“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing.” I plopped into my unofficial seat across from him, offering Lola a quick wave. She’d never come home last night, was wearing a band shirt that belonged to another woman, and was definitely glowing. She shrugged sheepishly from behind the counter, then brought me a giant cup of coffee. “Just tired.”
Tyler drew his eyebrows together. “No. Not just tired.”
I hated this. That he knew me, that he saw me. That he could still read me like a book. It was a skill he’d picked up as a kid—he hadn’t earned it; it just happened. I was there, and so he learned me the way toddlers learned a second language. I was the girl next door, and so he figured me out. And there was no way to undo that—no way to take back all the secrets he’d stolen or memories he’d made.
“Katie,” he said again. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” I pushed my hair behind my ears. “What’d you think of Tessa? So hot, right?”
“Hey, come on. Something’s wrong. I can tell. Your hair’s extra nice today.”
At that, I crossed my arms over my body. “It’s nothing, okay? Seriously.”
He just looked at me. His book, down. His eyes, soft. “Katie, please. You can talk to me.”
I squeezed myself harder. My elbows, now gripped so tightly I was lucky they hadn’t failed me—hadn’t fractured in my own fists. “It’s just... it’s my mom, okay? It doesn’t even matter. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
Tyler gulped, then grabbed the back of his neck with both hands. “Oh, uh... how is she? How’s your dad? How’s Maple?”
I closed my eyes. I almost told him everything. Almost recounted every last second of my stupid phone call. Almost let him back into my window, back into my world. Almost let him wrap his arms around me, drop his head into my lap, hug my broken body until I ran out of heaves. But instead, I straightened. Instead, I said, “Bad. They’re bad. And Maple’s dead.”
Tyler grimaced, squishing a coffee-stained napkin into a tight little ball. His knuckles strained white, and the ink-swathed tendons in his forearms tightened. “Katie,” he said. “Your family, they... I’d do anything to go back in time. To change what happened. To—”
“Yeah,” I said as I opened my laptop. We had a book to write. We had arcs to flesh out and a deadline to meet. “Me too.”
By Friday evening, we’d transformed Pinot’s list of tropes into a ten-page outline full of plot twists and pinch points and seminal lines of dialogue. Things like, “It’s a wallpaper sample, Willa, not theMona Lisa,” and “Go fuck yourself, Henry Cooper,” and “Willa, wait! I think I love you! I think I’ve been in love with you since the day you were born!” You know, those kinds of things.
The plot, quite simply, was this: Willa and Henry, we thought,would fall in love as they restored a bed-and-breakfast owned by Willa’s wealthy father. Willa, desperate to prove to her parents she was remarkable in her own right and worthy of at least a blip of praise, would handle the interior design, the textiles, and the “vibes,” while Henry—using his rugged hands and generally bad attitude—would build things, say hot toxic shit, and, ultimately, screw Willa’s brains out. But before that, they’d spend half of the book pretending to hate each other instead of dealing with the wreckage of their pasts. Henry, poor and unloved, had grown up in the guesthouse of Willa’s next-door neighbor. That was how he’d grown so close to Willa’s brother. We hadn’t quite figured out their feud or how Henry ended up in the same world as Willa. It was probably going to be a weird family saga thing or perhaps a nephew-of-the-live-in-gardener situation. To be determined.
Notebooks closed and laptops tucked away for the weekend, we rose to our feet and were mid-spar about whether Willa had brown eyes or blue when Tyler held the door to the café open for me.
“What was that for?” I said.
“Uh, just trying to be chivalrous?”
“Well, don’t. It’s weird, and I hate it. We’re enemies, remember?”
He laughed. “Sorry. Next time, I’ll let it slam in your face.”
I glared at him, and then, when Seventy-Seventh Street became Third Avenue, I turned left, and he turned right, and I said, “See you Monday,” and he said, “Good night, Katie Caruso,” and just like that, we were teenagers again. His bedroom was glowing, and I was toweling off my hair, and he was sliding on a soft, dry T-shirt, and I was counting the lines of his stomach, remembering the jut of his hips, the rain on his lips, the way his hands crawled up myribs, the way it felt to finally twist my tongue into his warm, wet mouth, and then—our gazes, connected—he walked toward his window, pressed his hand to the glass and mouthed,Good night, Katie Caruso, and neither of us knew it yet, but in two weeks, everything was going to break. Everything was going to shatter. And somehow, when he said it again tonight, eight whole years of horrible later, they were still the most perfect four words I’d ever heard.
Girl Next Door
Willa Pearson was just another girl. Pretty, yes. Beautiful, even. But, above all that, she was annoying. She was a pest. She was Eric Pearson’s little sister. Maybe that was why, the first time Henry realized it—that he couldn’t take his eyes off her, that she was the most perfect thing he’d ever seen—it caught him by surprise.
But wasn’t it always that way? Wasn’t it always the girl who’d been there all along?
10
Tyler
June, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
It was the first weekend of summer, and the Stonyport sky was warm and lavender, inching closer and closer to ink. There was, as usual, absolutely nothing to do. Katie was lying in a hammock on the other side of the backyard, vacillating between reading a paperback and scribbling furiously in a giant notebook. Mikey was in the grass, finishing up his daily hour of insane stretching, and I was sitting in a lawn chair, listening to him talk about Ingrid and this scout he’d talked to earlier as I half-texted a girl I’d met at a party yesterday.
