Chapter Fourteen #2
as he took a breath, and then they dropped to—it couldn’t be—but they did, they dropped to her lips, and her eyes dropped
to his.
She watched as he dampened them, and then they were moving, slightly open, in her direction. Merritt took a deep breath, feeling
as though she was smelling all of him.
The door to the house opened.
“Dad,” a voice called, and Whit slid several more inches away from Merritt.
There was Annie, dressed as Velma from Scooby-Doo. Willa and Adrienne’s son—a twelve-year-old Beetlejuice—was standing behind her.
Annie looked intrigued at finding the two of them on the porch, confused even, but then her mind clearly turned to more important
things.
“Can you come inside? Albie and I want to ask you something.”
Whit shot a look at Merritt, both wary and apologetic, before turning back to his daughter.
“Sure thing.”
Whit’s face was still turned away from her, but Merritt could see the anxiousness in his body. She felt it in her own. What
had Annie seen?
“Hurry,” Annie said rapidly, and Merritt forced a smile at her childish desperation.
Slowly Whit looked back to Merritt, his eyes wide and jaw clenched in barely contained worry.
“Coming, sweetheart,” he said, not turning from her. Sorry, he mouthed.
Merritt lifted a hand jerkily, as if controlling it with a spotty remote control, and waved dismissively.
Go, she said with her face. Of course you should go.
She sat outside for a minute longer, finishing her wine, nearly consumed by a buzzy feeling in her chest. Then she grabbed
Whit’s now-cool mug and—what the heck—threw it back as well. Almost instantly, the buzziness subsided into a warm vibration.
He had been about to kiss her. There was no doubt about it. She had been thinking about this moment, or something like it,
and here, tonight, it had almost happened. Whit Longacre had felt what she felt, and he had been this close to doing something about it. And yes, Annie had almost seen them, and he had not liked that, but Merritt . . . she was pretty
certain that he did like her.
She grinned, gripped a clear glass mug in both hands, and stood to her feet. Instantly, wooziness swirled in her head, like
the shaken contents of a snow globe, and she steadied herself against an oversized terra-cotta pot. As she waited for the
feeling to pass, a wisp of chilly uncertainty met the warmth inside her.
He was her new boss. This was her big break. She was going to be a writer.
What was she doing?
She went inside, deposited the mugs in the sink, and made for the front door, abandoning her lost top hat. It was time to
go home.
Whit could not find Merritt anywhere.
The thing Annie had needed to ask him was about a picture she’d found with Albie, of the four parents, several years younger:
Willa, Adrienne, Whit, and Helen, dressed as Lord of the Rings characters. Whit was, embarrassingly, a sad sexless imitation of Aragorn, and Helen was resplendent in a blond wig, a pregnant Galadriel.
It hadn’t really made sense to have a baby just then. They were two struggling writers. Whit had an agent and a manuscript
on submission with publishers, and he was writing the occasional piece for regional travel magazines about local flavor—things
he didn’t have to actually travel to do. Helen was writing trade manuals by day, hating every second of it, and by night completing
what would become The Door in the Garden Wall. They felt their pennilessness all the time, but they believed in each other so much, and then along came this baby, a girl,
like they had wanted—and they were very, very happy. Helen looked so lovely.
“Albie said that’s me in there.”
“It is,” Whit had said, resting his hand on the top of her head. “Your first Halloween. Do you think you dressed up in there?”
Annie had laughed. “In her belly?”
“Yeah,” Whit said, smiling back. “Maybe you had a tiny little goblin or vampire costume.”
“Dad.” She took the picture frame back. “Can I keep it?”
Her face was eager and hopeful and, Whit realized with a pang, a little bit sad.
Whit looked to Albie, who was in seventh grade, as if asking his permission—but of course, it was the other way around.
“I’m sure Willa won’t mind,” he said.
Annie beamed and clasped the frame to her chest, giving it one last look before handing it back to her dad.
“Will you hold it for me?”
“I will.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She dabbed at one eye with a rapid hand and then ran off with Albie to join the other kids upstairs.
Whit looked at the picture, their youthful faces, remembering what it had been like before Helen was a New York Times bestselling author and he was a New York Times bestselling author’s husband.
A relic from a different time. Something wriggled in his chest, and he let himself feel it for a moment: the grief and the longing for the woman he had only had for ten short years.
But as he focused his eyes to assess his own face, it felt like part of him split in two.
The Whit in the picture was exuberant, and the Whit of the present day felt a kinship with him that would have been impossible a month ago.
He missed his wife terribly. And he had tried to kiss Merritt tonight. Both things were somehow true.
But now he’d probably lost Merritt as well. He had looked for her all over Willa’s house for at least fifteen minutes, and
then his text—Where’d you run off to?—had gone unanswered. Whit could play dumb only for so long before he had to face the obvious truth: he had scared her away.
The almost kiss, out there on the porch, was born from a swell of feeling that seemed to have filled his whole body, and he’d
acted rashly. He’d known it then, in the moment, known he was being stupid, unprofessional, presumptuous, and now he was reaping
the cost.
When he was sure she was no longer inside, Whit wound his way to the front door. It was pointless, he knew, and yet still
he peeked into the lane before him. It was empty but for a spiral of dead leaves floating on the wind.
Whit closed the door and pressed his forehead against the wood, trying to ignore the sound of laughter and the faint strains
of the Kidz Bop version of “The Monster Mash” filtering down from where the children played above.
God he hated parties.