Chapter Twenty-Two
Act normal, act normal, act normal, Whit told himself as the party stood in the entry hall, saying their goodbyes. Kathleen was cupping Annie by the chin, looking
down at her like a good witch uttering a blessing. The Barrett-Linds had left earlier to pop in on Adrienne’s cousins a town
over, and édouard had taken on washing the dessert dishes in the kitchen, but Evie was there, saying goodbye to Merritt while
keeping one eye trained on Whit. He was stewing in his awkwardness as he tried desperately to tamp down the frenetic energy
he felt in all of him.
They had kissed. They had actually kissed, and something had passed between them, and then they hadn’t been able to talk about
it. Annie had come looking for them, wanting to show them édouard’s game, right as Adrienne and Kathleen were returning from
their walk. So Whit had spent the next several hours playing cards, eating pie, and finally, half-watching their first Christmas
movie of the season (A Muppet Christmas Carol, Annie’s choice), when all he’d wanted to be doing was talking to Merritt about how they had just kissed.
Now he was waiting to say goodbye while his sister lurked in the distance with a sinister smirk on her face. And here was
Merritt.
“See you Monday?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, wondering if his voice always sounded this vibratey. “Unless—”
“Yes?” Merritt said quickly.
“Well, I was kind of thinking about working tomorrow, if—”
“I’d love to,” she said, even more quickly.
“Great.”
“Great. Okay. See you then.”
“Okay.”
They hugged. It was a sad, pained, stiff-armed thing (their first hug), and then the hall was empty but for him and Evie.
And he was thinking a stupid thing (that he missed Merritt and wanted to call her) when he heard Evie clear her throat.
He turned to her, and she was on him in a flash.
“Something happened.”
“What?”
Her eyes were glowing. “I know it did, something happened between you two.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh my God, look at your face. You kissed, didn’t you?”
“Shh!” Whit hissed, conscious that his daughter had just gone upstairs.
“Didn’t you? They probably just got into their car, I can just go out there and ask her if you—”
“Yes, fine, yes, we kissed. Now shut up.”
Evie clapped her hands together above her head and then raised them even higher, as if she were someone praying dramatically
in an opera.
“Thank you, God. Thank you.”
Whit let himself laugh. “Oh, shut up.”
Merritt spent the car ride home urging herself to act normal, act normal, act normal.
Kathleen did most of the talking, going on about what a lovely job Evie had done with the food and the house, and how it must be good for Whit and Annie to have her around, and then they talked about édouard, and Merritt did contribute then because, as she’d told Whit, it was hard not to fawn over him, and because he had done that rare thing of being both handsome and perfectly unobjectionable all night long.
He had been funny, even, over their pie à la mode.
A perfectly nice man who also happened to be shockingly enjoyable to look at.
That was one reason Merritt knew she had it bad: she was daydreaming about a world in which a man like édouard was a side character. The whole day felt tremendously normal, natural, and then she had kissed Whit, and he’d kissed her back, and here she was,
having to act unfazed as her mom pulled into her garage.
“I think I’ll go on a walk,” she said when they walked into the kitchen.
“It’s after eight and in the forties,” her mother said, surprised. “And dark.”
“I’ll bundle up.”
Merritt quickly donned some long johns, and as soon as her booted foot hit the sidewalk, she knew she’d made the right decision.
The brick-lined streets glowed orange in the light of the lampposts and set her mind to imagining this village a hundred,
two hundred years ago, lit up then by actual flames brought by men with long, curved sticks, when women like her would be
inside, fast asleep, or perhaps writing furiously by the light of their candles. Playing whist—whatever that was—or sitting
at the pianoforte. And yes, these were just things heroines did in novels by Jane Austen and the Brontes, and who knew whether
the same was true of old New Englanders. The point was that the walking was expelling the live-wire energy roiling in her
body, and thinking about nineteenth-century ladies and horse-drawn carriages was taking her mind away from Whit Longacre—until
her phone buzzed and it was him.
To her mind, there were two opposing possibilities: either he was merely calling because they’d failed to set a time to meet up tomorrow, or he was calling with regret, with anger, with great grief and a sense that he’d betrayed his late wife.
Merritt felt an urge to answer and spit out an apology before he even spoke, but he was too quick.
“I’m sorry—”
There it was. Already.
“—for calling so soon,” he continued. “Maybe it’s more, I don’t know, smooth to wait a bit, but I just needed to talk to you.”
Oh.
“Are you okay?” he said, surprising her again. “I mean, was that okay? Do you feel okay about what happened?”
“Do you?”
She winced as she waited the space of a breath for him to respond.
“Yes. I do.”
“You do?”
“I do!”
He was smiling, she could tell. He was happy.
Oh, she was happy, too.
“So do I,” she said at last. “I feel . . . I’ve wanted . . . but, I didn’t know if you would—”
“I didn’t know I would, either.”
Merritt laughed, and she thought to herself that it was really more of a giggle, and that that was allowed. This was the sort
of thing you giggled over. There were so many factors at play—Whit had a daughter, he was a widower, they worked together—that
the whole thing felt secretive and a bit high-school-ish. It felt thrilling and difficult to talk about in complete sentences.
“Listen,” he said, after they’d laughed a bit more about their awkwardness. “Evie and édouard are leaving in two days. After
that, we should get dinner—not a working dinner, but a real dinner. A date.”
She liked that he called it a date. She liked that it was his idea. That he was letting her know where things stood. Goodness, it was refreshing.
“I’d love that,” she said. “It’s a date.”
“It certainly is.”
They hung up, and here she was, back where she started: her body full of electricity and her mind full of Whit. She walked
for another hour before finally going home to lie awake in bed, resisting the urge to pick up her phone and text him to say
good night.