I took a deep breath and dropped to my knees, right there on Forty-Seventh Street. “I want to love you, Katie, for as long as you’ll let me. And I’m really hoping that might be forever.”
She plopped down on the sidewalk right across from me.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You’re going to screw up your dress. Which is so pretty, by the way. I love you in green. I—”
A man in an Avenger costume screamed to get the fuck out of his way. We both laughed.
“I didn’t want you to be alone down here!” she said.
I cupped her face and kissed her. “God, do I love you. You are so, so bright.”
She pulled back, straightening my bow tie, then tracing the silk with her fingertips. She dropped her hands to the lapels and tested the fabric. “Where on earth did you get this thing, by the way? This is, like, really nice. Is this Hugo Boss? Is it custom? The stitching is incredible.”
We were still kneeling on the sidewalk, the city swarming around us. It was hot out. Gross, even. A little water dripped on my head. I assumed it was from an air conditioner, but I couldn’t say for sure. Katie was still kissing me, touching me, talking about my tuxedo.
“Did Meredith dress you too? She did, didn’t she? She is such a fairy godmother. She is such a hopeless romantic. She’s even worse than me. Oh my god—we have to go see her! She’s going to absolutely die over this! Is the tunnel open yet? Do you know how to call Maurice? How do we still not have his fucking number? Should we just get an Uber? It’s going to be, like, five hundred dollars. But we have to go. We...”
A black Range Rover pulled up to the curb, hazards on. Maurice rolled down the window and looked at me. I gulped and then, with my hands fixed on the small of Katie’s back, helped her into the car.
She was buckling her seat belt, her heart beaming out of her body, bumbling on about how excited she was to tell Meredith about our night and our arcs, and how we were just like charactersin a romance novel, down to the very last scene, and I was just nodding. I was just holding her hand.
“Katie,” I said as the car approached First Avenue, as we headed farther and farther east, as the Midtown Tunnel turned to stripes of light—to whirling urban black. “I need to talk to you about Meredith, okay?”
She looked at me with those green eyes and those glossed lips. There was glitter on the bridge of her nose. I breathed in. I breathed out.
“I went to the carriage house this afternoon,” I said, my hand still clutching hers. I held on tight. “I’ll tell you everything, from the very start, all right? But you need to believe me. She isn’t going to be there. I don’t think we’re going to see her again.”
Katie’s startle flew through my fingertips. “What are you talking about? Why would you even joke about that? After everything today? That’s not funny. That’s not...”
But then there was that look on her face. The kind she made when she was digging us out of a plot hole. When she was making connections. When she was sifting through the breadcrumbs of a story and organizing them into an unmistakable, irrefutable trail. In that look, I saw it all. I saw it despite what she said next.
“We should just call her. We should just ask Maurice to call her. You’re just being crazy, you’re...”
But we couldn’t call her, of course. We couldn’t call her because she only had a landline and refused to pick up the phone. Because I’d already tried that—already called it a thousand times.The phone number you are trying to reach, said a robot operator,no longer exists.
I held on tight as reality coursed through her. As her brain made sense of the story Meredith had been hiding in plain sight. No computer. No new technology. No books or movies or catalogs or magazines that had been published since we were in high school. Every story she’d ever picked up, speculative or gothic or paranormal in some way. The fact that she’d never left that property, that she did no press, no interviews, no signings. That her sprawling estate had been maintained only by Maurice and an invisible hand. That her cat, somehow, was everywhere. That she cooked but never ate. That—despite how close the three of us had become—she’d never touched us. Not even once had she reached out to touch us.
Not on that first day, when she should’ve shaken our hands. Not by accident, upon pouring us a cup of coffee. Not on purpose, once we’d really gotten to know her.
And I knew all this. I’d known it for hours, but with Katie by my side, I was grappling with the proof again and aloud as Queens turned into Nassau County, into Suffolk County, as we passed the exit sign for our old and nothing town. As the Montauk Highway dissolved into this turn and that turn and then, finally, Fowler Street, and we began the crackling trek up Meredith Bradford’s private drive for the final time.
But as we approached her estate, the leather of our back seat started to scuff. The paneling on the doors faded. The car itself began to dissolve—began to slip away. Katie banged on what was left of the window, leaping out of her seat and running through the wide-open and suddenly crooked, moss-covered gate.
The fountain in the car park was rung with algae.
The hydrangeas, shriveled and parched.
The shingles, loose.
The sconces, sideways.
The front door, ajar.
We stepped inside.
“Meredith!?” Katie screamed.
Nothing. The furniture was tattered. The art, destroyed. The windows in the great room were wide open, and the curtains flapped and fluttered as if the howling summer wind had invited itself in.
