I’d laugh, and then, grinning, I’d wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, float back to my cottage, and get to work.
I had, with Meredith’s encouragement, decided to rewrite my manuscript from start to finish a second time. Not because the book needed a gut job but rather because my understanding of the protagonist had changed, and much of the old prose no longer rangtrue. It was more work to fix the falsities in my sentences than to fling together new ones.
And besides, it had been magic, writing here. It was happening in the manuscript Katie and I were drafting, and it was also happening in my own. I did not know if it was the quiet or if it was Meredith’s mentorship—her success story. Some charmed proof of concept that helped me keep my eyes on the prize and believe I could achieve it too. But whatever it was, this house had played host to the best writing I’d ever done.
Everything that came onto the page propelled me forward. Even when the words were wrong, even when I had to use the backspace to delete five, ten, fifteen pages of text, I did not care. I was in complete control of my story. Whenever I had to kill a darling or compress a flashback or combine two characters into one, I was swift with the knife. I would slaughter something I’d clung to for years, and the moment I’d done it, I’d laugh because it worked. Because it just kept getting better.
And then, one night, hours and hours into another effortless session, I saw it, right there at the top of my screen.
The date.
August 1.
I walked to the edge of the water, the sand dark and lonely, and then sat with my toes curled into the shoreline and the tide washing up to my ankles. And then, with nothing else to do, with nothing else to distract me or make what I’d done fall away or be forgiven, I put my head in my hands and repeated to myself those same six words.
I am not what I did.
I am not what I did.
I must have stayed like that for hours because when I finally opened my eyes—had I been asleep? Dreaming? Dissociating?—Meredith was sitting a few feet from me, doing almost the exact same thing. Staring out into the horizon, searching for something that was not there. She had a cup of coffee in her hands. The mug was filled to the brim and steaming.
She passed it my way but said nothing.
“Thank you,” I muttered before taking a long sip.
She nodded, still staring out to sea. The night was dark. Just whitecaps underneath the slightest sliver of a low-slung, too-familiar moon.
“Are you all right?” she said.
I shrugged. For a minute, there was quiet, and then I whispered out the words. I let them hang there—let them hover in the mist.
“I had a best friend,” I said.
More silence.
I closed my eyes again.
“He died,” I said. “Almost eight years ago.”
More quiet.
“Today was his birthday. He would’ve been twenty-seven. I never forget. I’ve never forgotten.”
“But you forgot.”
I winced, nodding softly.
“It was Katie’s brother, wasn’t it?” she said.
I turned to her, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt. I had not realized, until now, that I needed to. “Katie told you about her brother?”
“Oh, no. Not exactly.” Meredith, for a blink, glanced away. Pinothad emerged on the scene, his paws sandy and his stride slow. He sat between us and, at once, began staring out to sea. “But I saw the looks on your faces when we pulled that last trope out of the bowl. And Selma mentioned, earlier this summer, she had a hunch you and Katie had history. I may not use the internet, but Selma sure does. She knew all about Katie’s brother—has since she hired her back in college. And as for the two of you, well... You haven’t very much tried to hide the latest development from me, have you now?”
I chuckled. “Are we really that obvious?”
“Horribly obvious,” she said. “From the very start. From the moment I saw the two of you together.”
I dug my fingers into the sand. It was damp and tightly packed, and I poked holes in it. The depressions filled with water as the muscles around my mouth fought back a frown.
