“I think she decided she didn’t want to be the one who sold everybody else out.”

  “Not it at all,” Bo said. “You’re wrong. She got scared. She was in until I told her about what happened to me in the orchard. Then she looked the place up and read Merritt’s book and it was a deal breaker for her. Apparently, she’s already a big believer in ghosts. She said—and I quote—I don’t fuck with that stuff.”

  “Maybe I don’t, either.”

  “OK,” he said. Then he waited like he was expecting her to say more.

  She didn’t.

  “Listen,” he said. “I have no idea how you personally feel about ghosts. I’d love to hear more if you want to tell me. What I do know is that I made a mess of it this afternoon and so I thought, fuck it, Heather is right: coming clean is the only way. You’re in or you’re not—with all of it. It’s gonna be too many moving parts when we get out there for me not to just cop to it all now.”

  “You said this afternoon that I’d know for sure that anything happening to us was fake,” Audrey said. “Like, that it would only be practical effects to get our reaction. But now you’re saying the opposite. You’re saying it’s really haunted.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So which is it?”

  “Both,” he said. “It could be both.”

  “Cool.”

  “Listen, that’s the truth,” he said. “It’s me playing my one Brookhants hand to my every advantage. I don’t see any other way to approach this.”

  “Then how do you know for sure it’s not dangerous out there?”

  “I guess I don’t,” he said. “But I do know we’ll have eyes on you guys pretty much every second you’re there. Unless you’re in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t make me feel better.”

  He groaned. “For real now, Audrey. Doesn’t any of this sound even a little bit fun?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” he said. “I mean, I can put on my serious director voice and tell you that you’ll never get another opportunity like this again, but I’d rather lead with our collective sense of wonder. Just step back for a minute from all this minutia about who knows what and consider this: we’ll be out there in New England on the ocean, start of fall, telling curse stories in the haunted woods. I mean, what could possibly be more glorious than that? Don’t life experiences count for anything anymore?”

  “I don’t have to go to Rhode Island and lie to a bunch of people in order to have life experiences.”

  Bo laughed. “Now you sound like Merritt.”

  “She does it much better than I do.”

  “I know!” he said, still laughing. “This is why we need her. And hey, and I really don’t mean to hard sell you with this—”

  “Yes you do,” she said.

  “Yes I do,” he said. “I was talking with Heather and we were thinking it might be something if your mom played Clara’s mom. I mean, it’s like one scene, you know, but the wink of it—you as Clara, your mom as your mom—it might . . .” His words drifted off, his attention clearly grabbed elsewhere. “Ho-leeeee fuck—I think we just got our confirmation that Harper and Merritt are a real thing. Or a thing that kisses, anyway.”

  “What?” Audrey was still trying to process the offer he’d maybe just made to cast her mom as Mrs. Broward. He had made it, hadn’t he? Caroline would flip. She’d be so excited.

  “Go to Twitter,” Bo said. “They’re trending.”

  “I’m not on Twitter.”

  “Yeeeeah, but I bet you know how to get there.”

  She went. She watched a few versions of Harper and Merritt happily kissing while encircled by fans and paparazzi, Bo offering commentary as he continued to watch from his own screen.

  They kissed like it was the only thing in the world for them to be doing in that moment and they were both so totally into that. They kissed like they knew the world would soon be watching them on repeat, and they had two middle fingers and two sets of thumbs up for those viewers. They kissed like they were entirely oblivious to what had just gone down at Bo’s house, this weird and confusing and messy movie project that had now been the centerpiece of Audrey’s own past twenty-four hours.

  They kissed and they kissed on a loop.

  The anger and envy their seeming obliviousness kindled in Audrey was not at all rational, but there it was, smoking away in the pit of her stomach. And it was this, Readers, that ultimately changed her mind. Bo’s reasoning, his ghost story, his hard sell had helped, no question, though she doubted any of it would have been enough on its own. But now paired with this—

  “OK,” she said. She gave him the credit even if it wasn’t entirely deserved: “I think you might have convinced me.”

  “I did?” He sounded unsure. “Really?”

  “I think so,” she said. “My mom will be so, like—she’ll be beside herself to do this. I know she will.”

  “It’s a cameo, Audrey. Caroline can’t be the only reason you say yes.”

  “She’s not. I—it’s not about her. I have a lot of questions. I want you to please tell me everything you just told me again, even your orchard story. I’ll probably want to hear it a lot more times after today, too.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Right now?”

  “Yes, if you have time,” she said. “Explain it all again. How it’s going to go.”

  “But, just to be clear, you’re saying you’re in for the whole thing, you and Clara both?” Bo asked. “I want confirmation of your total commitment, here.”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, so let me tell you the deal about Brookhants,” Bo started. He started again. He told her everything again. And more.

  And while she listened, Audrey watched that clip of Merritt and Harper kissing again and again and again.

  Side Talk #2

  Harold Brookhants Makes His Case

  Alexandra Trills’s mother died during childbirth.

  Alex’s father, Ogden, who was the first to call her Alex, had been diagnosed with melancholia even before his young wife died, and his condition only worsened after.

