I nodded, trying to keep my gaze down. Trying to pretend I hadn’t heard the crack in her voice—or seen her eyes begin to fill with tears.
Thirty minutes later, Meredith was giving me a tour of the house. We started downstairs, winding our way through the formal dining room, the wine room, and the other wine room. Next, we wandered east across the great room, through several smaller living spaces, and into a screening room, a ballet studio, and a gleaming, if slightly dated, gym. After that, we headed upstairs to a towering library, a sun-filled parlor, and the succulent-studded, ocean-framing meditation deck just outside it.
“This is incredible,” I said. “I can’t believe you actually live here.”
She smiled, then led me back downstairs and onto the veranda, where a wisteria-drenched pergola spanned the length of the house. Beneath that dense ceiling of lilac and green, which I’d seen only from afar three weeks back, was a long slab of oak offering seating for at least thirty. Beside the dining area was an outdoor fireplace, a bar, and several conversation sets, each intimately situated and in perfect condition. Parallel to all this was a stone-paved deck that played host to a massive, pristine pool: perhaps twenty-five yards of soft, rippling blue. Chaise longues lined the water on either side, white and teak and fashioned with ridiculously plump, periwinkle-striped towels. To the pool’s right was a small cottage: dark shingles, white shutters, and violets bursting from window boxes. And to the left, as far back as I could see, perhaps ten acres away and barely noticeable behind a thousand dense and mature oaks, was a sliver of something. I had to squint to make it out, but it was there. A few roof tiles, the tip of a chimney.
Meredith followed my line of sight but said nothing. Silently, she led me past the pool and back through the lush, lavender-lined gardens we’d walked that first day until we were climbing the stairs over the dunes. The Atlantic was glistening.
She turned back toward the estate, whose first story—the gardens and terraces and flung-open windows—had disappeared behind the hedges. The top level, visible but suddenly nondescript. Just another mansion, scraping the sky.
Meredith’s house, I’d learned from online aerial footage I’d scoured during the drive, was the last of any beachfront property in Southampton. The easternmost edge of her twenty-five-acre lot blended seamlessly into protected woods, ponds, and marsh for another half mile, while the pristine shoreline that paralleled the landcarried on and on until it eventually turned into Watermill Beach, a parking lot, and then Bridgehampton, where another string of hedge-hidden estates began again.
“You’re welcome to make yourself at home here,” Meredith said as we made our way to the water. Both of us, barefoot. The sand was soft and warm; the beach, empty. “My house is your house. Make coffee, burn popcorn, write in the library, in the kitchen, on the terrace. Play tennis. Use the spa. Swim. Anything you want or need that you cannot find, just let me know.”
I nodded. “Thank you. This is—”
“That house you saw,” she said. “That’s the carriage house. I write there. It is the only part of the property that is off-limits. Nobody is to enter at any time. It is only for me. Do you understand?”
I nodded again, swallowing. A cold sweat had crept across the back of my neck, but I wiped it away. Meredith had always been a notoriously private writer, even in her twenties, before she grew reclusive. Of course she drafted alone. Of course she kept an office, kept her own space.
Meredith turned to the ocean and stared straight out into the horizon. She was searching for something, it seemed. Squinting. Straining.
“This is the most beautiful home I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “And the loneliest place on earth.”
22
Tyler
“Jesus, Katie,” I said, pacing around in little semicircles on Seventy-Seventh Street. The sun was trapped behind a building, but the six o’clock sky was hot and bright. “I was half-convinced you’d been chopped up into a suitcase by now. I called you a thousand times. You weren’t in the manuscript at all, and you said you’d text me when you got there, and—”
“I got distracted! Sorry! Meredith and I were chatting, and then she gave me a tour, and then I sat down to do my edits, and guess what? She has no internet! I had to walk all the way back to Fowler Street just to FaceTime you.”
I nearly dropped my phone on the sidewalk. “She doesn’t have internet? Are you fucking kidding me? She and Selma forced you to go out there and write, and nobody bothered to mention there was no internet? How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, okay? When I asked her for the Wi-Fi, she looked at me like I was crazy. Said she’d never even bothered to have the house wired. That too much information hinders creativity. That technology stymies art.”
“Well, it’s official, Katherine. You’re getting slaughtered tonight, for sure.”
“I am not getting slaughtered, okay! She’s just... eccentric, that’s all.”
I leaned against the café’s window. “How are we supposed to write like this? How is this actually going to work?”
Katie sighed. “I guess I’ll just walk over here a few times a day? Use my hotspot to drop whatever I’ve written into the manuscript?”
I was quiet for a second. “This is too hard. We were really getting somewhere last week. We had the whole system down.”
“I know,” she said as a seagull squawked. The wind was loud, and her hair was a mess: auburn tresses sweeping in every which way. “Trust me, I know. But it’s also so inspiring. The beach, the light—my god, the light. It’s so gorgeous. And also, I have my own wing! I have a marble tub! And she has really nice candles, and she makes these really good little cucumber sandwiches, and she said Maurice could set up an extra landline for me tomorrow, and...”
I exhaled. My head, again, tipping against the warm glass. “Okay, okay. And Wi-Fi insanity aside, she’s acting... normal? You feel safe and everything? Should we put an AirTag on you? Do you have one with you? Do those even work without a signal?”
“Oh my god, Tyler. Drop it. She’s harmless. I mean, she’s definitely got some sort of Gatsby complex going on, but I kind of dig it. It suits her.”
“Katie,” I said, stepping back inside as Lola looked up from a steaming espresso machine. I pointed toward my phone, that universal signal for yes-Katie’s-alive-and-yes-she’s-still-insane, then plopped back into my chair. “Gatsby ended up dead in a pool, remember?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it literally. I meant more vibe-wise. You know, like, Gatsby from the first fifty pages.”
