Chapter Thirty-Three
He did not look back, but he did look down—at his phone to buy a plane ticket, and then again, minutes later, at the nail
in his now-flat front tire.
“Dammit,” he shouted, in a voice that echoed across the parking lot, drawing looks from a group of moms unloading Valentine’s
Day decorations from a Yukon XL.
Whit’s hands were on top of his head as he turned back and forth, cursing himself for cutting through that construction zone.
He already had his phone out, having called Willa to ask if she could pick up Annie after school and let her spend the night.
When she’d asked why, he’d simply answered “Merritt—” and Willa had said, “Say no more.”
But now this. He dialed Merritt’s number again, thinking perhaps she’d landed by now and he could talk to her about, well,
something rather than behaving in this reckless way. Once again his call went straight to voicemail. He checked how long it would take
a Lyft to pick him up, and at the sight of “30 minutes,” the electric charge that had animated him from the inception of this
plan (talk to Merritt, fix things) faltered.
For the first time that morning he paused to think about what he was chasing. What did he mean by fix things?
He had to tell Merritt he’d been wrong. That was part of it.
She was right about the book. The book was incredible.
And she’d been right about Helen—how could she not be right?
How could Helen, had she been able to read this thing he and Merritt made, want the story to go any other way, to be handed off to some stranger?
This was the only way things could go, in the end, it just was, and—
A sigh overtook Whit. He placed his hands on the car and lowered his head to the cold metal of its roof.
All of that was true, but what he was really chasing was Merritt. He had lost her, and over what? A mistake. A misguided belief.
Fear and grief. Merritt had been an antidote to that fear and a reprieve from grief. She had liked him, perhaps even loved
him, despite his sorry state, and she had helped him break the terrarium that housed his feelings—the good ones, the bad ones,
the mourning, the joy. He wanted to be close to her all the time. He wanted to kiss her, to hold her, to sit with her at dinner
while they asked Annie how her day was. He wanted Merritt in his space, to take up her space. He wanted to hold her hand.
He tapped his forehead against the car, just once, holding back the urge to cry.
“Whit? Are you all right?”
Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
Whit waited, closing his eyes as he considered his options, which, it turned out, were either speak to this person or duck
into his immobilized jeep and hide like a kid behind a too-narrow tree.
He sighed.
“Hi, Noel. I’m fine.”
Noel Pendergrass chuckled. (The nerve.)
“Oh, ha-ha, Whit. You are clearly not fine.”
Whit finally looked at the man, opening his mouth to speak but at a loss for how to explain himself. He raised his hands weakly
and then gave a wild shrug.
“I’m not, no, you’re right.”
Noel nodded.
“Rowan forgot his lunch,” Noel said. “So that’s why I’m here . . .”
The man waited, his eyes magnified slightly by his hexagonal glasses. He pulled a handkerchief from the front pocket on his Patagonia vest and wiped his runny nose, but still he waited.
“Um,” Whit said. He gestured to the flat tire to stall for time.
“Ah,” Noel said. “Need help putting on the spare?”
Whit balked at the suggestion that he might not know how to change a flat, then shook his head.
“No, I can do it, I just don’t have time if I’m going to make my flight.”
A light flicked to life in Noel’s eyes, and the genuine compassion that had shaped his face curled just a fraction into something
more complicated.
Noel smiled. “I could take you . . .”
Whit felt dread well up in him like water seeping through the sole of a worn-out boot.
“. . . but, oh, well, I hate to ask this, but could you do me a favor in return?”
Whit waited, cringing.
“It’s just that I need someone to cover carpool duty next week. Greg and I are taking the boys to the Poconos to ski, and
well . . .”
There were flights nearly every hour, from Boston to New York. Whit knew that. He could wait for a Lyft and get to Logan in
two hours. He could take a train, rent a car, there was a shuttle—except every nerve, every synapse within him pulsed with
longing. He needed to find and speak to Merritt. He needed to do this reckless, stupid thing, no matter the mental cost.
“Fine, Noel, I will help you with carpool duty.”
The man’s face lit up like a bottle rocket.
“Wonderful. Then to the airport we gooo.”
Noel spoke in a singsong voice that almost made Whit back out. But his Tesla was parked right next to the blue jeep, and within
a minute Whit had set out on the hour-plus drive to the airport, with only Noel and several Imagine Dragons–heavy playlists
for company.