  Ogden and his newborn daughter moved into a somewhat shabby house across the street from his parents’ grander house. Despite once having more ambitious plans for his career, Ogden settled into a regional sales position within his father’s millinery business. This position required him to often be away on travel, which meant that Alex was largely raised by nursemaids who, as she grew, switched out for governesses. Alex was quite fond of these women, even when her cleverness outpaced their own. (She was a serious and obedient child who rarely complained.)

  Alex’s father encouraged her scholarly aptitude, even despite any social conventions it brushed up against regarding her sex, and even despite his parents’ claims that he was making an odd duck even odder. When Ogden was home, father and daughter often read together after supper, or simply talked to each other about what they were reading. It was Ogden who first put thoughts of college into his child’s mind, where they grew into plans for college.

  Until, that is, Ogden Trills hanged himself in his hotel room in Maine. Alex was then eleven. She was moved across the street and into her grandparents’ house, one of elaborate customs and rules. Her father was rarely mentioned, and what he’d done was never mentioned, except as a dark mark upon her.

  Her grandparents fretted openly and often that she had inherited the melancholy, as they called it. They worried about how tall and slim and masculine she was. They worried about how much time she spent reading, and the things she said—when she said things—and how on earth she’d find a husband. Who would have her? She was such a peculiar girl. The very attributes her father had once celebrated in her were now topics of constant concern.

  Perhaps Alex’s grandparents worried themselves to death, because by the time she was seventeen, both were gone, one after the next. Later, Alex would consider this the greatest kindness they had ever shown her. For once they, and their objections, were cleared from her life, she had freedom to set its course.

  Her only other close relative—her father’s brother, Uncle Lawrence—was glad to let her. He now had his father’s millinery business to run and no time or interest to spend on the hands-on rearing of a bookish niece entering her late adolescence. Ogden had left her enough money to pay for an education at the college of her choosing—and not very much more than that—and so Uncle Lawrence sent her on her way.

  Which is how she eventually ended up at Wellesley. Where, as you already know, Readers: she thrived. And in that thriving, because of it, she met our Libbie Brookhants, who was then Libbie Packard.

  Despite Alex’s reputation as Alex the Flirt, her previous courtships at Wellesley had been just that: romantic farces full of high ideals and vaguely courtly gestures. After years of her grandparents’ admonishments about her looks, she had happened into her desirability quite by accident in college. Something about her studiousness (which was never performed) and her sincerity, enclosed within the long, thin shape of her (a shape then dressed in fitted jackets or her rowing costume) produced the right alchemy of attraction for her classmates during those years.

  Once she recognized this desirability, Alex played into it, certainly; but she had not planned for it and in many ways was still quite naive about its strength. She understood herself to be rather more stoic than the girls who fawned over her and she very much liked that contrast, liked thinking of herself as the object of desire, one who was desired precisely because she did not invest too much of herself in the matter.

  This changed with Libbie Packard.

  By the time Libbie made her move at the Follies, the semester was all but finished, so they were forced to acquaint themselves via a vigorous exchange of letters—which suited them both. As the summer ticked by, these letters moved from conventional to revealing, to increasingly, teasingly intimate, always with Libbie as the one to first cross the next threshold, Alex following tentatively along.

  Whatever boundaries they pushed against, they did so only with ink and paper, their desire sealed up in envelopes and shipped off to await a private response.

  However, when the two of them came back together in the flesh for fall semester, they promptly combusted.

  Before Libbie, Alex had believed that all carnal pleasures outside of marriage were base. She felt they were an affront to her high esteem for women as the fairer sex and beneath the pure sentiment that might only exist between two ladies who loved free of concupiscence.

  After Libbie, Alex didn’t know what that earlier Alex had ever been thinking.

  But only—and this is crucial to understanding Alexandra Trills’s mindset, eye-rolling Readers—because she knew that she and Libbie Packard were truly, truly in love. Alex came to understand their shared carnality as an expression of that love, which, she believed, did more than absolve it. It sanctioned it.

  Although they were not so very apart in years, Libbie seemed then, to Alex, so terrifically young and bold, so refreshingly modern in her way of seeing the world and her place in it. Modern without being unsavory. Despite that Libbie came from far more money (however new that money might have been)—and with it its own great burdens of expectation—she simply did not seem noosed by convention in the way Alex so often did. Indeed, she was so free and easy that it was quite natural for Alex to feel more free and easy when with her.

  Their most significant dilemma was that by the time they finally coupled up at Wellesley, Alex was a senior, and Libbie only a junior. So they spent their last overlapping school year drunk on each other, and then had no choice but to sober up and separate.*

  Libbie took this well. Alex did not.

