Chapter 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.”
“You’re just looking for a reason to prance around in a microscopic flapper dress, aren’t you?”
She laughed, leaning back against the salt-roughened edge of a crooked metal sign. No Trespassing, it posted. Private Drive. I ignored the pit in my stomach and instead focused on the warm and pleasant swirl just above it. Katie’s eyes were twinkling.
“I think we both know,” she said, “I’ve never needed an excuse to do that.”