Chapter Thirty-Two
Annie was annoyed with him. They were running late, and it was his fault. He had slept in, like a teenager who’d stayed up
playing video games, except he was a thirty-seven-year-old man who had stayed up reading a book he had mostly cowritten. A
crazy thing had happened to him as he read: he found that he could not put the book down. Never, never had he felt something like this rereading one of his own books. This creation of his and Merritt’s was lightning in a bottle.
It was clearly written for younger readers, and yet it called to him and moved him. He loved it.
And then Merritt’s ending—the bits she’d written herself—God, they were good. He found himself crying during the death scene and grinning goofily, unselfconsciously, as he reached the
book’s resolution. It was magical, joyful, and touching, the polar opposite of cheesy or didactic, and yet it actually said
something about what it meant to be a human, to be loved, to do good in the world.
When he had fallen asleep around 4 a.m., his thoughts were a blurry mix of elves and giants (including, near the end of the
book, a baby one), of dragons and warlocks, and of Merritt . . . so much Merritt.
Now he drove like a maniac in the blue jeep, desperate to drop Annie off and hustle over to the bookshop to tell Merritt he had loved it.
He could have called her, but he had to see her face to face, to tell her about how wonderful this thing they made had turned out to be.
More than that, he had to tell her she had been right and he had been wrong.
Screw the deadline, forget the journals. They had to do this.
“I love you, Annie,” he called as she walked into the school. “More than ice cream.”
Annie waved in a you’re-embarrassing-me way, but she grinned.
Whit was grinning, too. He made it from the school to Goodenough Books in record time and opened the door with such gusto
that he worried the bell overhead might swing off its hinge.
“Whoa,” said Huong, whom Whit did not actually know but whom Merritt had sometimes talked about. Today she wore a blue Dickies
jumpsuit and oversized hoop earrings. She stared at him from behind the counter.
“Hi. Is Merritt here?”
Huong looked at him coldly and crossed her arms.
What had Merritt told her about him?
“No,” she said.
“Doesn’t she work in the mornings?”
“Usually,” the woman said, her voice flat and uninterested.
“But today . . .”
Huong shrugged. “Not here.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful, thank you.”
She gave him a sarcastic smile and turned her eyes to the computer.
On the sidewalk outside the store, Whit pulled out his phone and texted Merritt. He waited thirty seconds for a reply before
calling, but his call went straight to voicemail.
She’s ignoring me, he thought. Or worse—she blocked me.
He had to talk to her, though. Had to.
He thought, pacing the space outside the bookstore door.
Why wouldn’t Merritt be at work? Where else could she be?
He stopped abruptly, snapping his fingers.
Of course, he realized. She was back where this all began.
“So you’re telling me,” Whit said to Wet-Looking Curly Hair Woman, “that Mrs. Pryor is here today? Merritt isn’t subbing for her?”
“Sorry, who’s Merritt again?”
“Her daughter,” Woman with the Extensive Neck Scarf Collection said. She looked intrigued. “You know,” she explained, “she
subbed when Kathleen was out on medical leave last semester. Cute girl, green glasses.”
“Oh,” Wet-Looking Curly Hair said, nodding eagerly. “Yup. A pretty girl, isn’t she, Mr. Longacre?”
Whit nearly groaned. From Goodenough Books, he had driven back to the Foothills School, speeding once again and going so far
as to cut through the parking lot of an under-construction building to beat the wait at a red light.
“Can I please have a visitor pass?”
“What?” the ladies said together, confused.
“I need to talk to Kathleen. If that’s okay.”
Adding the last part pained him, but these ladies seemed to need a gentler touch than he was currently capable of giving.
“Well,” Extensive Neck Scarf Collection said slowly, sharing a look with her colleague, “I think she’s with a class right
now, and I’d hate for her to be interrupted.”
Whit closed his eyes just briefly, then said, with all the sad-widower-ness he could muster, “I really need her help. It’s
an emergency. Please?”
The two women clocked his change in tone and posture, and their faces fell in unison.
“Oh, well, if it’s an emergency,” Wet-Looking Curly Hair said with what could only be described as rapacious pity.
Extensive Neck Scarf Collection began scrambling for a pass. “Yes,” she said, “if it’s an emergency, I suppose . . .”
Whit snatched the pass from her hands.
“It is. Thank you.”
And he tore down the hall.
Kathleen Pryor was halfway through reading Everybody in the Red Brick Building to a first-grade class. She sat in a gold-painted rocking chair beneath the tree made of construction paper and felt, and
fifteen or so kids listened from the beanbag chairs and floor pillows that surrounded her. It was a quaint scene until Whit
burst through the doors and every head snapped to look in his direction.
“Mr. Longacre,” Kathleen said, half-surprised, half-admonishing. “Is everything all right?”
Whit’s cheeks burned a bit under the gaze of so many six-year-olds and their very intrigued teacher leaning against a nearby
shelf. In an instant, he remembered the last time he’d been in this room, weighed down with an unspeakable weariness and a
sense of failure that seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then he had met Merritt, and so much had happened, and now
he stood here, huffing and puffing, invigorated.
“Yes,” he said, ignoring Kathleen’s tone and the universal attention that felt like the heat of a spotlight. “No . . . I don’t
know. I need to talk to Merritt, but she’s not at work, and she’s not answering her phone, but I need . . . I need her.”
Kathleen’s eyes opened wide.
“Whit,” she said, a little more softly, a little more gently, “if you’ll just wait fifteen minutes—”
“Kath—Mrs. Pryor, please, I can’t wait.”
Kathleen looked at the students around her, then at her watch. From the shelf, the first-graders’ teacher cleared her throat
impatiently. Kathleen sighed.
“She’s not here. She left for New York late last night—”
“New York?”
“Whit, please, if you’ll just give me fifteen minutes—”
“She’s gone?”
The teacher cleared her throat again. Kathleen set her jaw.
“Yes, dear, she left for New York—”
More throat-clearing.
“Do you need a cough drop, Ms. Santo?”
“Mm-mm,” the woman said, shaking her head with a false smile, “all good.”
Whit did not have time for this. He turned to leave.
“Where are you going, Mr. Longacre?” Kathleen called. “Whit?”
“New York,” Whit answered.
He did not look back.