Chapter Nine
Merritt stared at the radio dial in her car, fully aware that she was being ridiculous. How many NPR stories about one measly
novel could there be? She jammed her finger into the button and waited, defiance keeping her body rigid. It was just the normal
hourly newsbreak stories. Increasingly bleak political news, a merger of two media conglomerates, and a natural disaster in
Kentucky—all were more important than her own personal calamity. And now here came Krys Boyd!, talking to a musician who had released a critically acclaimed country music album. Merritt did not care, but it felt like
a victory that she had turned on the radio at all, and it took her mind off Graydon Lyons as she drove to Whit’s house.
She had worked out a new schedule with Diana, having alluded to a second part-time job that she took pains to make sound a
lot like copywriting. On days when she wrote with Whit, she would spend the mornings at Goodenough Books, leave at lunch,
and then return to the store to close when needed. She had sold only one copy of Serious Games today, to Ian Hoult. He was one of the local authors and someone she had pretended to like back in grad school, when she
felt compelled to care about such things. This morning she pretended not to recognize him.
Merritt tossed her head a bit to rid it of these thoughts. It was time to transition to ghostwriter mode. She had ideas for
Whit, and she was determined, now more than ever, to execute them with glorious precision.
Merritt had carefully planned things so that she would arrive early at Whit’s.
She pulled out a large thermos of her mother’s chicken soup with leeks and rice and tried not to feel like a schoolgirl with a packed lunch as she ate it there in the front seat.
With each spoonful, she added a bullet point to her checklist for the afternoon: she had ideas for the outline and for a potential new character, and a theory she’d been working on, since long before Whit came into her life, about the half-fairy and an allusion to Sleeping Beauty was gaining steam in her brain.
She was waving her spoon in the air—a quirk of hers when she got a good bite or a good idea—when a knock on her window nearly sent her soup flying.
It was Whit, of course. She rolled down the window.
“Hi,” she said, embarrassed.
Whit looked like he was trying not to laugh. “What are you doing?”
“Eating my lunch.”
“Out here?”
She shrugged. “I don’t like eating in front of people.”
“You ate at the bistro.”
“You were eating, too, that’s different.”
She could see Whit’s breath. He held himself by the elbows, which were covered by a tan Carhartt that (just face it, Merritt) looked quite good on him, showing off his sturdy arms and broad shoulders.
“Will you just come inside? It’s cold out here.”
“I’m warm,” she joked.
He had already turned around to walk in.
“Come inside,” he called without looking back.
As she screwed the thermos lid back on, Merritt let herself smile.
“So,” Merritt said, as she removed her coat, “I have some more ideas.”
“Me too,” Whit said, trying not to sound too excited by this fact.
“And I have this.”
Merritt pulled the signed contract from her tote.
“Everything look okay?”
Merritt made a show of pretending to think.
“Yeah,” she said eventually, flatly. “It’s . . . yeah. Everything looks shipshape.”
Whit laughed and carefully avoided her fingers as he grabbed the paper.
“Good. You eat, and I’ll make tea.”
Whit reviewed his other plans for the day as they headed for the kitchen. He was a great outliner himself, so he knew there
was no chance of them completing their full blueprint today. That took patience and extreme care for a book like this one,
with its four previous installments and its ravenous, critical fans. But he had spent the night before looking over Merritt’s
work, which she’d left behind.
He had already read Helen’s books, and he’d reread them this last year as he tried to find the gumption to write the next
one. But last night had been different. Reading Merritt’s character briefs was like encountering a piece of really good literary
criticism: it unlocked something for him. He was understanding these characters now as fully realized individuals with years
of history and central experiences, with quirks, fears, strengths, and, most importantly, desires. He felt a now-familiar
burst of shame at the realization that it had taken Merritt to stir this appreciation in him. He wished he’d been able to
feel it when Helen had been here and to praise what she’d made more openly and honestly.
The truth was, he had needed Merritt’s insights. For the first time, he knew, consciously, what Helen’s characters wanted—he
got it. It made sense. They made sense in a way they never had before. By the time he finished reading Merritt’s briefs, he felt more confidence in the
success of this project than he had yet.
