I gasped, standing up, lungs shocked from the impossibility of it all, from the sorcery of it all, and I was spinning to find the woods, circles and circles and circles, but it was no use. The sea smoke had blown in, and there was only gray. I dropped back onto all fours, zigzagging across the earth, desperate for the braided roots of the forest, desperate for the trail of my own footprints. Just then, another gust blew through, ripping the glasses from my face so that the dense, viscous nothingness was twice as small. I cursed, fumbling for the frames, but all I found were clumps of dirt, and I could not tell east from west or up from down.
I closed my eyes and breathed.
The ocean.
The beach.
I kept my eyes shut and located the rush of it, the roar of it, and through the whipping wind, followed it south. From there, I’d at least have the water, the haze of mansion lights. Enough of a clue to orient myself, to get back to the stairs and lock the door to my cottage and get my head on straight.
One crawl after another, I chased the sound. Dirt turned to roots turned to sand, and my hands and knees were scraped and skinned and rubbed raw. I stood, wiping my palms on the cotton of my shirt, moistening my bone-dry throat with a series of sharp, futile gulps. The fog was even thicker here. The ocean, so loud I could barely hear myself think.
And then, I caught sight of something. The slightest shadow on the shoreline. A blurred suggestion, low and slinking.
The cat.
Pinot.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I wrapped my arms around my body, blinking to beg the scene into focus. I took a half step closer, careful not to make a sound, only to track him. His silhouette slithered east along the sand’s milk-hazed edge, a silver swath of silt that must’ve clung to his paws. I rubbed my eyes. What cat liked water? What cat wandered the beach?
It was then I realized he was not alone. Another figure had emerged on the gusting shore.
A smudge of a woman.
Meredith.
She stood quietly for a minute, her garment—a dress? a nightgown?—flapping in the wind, Pinot seated at her feet. I hugged my body closer, but I did not dare move. I was only ten feet away. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I should call to her. A single pivot, and she’d have seen me. I could get out in front of this—I could explain myself. I could tell her that I hadn’t been able to sleep. That I’d dreamed of Katie getting her neck sucked by a blond-haired douchebag with a job in Big Law and was simply walking it off. That curiosity had gotten the best of me, but only for a moment, and not before I could open the carriage house’s front door.
But then I thought better of it.
I stayed perfectly still.
Meredith just stood there, her hands on her head, her eyes tipped to the sky, and then, toward the water. I half-expected the obvious: the end of a dock, a flickering green light. But no. There was absolutely nothing. It was just fog, and beyond that, the Atlantic as far as god’s eye could see.
I blinked, testing the theory. Nick Carraway, failed writer nextdoor. Some transient narrator who’d chanced upon a story. Gatsby, right there, counting the heavens and then scouring the shore. But when I opened my eyes to look for Meredith again, expecting her to have vanished, she remained.
She was weeping, I realized. She was weeping, and the water was up to her knees.
34
Katie
Saturday morning, I called Lola from the curb of a coffee shop walking distance from Danny’s rental. My head was pounding, and my skin didn’t feel quite like my own. My Friday night—a melted blur of sunset in the pool, of warm, wet whiskey burning my throat and widening my eyes, of this bar and that lounge and then calling it off, calling a car, and crawling quietly and alone into Danny’s empty bed.
“I don’t get it, Katie,” she said as Juniper yapped in the background about celebratory, fourth-round-of-interviews pancakes. “What are you even doing there? Go back to Meredith’s. Go figure this shit out with Tyler.”
“I like Danny,” I said, tipping my head against a street sign. Swallowing the churn in my stomach back down. “I’m just not feeling well, that’s all. But he checks all my boxes. Really.”
“Huh? Checks what boxes? You sound insane. You sound, like, thirty. I know you’re protecting yourself, but this isn’t healthy. The way you pick men—it’s like a punishment. They’re all exactly the same, and you wear them like costumes. Like shields. Like you’ve got something to prove.”
I poked at an ice cube in my cold brew, which I’d yet to sip. “It’s just...”
“He doesn’t even know about your brother. Or your shit with your mom or anything. That’s not normal. How are you going to explainthe gala you’re planning? How are you going to introduce him to your parents? Are you just going to bring him and be like, surprise, my brother’s dead, and my mom acts like he was the second coming of Jesus, do you want the chicken or the beef, do you want to meet the junior senator from the great state of New York?”
“I know, I know.”
Lola sighed. “Does he even know half the story about you and Tyler? That you guys grew up together? That you guys had a thing?”
“We did not have a thing,” I said, closing my eyes. A strike of memory: Tyler’s mouth on my ribs, his breath on my skin, my heart in his hands. Lace, sliding down my hips. His body, hovering over mine.Soon, he said, drawing careful swirls down the slopes of my stomach.So, so soon.I could not stop touching him. “And, um, no. No.”
