Chapter Eighteen
Merritt drove with purpose. She felt like the main character in a network TV series about a strong, smart professional woman
who doesn’t need a man to complete her. Something like righteous determination was animating her, giving every pump of the
gas, every turn of the wheel, an edge of significance. She and Whit had almost kissed, and that was perhaps unfortunate, but
she wouldn’t let it derail this huge career opportunity. (“Huge career opportunity” was something they said on those TV shows.)
Today she was going to be so cool. The consummate professional.
She parked in her usual spot and allowed herself thirty seconds of staring at the house through narrowed eyes, nodding along
to the Cranberries song playing from her car speakers. The opening credits were winding down. It was time to go in.
As she walked to the door, the song still played in her head, alongside the thought What would Dolores O’Riordan do? She would probably not have had as many scruples as Merritt did about eating in front of people (a quirk that had led Merritt,
in her singularly focused state, to have lunch before leaving the bookstore), but that didn’t matter. Today Merritt was devil-may-care.
She was rock ’n’ roll. She was—
She was staring at the open front door, which now framed one of the most beautiful women Merritt had seen in her life.
Suddenly the last five minutes of her thought life became deeply embarrassing.
This woman must never know she had mentally used the words “rock ’n’ roll” to describe herself.
She was wearing a light brown, ribbed mock-turtleneck tucked into jeans, which as a sentence was offensive to Merritt but in the present moment was somehow the chicest thing she’d ever seen.
“Hi,” the woman said warmly. She had lips and eyebrows that were impossibly yet naturally full. “I’m Evie. You must be Merritt.
I’ve heard a lot about you.”
What an absolutely terrifying statement. A vision flashed before Merritt’s eyes of grabbing this woman by the shoulders and
begging her, “What has he told you?” Instead, Merritt smiled what felt like an incredibly stupid smile.
“Hi. I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” she said, which was essentially a lie. A lot? Really?
“Come in,” Evie said with a nod. “Whit ran out to get some tea, which he seemed to think was suddenly urgent, but he should
be back any minute. It sounds like you’ve fully saved his life.”
Evie had moved seamlessly from one subject to the next, but at these words, Merritt hesitated. In response, Evie halted on
her track to the living room.
“He said that?”
“Maybe not in those exact words,” Evie said, “but I got the picture.”
“When?”
Her voice had gone all squeaky and, well, there went playing it cool. The presence of this woman had made Merritt short-circuit.
“What do you mean?” Evie asked. Merritt had expected her to look confused, but instead she and her perfectly threaded eyebrows
seemed interested, almost excited.
“Sorry, just wondering if he said that today or last week or what.”
“Why? Did something happen?” The eyebrows were arching now.
Merritt—stupid, stupid—scrambled for a lie. “No, nothing like that. It felt like we were hitting a wall last week. Not getting anywhere. I just wanted to make sure he was still happy with me. With the work we’re doing, I mean.”
Sure, Merritt, overexplain, that will help.
“Oh,” Evie said, squinting toward the ceiling and demonstrating a remarkable gameness for this round of twenty questions.
“He said you’ve been . . . I think the words were ‘exceptionally helpful,’ but it could have been ‘astonishingly helpful.’
Though that sounds a little more gushing than the Whit we both know. And that would have been Sunday, I’m pretty certain.”
Relief caused Merritt to take too long a pause.
Evie leaned her head toward Merritt, as if trying to hear someone through mumbles. “There’s something you’re not telling me,
which is fine because we met thirty seconds ago, but I think maybe you could use a cup of coffee?”
Merritt said that she could, and the two women small-talked while Evie fiddled with the kettle and the French press. She asked
Evie about her freelance work, and Evie asked Merritt about her job at the bookstore and the Samantha Irby book they had both
recently read. Merritt immediately liked this woman.
“Now,” Evie said, handing Merritt a mug of deep black coffee, “drink that, while I tell you embarrassing stories from Whit’s
childhood.”
Merritt laughed harder than she expected.
“Well,” a voice said from the doorway. “This is a harrowing sight.”
It was Whit, holding a now unnecessary box of tea. His voice flipped a switch in Merritt, her fuzzy uncertainty returning
at speed. She set her jaw.
“What did you hear?” Evie demanded, jutting out an accusatory finger.
“Just threatening laughter, that’s all.”
“Good,” she said, and that made both her and Merritt laugh again.
Whit looked genuinely frightened. He stood a little stupidly for a moment before finally speaking up again.
“Well, should we get to work?”