  Libbie felt ready to woo and pursue others, many others, she hoped, within her lifetime. Men and women—probably more women than men, but who could say for certain? She might marry. She might not. She might move to Paris with Sara Dahlgren and disappoint her parents when news of her exploits reached them. (Or disappoint her brother, the senator; for he would surely be the most disappointed.) All around her, she saw young women like herself striking out as originals. And she wanted to be one, too.*

  Alex had no such plans. For Alex, Libbie Packard was it. Libbie Packard was all. At least when it came to matters of the heart. Libbie Packard had wanted her. Her, peculiar Alexandra Trills. (And not only to wear on her arm as they crossed campus.) It was as if Libbie Packard had somehow gotten inside of her, with more than her hands or mouth, I mean. To lose her now would be like cutting off a part of herself. She’d no longer be whole. When they’d read Henry James’s The Bostonians together, hadn’t they laughed at Verena choosing Basil Ransom? And cursed it? Of course the great love affair of that novel belonged to Olive and Verena and not to Verena and Basil.

  But what could Alex do now, while they were apart? Write letters, for one. Which she did. She wrote the longest, most confessional letters of her life. Were they desperate, these letters? A bit. But Alex then felt desperate for Libbie. For her Libbie, still away at Wellesley and no doubt pursuing her new conquests with aplomb. Libbie did write her back. But inconsistently, and with little of the passion she’d once put to paper.

  It was a spectacular and particular cruelty, Alex thought: for Libbie Packard to be the one to make her feel more desired, and more complete, than anyone else ever had, and then for Libbie Packard to extinguish that desire at will.

  She’d had her heart broken, Readers. Perhaps you’re familiar with the state.

  And that state could have been the end of their story. Their story together, I mean.

  Alex and Libbie’s separation might have lasted for years longer than it did, maybe for always, if there hadn’t come a carnival of marvels that set the world talking and made Libbie—and the rest of the Packards—more proud of their hometown than even they could quite believe:* the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Perhaps better known to you as the Chicago World’s Fair.) If ever there was a site more rich with spectacle, or which provided a better reason for hosting the passionate reunion of two young American lady WASPs of the future, I do not know of it.

  After months without any words at all between them, Libbie wrote to ask Alex to come visit that summer, to take in the city and, of course, their fair fair. Mr. Packard would pay her way. (First class. Naturally.)

  As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, Readers, our Alex said yes.

  She arrived in Chicago in the full scorch of August. She’d come on the train from Providence, where she’d recently finished her first year as one of only a handful of female graduate students then enrolled at Brown University. She’d bought a new skirt and shirtwaist and two new dresses and hats for this trip (she’d asked her uncle Lawrence for money, something she hated to do, so you know it was important to her), and she felt wonderfully independent, if occasionally also a notch too bold, traveling alone on the train.

  Back in Rhode Island, Alex had been living quite contently (and chastely) with a companion, grade-school teacher Edith Hays, nursing her heartache all the while, and from the moment she spotted Libbie at the train station—Libbie in her pale blue summer dress, standing on her tiptoes atop a shoeblack box that she borrowed for the purpose of scanning the crowd of recent arrivals—Alex had wanted nothing more than for the two of them to wind themselves together like a jasmine vine in The Orangerie.*

  Libbie hopped down from the box and ran through the crowd to reach Alex. They embraced and Alex thought: We’ll fall right back into what we were. She’s called me to her and I’ve come.

  But then, during their hansom ride to the Packards’ impressive home, Libbie was distracted, giving half answers to Alex’s questions. Here they were together in Chicago, which was just then electric with current to spare, but Libbie seemed preoccupied with something, or someone, else.

  Alex wanted to ask her about it. She wanted for them to shut themselves up in Libbie’s massive corner bedroom overlooking a park—was everything so grand and green and new in Chicago?—and talk and talk. And then maybe to do much more.

  But there was no time.

  At the house they were met by Libbie’s parents, two of her brothers and their wives and loud children. Alex dutifully toured the property and admired the art she was expected to admire. Then she freshened up in her guest room (which was several rooms and a long hall away from Libbie’s own) before late-afternoon cocktails, and then they were off again, this time in the three separate carriages it took to carry them all. They were expected at a reception honoring Libbie’s father’s contributions to the success of both the fair and, more broadly, the city of Chicago.

  The Packards had been coming to the fair since its opening day. Mr. Packard was even forced to miss Libbie’s Wellesley graduation because of it. But more than this: the World’s Columbian Exposition simply was her city that summer.

  However, other than a few lines in Libbie’s invitation letter, and what she’d read in newspapers, Alex had no real sense of what to expect when they swept in the dignitary entrance that night: the glittering dreamscape that was the White City. And she wasn’t in the mood for it, anyway. She was tired from her long journey and now worried about the strain between them, Libbie’s preoccupation.

  They disembarked their carriages and even in their rush to the reception hall (all of this old hat for the rest of the party) Alex could see that the scale of the fair was overwhelming and its crowds the same. It was also very hot outside, in this late stretch of evening, and she felt like a wrung-out rag. She hadn’t expected to do so much so soon and rather wished she’d stayed behind at the Packards’ house to rest.

  They hurried along as a group, escorted by an official with a red rose in his lapel and a walk that was nearly a jog. Once or twice, Libbie pointed out this building or that, but Alex had no time to really take them in, and then it was up and into the hall where Mr. Packard was to give a speech. A glass of champagne was put in Alex’s hand, and as the room swelled with swells, she felt like she might faint. She needed to eat something and to sit down, preferably, while she was doing so.