“Your notes are wonderful,” he told her now as he put the kettle on and Merritt finished her soup at the table.
“Oh,” she said, her spoon inches from her face. “Thank you.”
“You sound surprised.”
She shrugged. “I am.”
“You really get these books, you know? You’re helping me get them.”
Whit spotted the barest trace of redness in her cheeks before Merritt dropped her face to stare at her soup.
“And anyway,” he continued, “I think we should start with Ursula, the half-fairy.”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked about the middle, right?” he said, aware of the heightened energy in his voice. “How it’s a bit murky and all,
but I think that’s fine. We have a sense of the beginning, and the end is taking shape, and what needs to happen now, I think,
is that we focus on our three protagonists and their arcs. The middle should naturally fill in that way, and Ursula seems
like a good place to start.”
“Why her?” Merritt asked, covering her mouth and trying unsuccessfully to mask a slurping sound. Whit hardly noticed.
“Because of what you said.” He waved his hand enthusiastically before picking up a stack of papers on the counter. “In here.
How she’s been steady and diligent and all those things for three and a half books, and how it was only in book 4 that we
really saw her start putting her own story first. So let’s do it, too. Let’s put her story first.”
“Are you sure you should be drinking caffeinated tea?” Merritt asked.
Whit moved his eyes from the papers he still held aloft to the mugs and teabags in front of him.
“I’m fine,” he said eventually. “I’m just excited.”
Merritt smiled at him. “So am I. I have some ideas I want to talk about, too, but let’s do your thing first.”
“What ideas?”
She shook her head, still smirking. “Nope. I don’t think we should let whatever this is”—she gestured to his entire body—“go
to waste.”
“Fair,” he said, laughing to himself as he let the boiling water tumble into the mugs. “Let’s go in here.”
Merritt followed him into the living room, where logs crackled in the grate. He sat in one squishy armchair and gestured to
its companion on the other side of the fire.
Whit had made the barest sketch of an outline, based on his and Merritt’s conversations about beginnings, middles, and endings.
Now, showing it to Merritt, he tried not to be too self-congratulatory about this rare feat of actually doing work, but Merritt sensed it.
“You did this on your own?” she asked, clearly fighting a smile.
“Yes, in fact I did,” Whit laughed. “All by myself.”
She was nodding her head slowly, pursing her lips into a frown like someone highly impressed. “Wow.”
Whit rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “No autographs, please.”
After talking for a bit about how to flesh out this outline, they eventually developed a system that felt intuitive to them.
Merritt would dump information and insights about the various characters and their motivations, and Whit would suggest bullet
points of plot to get them from point A to point B to point C, which Merritt would rearrange before Whit went back through
once more with his mystery novelist’s eye for things like pacing and probability.
Then they started and, to Whit’s delight, it worked. They were a symbiotic, self-perpetuating machine that relentlessly churned through chapters and plot points in a way Whit
found both wildly unfamiliar and deeply thrilling.
They continued this process for an hour or so, sitting in their chairs until Merritt got down on the floor to spread out her various printed materials. Whit felt awkward sitting above her, so he joined her there.
“More tea?” he asked after another half hour. His body had begun to ache in embarrassing ways, and he needed to stand for
a bit.
“Sure,” she said. “Let me just finish this one thing.”
In the kitchen on his own, Whit found himself grinning, really grinning, and he was so taken aback that he actually touched
his mouth with his fingers like he did after getting numbed at the dentist.
What was going on?
He knew what was going on: they were writing. He and Merritt were actually writing, and it was going really well, and when
he’d thought about the Task over the last few days, he hardly even used the word “Monumental” because they were sharing the
load and it was, unbelievably, quite bearable. That was why he was grinning.
Except.
Except that he and Merritt were sharing the load. The phrase lingered in his brain. Had this been what Helen had in mind when she left the book to him? Who knew? A surge
of frustration welled up in him, a streak of defensiveness toward Helen and her enigmatic, secretive ways. What else was he
supposed to do? Whit had been so painfully out of his depth before Merritt came along. He had needed someone to save him from
the weight of inaction, and it was starting to look like Merritt had been the perfect choice. He should not feel like he needed
to apologize for doing the savvy thing required to save the Greenwood Castle series.