter from Montecito.”
“Where—Where did they find you?”
Meredith had glided back to the now-closed window, and her hand was glued to the pane. “On the shore,” she said. “With the water up to my knees.”
There was a lump in my throat. “Were you okay? What happened?”
She shrugged. The sky was growing dimmer by the second. “The night of Michael’s service, after I got home, I began plotting your love story. I was trying to put all the pieces into place, just with what I could glean, with what Michael had told me, with what I could understand by looking at you two. I never dreamed I’d be able to read your minds one day—to see through both your souls like characters of my own. But then... I saw something.”
I was quiet.
She pressed her hand a little harder against the glass.
“I saw Tom,” she said. “I saw Tom swimming, and then... I don’t know. A part of me never came back. My body is still there, in that ocean. And the rest of me, well... The rest of me became whatever it is I am now.”
My head moved up and down very slowly. It took me a full minute to realize I was nodding. That somehow, her story made sense. Despite everything, it all made perfect sense.
“He’s who you see?” I whispered. “When you close your eyes?”
