I scratched the back of my neck. “Yeah, well, I figured you’d be more likely to use them if you thought they were cute.”
Her eyes crinkled, and something warm and easy stretched across my chest.
“Come on,” she said, shoving the walkies back into the box, then pushing open Meredith’s front door. “I’ll show you around.”
Katie gave me the grand tour of the home’s first floor and gardens: the parlor, the sunroom, the pantry twice the size of my bedroom in the city. She showed me the media room, the pottery studio, the pool table. The gym and sauna, the ivy-draped gazebo off the tennis court, the shed filled with croquet sets, pool floats, and beach cruisers. We were halfway up the stairs to the library when a timer went off in the kitchen.
“I kind of baked a lobster potpie,” she said.
“How does one kind of bake a lobster potpie?”
She chuckled, then traipsed back down the stairs. I followed her featherweight steps, one after another, as she floated into the kitchen, explaining how she’d begun making her way through a Barefoot Contessa cookbook she’d found on her second night here.
“Anything you want,” she said, pointing to a notepad splayed out on the island, “you put on the list, and I think Maurice just goes to the market and buys it.”
I traced Katie’s loopy letters—raspberries, ricotta, good vanilla—while she cut into the pie’s golden crust. Steam escaped, and my mouth watered.
“Two sticks of butter,” she said, licking the back of the knife after she served us each a slice. I grabbed our plates as she led the way outside, past the pool, and over the stairs, a bottle of sparkling water tucked under her arm. We settled onto the beach, the sky dark and the sand cool and the world behind us, quiet. Waves crashed. The breeze blew.
“Meredith writes late at night,” she said, stabbing a pea with her fork. “Then she usually sleeps in. I see her in the afternoons, mostly. I thought she’d have a ton of staff or whatever, but it’s just Maurice—who I barely see—and then this woman who Meredith said comes sometimes to clean, but I haven’t met her yet.”
I nodded, picking out a piece of lobster from the pie’s filling. Katie had made, it seemed, a small accounting error with the salt, and the meal was... not good. She’d been the first to admit it.
“Oh!” she said. “I forgot to tell you! Sorry, it’s actually important. You probably won’t be able to see it until morning, but way east, at the end of the property, past the woods, there’s another house. It’s a carriage house—like, for staff. Anyway, it’s off-limits. Meredith writes there.”
I put down my plate. I was a foot away from Katie, maybe less, and her bare feet were covered in sand. “What do you mean, off-limits?”
“I don’t know. Just, we’re not allowed to go there.”
“You mean it’sforbidden?”
She shrugged.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s obviously where the bodies are. How are you a writer? How did you fail to mention this to me sooner? I would’ve brought you a rhinestone-studded axe or something! No Wi-Fi, and now this? On top of what is clearly the most orchestrated occurrence ofForced ProximityI’ve ever seen? We are one hundred percent dying in this house. That, I’m sure of.”
Katie laughed, setting her plate aside and twisting toward me a little more. “You’re insane. You know that, right? The newspaper selfies. The conspiracy theories. The walkie-talkies...”
I turned to her. The space between us, inches. Her mouth, theslightest bit open. Her lips, the slightest bit wet. “Would you like me to care about you less, Katherine?”
She looked straight out toward the ocean. The moon dangled above us, a sliver of light.
“No.”
I inhaled, then moved a half inch closer to her. It was nothing—a tiny, imperceptible shift. A centimeter, maybe two. But then, she did the same. Our hands just lay there, flat on the sand. Two pinkies fighting a muscle memory I still hadn’t managed to forget.
“Okay then,” I said. “I won’t.”
27
Tyler
June, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
I watched the Mets game. I read three chapters ofThe Sound and the Fury. I went to a party and talked to some girl, and then another, and then another. I texted Mikey and told him to quit baseball and come home. And then, around two in the morning, when I was stumbling into bed, when I saw Katie’s room glittering and bright and aglow, when I saw her spinning in circles, everything light and pink and orange and gold, I couldn’t help myself.
I climbed onto my sill and flung a stress ball at her pane. That was a memento from my mom’s latest ex-boyfriend: a pharmaceutical rep who always stopped into the diner she managed for a cup of coffee. The same guy who’d taken her on a cruise to the Bahamas in May then turned out to have another family in Syosset. Two golden retrievers and a mortgage and everything.
