Chapter 12 #2
"He's very happy," Erin said. "He's got a friend with a deaf dog and he's read forty books since April and he told Shannon last week that our apartment is better because you can hear the shop."
Graham put his hand over his mouth for a second.
"Good," he said. "That's good."
And then, because he had done every single thing she had asked for fifty-eight minutes, and because she had watched him do it, Erin said the thing she had genuinely not decided in advance.
"Three o'clock," she said.
"I know."
He stood up. He put money on the table for a coffee he had not ordered, which annoyed her, and then did not linger over it, which annoyed her more.
"Thank you," he said. "That's all. Thank you."
He got to the door.
"Graham."
He stopped with his hand on it and did not turn all the way around, which she would think about later — the discipline of a man who would not let himself be seen hoping.
"Ten days," Erin said. "The same place. Same hour. Same terms."
Two seconds.
"Okay," he said.
And he went out and got into his car and drove away without looking at the window, and Erin sat alone in a booth at Owls Head with a cold coffee and her hands flat on the table.
She did not feel triumphant, and she did not feel soft, and she was careful with herself about both on the drive home.
What she felt, coming down the harbor road with the water going by on the left, was something she had not had in six years and had not known she was missing until she put her hand on it.
She had set the hour. She had set the place, the terms, the length, and the number of them. She had said ten days and it would be ten days, not nine, because she had said so.
For five years she had lived in a house where the calendar came through from Boston with her own weekends already on it.
Now there was a man in a car heading south down Route 1 with nothing in his hands, who had said okay in two seconds, and who would be sitting in a parking lot at Owls Head in ten days at ten to two, because that was the only ground he was going to get and both of them knew who was giving it.
One inch, Erin thought.
And I'm the one holding the ruler.
She got home at four, and Wyatt was at Casey's until six, and so she did the thing she had done every weekday since October, which was sit down at the table and open the book.
She was at ninety-one thousand words. Bev had the first two-thirds and had said one word about it, which was Christ, and had then said it again with a different inflection.
The chapter she was in was the one she had been circling for three weeks. It was the scene where the husband comes to the wife's new place, eight months out, and asks for an hour.
She had known how it went since November.
She had known the whole shape of it since before she started: he comes with something.
He always comes with something, that is the entire architecture of the man, that is the point of him — he arrives with an object, a document, a gesture, some engineered piece of evidence that he has changed, and he sets it on the table, and the setting-it-on-the-table is the failure, because it asks her to hold it.
She had that scene outlined in a file. She had had it outlined for eight months. It was the hinge of the last third and it was, she had been quietly certain, the best thing in the book.
She wrote for forty minutes.
Then she read it back and sat looking at the screen.
It was dead.
Not badly written. She could not write a badly built sentence anymore.
It was dead the way a thing is dead when you no longer believe it, and she knew that feeling with total precision, because she had felt it exactly once before, at ten in the morning at this same table in October, writing four hundred careful words as though someone might come in.
She got up and walked around the kitchen.
Because here was the problem, and she made herself say it out loud in the empty room, the way she made herself say everything.
"He didn't bring anything."
He had walked into that diner with nothing in his hands.
She had asked for nothing and he had gone further than nothing, he had left his coat in the car so there would be no shape in a pocket.
And when she had asked him the question — the real one, the one she had built the whole hour to get to — he had said the thing that broke her scene in half:
If I'd told you, it would have been a receipt.
The man in her book did not know that. That was the whole of what was wrong with him. The man in her book was a man who had never once worked out that the giving was the problem, and she had built ninety-one thousand words on the certainty that he never would.
Erin stood in her kitchen with her hands on the back of a chair.
She had sold this book in October on a page and a half. It was scheduled. Bev had two-thirds of it. There was a jacket in a meeting somewhere with a title on it that she had approved by email in March.
And she had just spent an hour in a diner in Owls Head watching her own antagonist stop being available.
She sat back down and read the dead chapter through one more time, all the way, and at the end of it she did something she had not done in five books.
She did not fix it. She did not cut it. She opened a new file, and she looked at the blinking cursor on an empty page for a long moment, and she typed one line, which was not a sentence from the novel and did not belong anywhere in it:
What if he stops asking?
Then she sat looking at that.
Downstairs the shop bell went and Owen said something to somebody about the weather.
That's not the book, Erin thought, with total clarity, and a kind of dread she had no name for.
That's the ending, and it isn't his to write, and I have got twelve weeks.