Whit had gone through security, boarded the plane, and finally buckled his seat belt before he came to his senses.
He did not know why Merritt had left Whelk Harbor.
He did not know what she was doing now that she was in New York—which, he told himself as the plane began to taxi, was, you know, kind of a big place—and he didn’t know how he intended to find her.
He didn’t even know if she’d be willing to speak to him.
And still, he had spent the last eighty-five minutes in a car with Noel Pendergrass, who vacillated between talking about his and his husband’s most recent renovation of their cabin in the Poconos (“We call it ‘the cabin’ affectionately, but it’s very much a house”), describing the various leadership roles Whit could take on with the carpool team (“Social Chair Whit Longacre has a nice ring to it”), and, worst of all, singing along to every Imagine Dragons song he’d ever heard and several he certainly had not.
“Should we play Two Truths and a Lie?” Noel had asked around the time the Boston skyline first became visible, but Whit chose
that time to make a phone call to Willa to update her.
Now the plane was making its ascent, and Whit felt like a helium balloon that had whizzed away with force, enthusiasm, and
whimsy until it had suddenly become snagged on the top of a chain-link fence.
Oh God. This was a mistake. More than that, it was a supremely embarrassing and misguided grand gesture. Most grand gestures
involved some degree of certainty. When Harry sprints across the city to spill his guts to Sally, he knows exactly where her
New Year’s Eve party is. When Meg Ryan decides to leave Bill Pullman and shoot her shot with Tom Hanks, she knows there’s
at least a possibility he’ll be at the top of the Empire State Building. Flying to New York without a plan wasn’t romantic
or exciting. It was just stupid.
He had left on such a whim and arrived at the airport so close to his departure time (a personal nightmare) that he did not have a book and had been far too stressed to stop at a Hudson News to get one. It was lunchtime, more or less, and his stomach was rumbling. And he had a middle seat.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
He tried reading the in-flight magazine, but it reminded him of the writing he used to do before his first book deal. So instead
he turned his attention to his fellow passengers. The suited man in the aisle seat was clearly traveling for business. As
Whit watched him poring over spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams messages on his laptop, he did think, for a moment, Well, things could be worse for me. He turned to the woman in the window seat, who was poring over an e-reader. She seemed to be in her early twenties and wore
large noise-canceling headphones over a beanie he suspected was homemade. This woman looked entirely content, enjoying a book
in her own world, and Whit felt a kind of affection for her that only grew when he noticed the black line tattoo peeking out
of the bottom of her sleeve.
He must have been gawking, because the woman suddenly pulled away from him and slipped off her headphones.
“Can I help you?” she said, clearly on the defensive.
Whit shook himself from his stare and laughed apologetically.
“No, I’m sorry, I just . . . I noticed your tattoo of the kestrel and spoon. The Sign of the Scout.”
The woman glanced down at her upper arm, touching it with the fingers of the opposite hand.
“Oh,” she said, more mildly, “are you a fan?”
Normally, Whit would have just said, “Yes.” In the past, in moments like this one, he had occasionally said, “My wife’s a
big fan,” which had always made him laugh.
Today he told the truth.
“My wife wrote those books.”
The woman started. Whit could feel her really looking at him.
“That sounds made up, I know,” he said, “but Helen Albright Longacre was my wife.”
He wasn’t sure why he did it, but he pulled out his phone and swiped quickly back to a picture of him with Helen and Annie.
They were crouching together by a snowman, laughing.
“Oh my God.” The woman spoke in a gentle tone that contrasted with her powerful words. Then she remembered.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Her hand moved from the armrest to touch the back of Whit’s hand, for less than a second.
Whit had imagined this kind of interaction. It felt like everyone he had spoken to for the last year had known him and Helen
personally, before her death. Everyone except Merritt. This was only the second time someone had learned who he was and then,
owing to his wife’s fame and her vibrant fan base, realized what that meant. He had been prepared for something nebulously
gross. He’d thought fans like this woman, like Merritt, would ask invasive questions or overwhelm him with their sympathy
or their secondhand grief, but that simply was not what had happened.
