Chapter 65
Tyler
I flung the final period onto the last page of my rewritten manuscript around three in the morning on a balmy and unremarkable
Wednesday. It was late August by now, and Katie, as usual, was sound asleep in my bed, a pillow threaded between her bare
and glistening legs. I sat at the table for a moment, hunched and tensed and unfathomably tired, and let the thrill course
through me for a third and final time.
And then, still flooded with the high, I clicked my laptop shut, tiptoed out the cottage door, and made my way to the beach.
Within minutes, Meredith had emerged. This had, over the past month, become something of a tradition between us. These unplanned,
pitch-black drafting breaks by the water. Sometimes, we missed each other, but at least a few times a week, the stars just
seemed to align.
“I finished,” I said as she settled onto the sand. “It’s done.”
“And?”
I let out the slightest chuckle. “You were right. Turns out it was a love story all along.”
She laughed. “Yes, well, most stories are. Even when we do not care to admit it.”
I nodded. For a while, we were both quiet. We let the waves crash. We let the stars blink. We let the sky breathe. And then,
all of a sudden, she broke the silence.
“I fell in love here, you know. Right on this very beach.”
I turned to her then. She was smiling, and sand was slipping through her fingers. All summer, I’d been too afraid to ask questions.
Too afraid to ask how or when or why she’d let this happen to her life. After all, she had no desire to stop drinking. What
good was it, encouraging her to recount whatever had crushed her? But now, here she was, offering her story to me.
“I was young,” she said. “Barely twenty-two. I’d just graduated from college, and he was working at my family’s beach club
for the summer. A trope, I know, but it didn’t feel like that one bit. It never does—not when it’s happening to you. Not when
it’s real. And god, was it real.”
I nodded. Meredith continued. “I loved him instantly. I loved him the minute I laid eyes on him. He was so different from
the boys I’d met at boarding school or university. He was a grown-up—a man. Weathered, assertive, unafraid. From that very
first night, I had this feeling he’d set the whole world on fire for me. We went on one date—simple: pizza and a walk on the
beach, and that was all it took. I couldn’t get enough of him. My parents were in Europe, and we sent the staff away. We took
over the carriage house and cooked and talked and swam and laughed. It was the easiest thing I’d ever done, loving him. I
was born to do it. It was second nature to me.”
On the shore, somehow, was Meredith’s silhouette. A projection, almost. Her story, playing out like a movie scene, nearly
how it had that night I caught sight of her crying on the beach. But this time, there was no scouring of the sea. This time,
there was another shadow beside her, and she was happy. She was young. She was free.
“What changed?” I asked. The words practically fell out of me. But I had to understand what shattered her. What made her do what Katie had told me she’d done over two decades ago: send her husband and daughter away. “What went wrong? Why’d you get divorced?”
She let out a chuckle. “Oh, Tyler, no. I had the kind of love you’d write a thousand books about. But not with Alan. Not with
the man I married.”
My stomach flipped. That vision on the sand rewound. It became a smudge—a blur. A question mark. I tried to connect the dots
but couldn’t. “Why . . . why wouldn’t you marry the person you loved?”
“I was a fool,” she said. “It was as simple as that. The summer ended, and I was moving to Iowa City, and I was a fool. I
thought I’d have a dozen more loves in my lifetime. That I’d find someone who was more like my father. Someone who was from
my world. And I suppose there was this part of me—the budding romance novelist in me—who believed we’d get a second chance
at our story. That if he were truly my soulmate, he’d come back to me.”
“But he didn’t?”
She was still sifting sand. Her fingers, an hourglass. “Time is cruel, Tyler. You must know that by now. When we shut the
door on love, we do not stop accumulating life. People wait for each other, yes, but not in the way you’d think. Not totally,
not completely. We move, we change, we settle. We get married, we start families, we take out mortgages.”
“You—You have a mortgage?”
“Oh, of course not, no. I meant that broadly.”
I laughed at that. She did too. And then she wrapped her arms around her knees and turned to me. Moonlight glimmered off her tears, and in that moment, it was the most human she’d ever seemed. The most real she’d ever be.
“Do not,” she said, “let Katie get away.”
“Oh, I . . .”
“I promise you, Tyler, there is nothing on this earth for you but love. You think you want success. You think you want to
change people with your words—make those lists, cash your checks, leave your mark.”
“It’s—”
“Without love, it is worthless. This house—the art, the money, unspeakable fame. It is all completely and utterly worthless.
It cannot hold you. It cannot whisper your name.”