Merritt looked to Evie, who was clearly crestfallen at having lost the chance to divulge juicy details about her brother’s
past.
She sighed.
“Okay. If we must.”
Things were off today, and Whit chastised himself. He had been so focused on Annie and on Evie being in town, and then when
the time came, he’d been nervous about his sister meeting Merritt—so nervous that he’d made up the false pretense of going
out for more tea in order to avoid bumbling through their initial meeting. Driving back from the store, he’d imagined that
maybe somehow they could go straight back to normal, but then he’d had to watch as Merritt’s face went from laughing naturally
with Evie to a strained, toothy grin at the sight of him.
Merritt sat there typing at the kitchen table, and even the sound of her keystrokes seemed unusually upbeat.
“What?” he said, thinking she’d spoken.
She looked up, her eyes too wide and her smile too polite. “Hm?”
“I thought . . .”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Oh.”
He tried to turn his wince into a smile. God, if you wanted to take me now, you could.
More silence. This was stupid. He should just acknowledge what happened. He geared himself up to speak, but when he opened
his mouth, his lips rebelled, flopping around uselessly like the jowls of a bloodhound.
Mercifully, Evie appeared.
“I’m going to do some errands before I pick up Annie,” she said from the archway that connected the breakfast room to the
hall. “Do you need anything?”
Whit tried not to look like a puppy being left at the pound.
“I’m good,” he said, hesitantly. “Do you?”
“All good here!” Merritt said, her voice chipper in a way he usually associated with cartoon chipmunks.
Evie stared for a moment at the trainwreck before her, then turned her gaze to Whit.
“Actually, I need you to show me how to drive the Range Rover.”
Whit paused. “How to—”
“I don’t have a car,” Evie explained to Merritt, before her eyes went back to searing into Whit’s. “And the Range Rover is
so fancy, please come show me all of its bells and whistles so I don’t drive into a ditch.”
The words came out with such increasing speed and intensity that Whit was already on his feet before she finished.
In the garage, she turned on him.
“What on earth—”
Whit flinched.
“Oh, please don’t start.”
“Something happened, you little liar!”
“Lower your voice.”
“Okay,” she hissed. “But you are being a real weirdo in there. Both of you. She was much more normal before you showed up.”
“Thank you so much for pointing that out. Helpful as always. And now you’ve pulled me in here on the dumbest possible pretext,
and I get to walk back in and tell Merritt, sorry, my sister is just really scared of cars.”
“Of Range Rovers,” she corrected.
“I’m going to kill you.”
Evie watched him, and when he didn’t speak again, she sighed.
“Fine, be that way. But when I get back, we will be having a big debrief.”
“There is nothing to—”
“Whit,” she said, raising her voice and looking pointedly at the door to the house. “When I get back, you are going to tell me—”
Suddenly ten years old again, Whit pressed his hand against her mouth. She pulled away laughing, but looked ready to yell
again.
“Okay,” he whisper-yelled.
“Thank you,” she said in her own cutesy, falsely chipper way, before getting in the car and starting it, literally, with her
eyes closed.
Whit trudged back inside and found Merritt sitting with her arms crossed and a smirk on her face.
After a moment, he asked, “What did you hear?”
Merritt pretended to think. “I believe the phrase was ‘you little liar,’ followed by ‘you are going to tell me’ . . .”
Whit threw his head back. “God.”
Now Merritt grinned openly.
“I’m sorry about that,” Whit said. The tone of the room had shifted for the better, and he found he could suddenly speak naturally.
“And I’m sorry for what happened at the party. You were telling me something really vulnerable and difficult, and I ruined
it by getting carried away in the moment.”
Merritt pulled back just slightly but relaxed immediately now that the silence was broken.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Or not only your fault.”
“I was pretty tipsy.”
“And I had just been accosted by your friend Ian.”
“Former friend,” he said. His whole body felt suddenly light again. “Anyway, it was stupid.”
“We’d been drinking,” she agreed. “We were at a party.”
“All kinds of silly things happen at parties.”
Merritt was smiling, too, happy to be pushing through. “Exactly.”
It felt as if the windows had been opened and a light breeze had whisked away their former awkwardness.
She squinted at his face for a moment.
“I must have been pretty tipsy myself,” she said.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
Another beaming smile. “Normally, I would have fled at the sight of that mustache.”
“I am going to ignore that low blow,” he said, turning toward the kitchen, “and make us some tea.”
“Great,” Merritt said. “I’ll have my usual.”