The woman was really seeing him, and she wasn’t ogling him or quizzing him. This woman who loved his wife’s stories enough
to permanently ink a memento from them onto her skin was looking at him like he was a person.
“Thank you,” Whit said after a beat. “I guess you really liked her books?”
The woman’s mouth opened slightly. She touched her tattoo again, this time keeping her hand there.
“Do you know the character Christabel? Of course you do.”
Whit laughed.
“In the third book, when her brother dies . . .”
She clicked off the e-reader that had been resting on her lap, then touched her lips with her thumb.
“My brother died,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded.
“He died, and then I read that book, and there’s a part where she talks about how she’s fighting for him now, you know, in
her journey to the castle beneath the waterfall. And she says, ‘I don’t know if the dead can feel pride, but I’m not taking
any chances.’ ”
Whit nodded, letting her speak. The woman did a miniature shrug, lifting her hands from her lap slightly.
“It just meant something to me. I don’t know what I think about God or heaven or whatever, but most days I try to live in
a way where I think my brother would be proud of me.”
She touched her tattoo once again and added, “She gave me that. Your wife.”
Whit looked at her.
“What was your brother’s name?”
“Ethan.”
Whit nodded.
“Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“Thanks for asking. I like talking about him.”
He smiled. “I like talking about her, too. Listen, can I ask you something else?”
The woman’s eyes brightened. “Sure,” she said with enthusiasm.
“How do you think the series ends?”
She seemed confused, so Whit kept speaking.
“I mean, do you have a feeling about what should happen? When all is said and done? Am I making sense?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I just don’t know what my answer should be. I mean, in the end, it’s a story about the things we
do for the people we love. Isn’t it? Whatever else happens, I think that would be the point.”
She waited, as if wondering whether she’d said the correct thing.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He had spent the last fifteen months trying to write this book for Helen, whom he loved. It had been such a burden at first,
coterminous with his grief. But then something had changed, and it wasn’t just Merritt. The book had sort of saved him, he
realized. It had helped him write again; it had given him something vital to accomplish. And Helen, who loved him, who thought
of him even as she was dying, had given him that.
“I think you’re right,” he said, smiling again. “I think you’re exactly right.”
Whit’s first stop in the city was to grab food at a Pret, a sad, soggy premade chicken salad sandwich that he ate while wandering
around the Upper West Side. He was there, ostensibly, because that was where Evie and édouard lived, and where he’d probably
be sleeping that night. If it happened to be where the main characters of You’ve Got Mail also lived, and if he happened to know that Merritt loved that movie, well, that was incidental. He did feel near to her
there, which made him feel dumb. But he felt it nonetheless.
His conversation on the plane had left him feeling buoyed, but now, as he walked into Riverside Park in the late afternoon,
he was weighed down once again by the magnitude of his powerlessness. Whit felt more than just moronic now. Aware of how pathetic
and pitiful this had all been, Whit was startled when, at last, his phone rang and he glanced at the caller ID.
“Merritt?”
“Whit, goodness. Are you okay? Why do I have seven missed calls from you?”
“Um.” Whit felt suddenly sheepish. “Why weren’t you answering?”
He braced himself for her to remind him that she did not actually have to answer.
“I lost my phone for a bit,” she said instead. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Where are you?”
“What?”
“You’re in New York, aren’t you?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“How did you know that?”
Whit was approaching the 91st Street Garden now. Behind its black name placard and wrought-iron fence, the flowerbeds were
in a muted winter state. It had snowed in New York the previous week, and the plants looked like they were still recovering,
trying to poke out from beneath the remaining layer of dirty gray slush.
“I came looking for you,” Whit explained, leaning with his free hand on the fence. He pulled away immediately, wishing he’d
thought to grab gloves from his car back in Whelk Harbor. “I thought you might be subbing for your mom, but she told me you
were here, and so I just—”
He paused, realizing what he had just revealed.
“Sorry,” Merritt said on the phone, “did you say here? As in you’re in New York?”
He took a breath.
“Yes. I’m at Riverside Park.”
“Oh, Whit,” Merritt said, and her tone made him cringe at his foolhardiness.
“I know. I don’t know what to say.”
“No, Whit,” she said, with an apology in her tone, “I just got back to Whelk Harbor.”
Whit’s voice stopped midway up his throat, until he forced out words.
“You what?”