And what a wretched fate it would be. That much was certain. Madame Verrett enumerated a host of dreadful futures for Libbie Packard, all of them avoidable, of course, if she’d only marry rich old Harold and partake in a ceremony or two, in France, before delivering her child there.

  Alex did try to argue with them, to counter their assurances with her own ample doubts and misgivings, but together, over those miles and miles, they wore her down.

  After all, she did want to braid her own life to that of her Libbie. Was she so wrong for wanting this, Readers? Libbie herself didn’t seem to know what she wanted. Couldn’t Alex want enough for them both?

  And if Harold was going to die soon, anyway—and both he and Madame Verrett were so adamant that he would—then so what if he tried a few more of his nonsense rituals before he did?

  Because of course they would be nonsense! What else would they be?

  From the train, Alex wrote Libbie a letter. In it, she explained that she’d perhaps been a notch too rash when she’d so stridently condemned Harold Brookhants and his plan, too motivated by her own stupor over Libbie’s distressing news. Alex didn’t perform an about-face on the matter—that would have been suspicious—but she did begin the process, one furthered by many more measured letters between them, of allowing room for the idea of the future Harold Brookhants had conjured.

  Alex let that idea of future in the door, spun it around, and told Libbie, gently—ever so gently—to take a good look, to consider it fully. It did have an appeal, didn’t it?

  She, Alex the Liar, had done that. She’d done it so they’d end up here.

  And now here they were.

  And Alex the Liar had work to do.

  Typist’s Block

  Merritt hadn’t spoken to Harper since the Hollywood Forever Cemetery the night of their date, even though they’d seen each other the very next day at the production office on the studio lot. There, Merritt had made a short speech wishing them well with their efforts and excusing herself from further ties to The Happenings at Brookhants. Elaine had protested. Bo and Heather had offered (subdued) words of disappointment. Merritt would not be dissuaded. She said she felt like they all better understood the movie they wanted to make than she did. And so they should make that movie. Without her. Then she flew home from LA, sans Elaine, three days early.

  In the hours and days following, Harper sent her several unanswered texts ranging from conciliatory to explanatory to (almost) poetic. The final of them: Really did not expect the silent treatment from you, Saguaro.

  Merritt’s mother was off doing research in a London archive. She’d invited her, but Merritt had said no without even considering the offer. She was glad to have their house to herself, living, for the first ten days or so, in her own campus-movie-inspired fantasy of frat life: letting takeout containers pile up on the end tables, Netflix-binging, searching for porn that didn’t make her hate herself for watching it. (Maybe seeking out ethical porn wasn’t so much part of the frat fantasy.)

  And then she grew bored with her antics, cleaned up her mess, and spent the next several days doing things. She painted the flaking front porch swing. She weeded out closets and donated stuff, a lot of it once belonging to her father. She moved through the house, room by room, until she reached the garage. Then she stopped. She didn’t ever go into the garage anymore, hadn’t been in there since the day she’d found him. And even that day, her father had tried to tell her (well, or to tell her mother, whom he surely expected would be the one home first) not to go in.

  He’d left a note taped to the outside of the door. It read: DO NOT ENTER! DO NOT OPEN DOOR! CALL POLICE! CARBON MONOXIDE INSIDE!

  Almost as soon as she saw the note that day, Merritt had heard the music. Loud, coming from inside—over the whir of the car engine, even, she could make it out.

  Dave Matthews Band, “Ants Marching.”

  And what the fuck do you do with that? What are you ever supposed to do with that supremely fucked-up fact from your life? The fact that your psychologist father was playing the DMB song “Ants Marching” on repeat as he killed himself? The fact that the song contains numerous instances of situationally on-the-nose lyrics?

  People would want to visibly wince or laugh or both, if she told them, but they couldn’t: they’d be monsters if they did. So then that would leave them looking at her in that icky, steady-faced, not-laughing-but-yes-judging limbo, asking themselves why on earth she would share with them such an upsetting detail. And what are they supposed to do with it?

  Anyway, Merritt stopped her clean out at the garage.

  Around that time, Bo called and the two of them had their longest conversation to date about his vision for the film and why he wanted (needed, he said) her to be a part of it. When he was finished, Merritt thanked him for elucidating, but she also told him that her mind had not been changed. Bo said he was disappointed but he understood.

  She’d then tried to throw herself into her writing. She now had notebooks and Word docs full of timelines, sketches, and asides, both about Capote’s original Answered Prayers pages and the real-life people on which he’d based his characters. She also had a nearly twenty-page outline. What she didn’t have was a book.

  Part of it was that she’d spent too much time researching and obsessing over Truman Capote’s own inability to finish that novel. But the bigger part of it was that she didn’t think she really knew how to write a book, at least not when she wasn’t at the desk atop Spite Tower, Elaine trading her snacks for paragraphs.

  And then Elaine doing much more than just reading those paragraphs, those pages: asking astute questions about them and offering insights, suggesting edits, bringing her additional documents to round out her research.

  Elaine Brookhants, the true keeper of the story. Always.

  But Elaine wasn’t around now and she didn’t like this story anyway, so . . .

  While Merritt wasn’t writing, she spent hours watching Harper Harper content, which included sometimes tracking down internet chatter devoted to their kiss. What was left of it, anyway. The online gossip tide turns so quickly and there were plenty of other grrrls paired, or at least photographed, with Harper in those days: a Bollywood star attempting to break into the American market, a professional beach volleyball player, the youngest of four siblings in a popular folk-pop band, an internet-famous chef known for her elaborate cakes and punk aesthetic.

  For Merritt, keeping up with Harper’s Instagram that summer felt a little like pulling the lever on a slot machine of enviable queers with interesting professions. Which pairs will come up today?

  When Merritt’s father had been alive, he’d more than once made the observation that their campus neighborhood became a ghost town in the summer. Students vanished from the Victorians turned apartment houses and FOR RENT signs grew like clover on their lawns. The businesses downtown suddenly had plenty of available parking and you didn’t need to make reservations for dinner.

  Partly because she couldn’t sleep at night—her mind buzzing with Harper’s various feeds and her own inability to write a sentence that didn’t make her wince—Merritt started personally haunting her ghost town during the small hours. It got her out of the house without forcing her to interact with anyone who might ask after her mother, the movie, her life. It made her feel connected to the people around her without requiring actual contact. In this way, it wasn’t entirely unlike her internet lurking.

  She’d nap in the afternoons and evenings, set an alarm to be up by midnight. Some nights she’d sit on the porch swing for a while, but once any remaining interior lights turned off in the houses of her immediate neighbors, she’d leave her home to wander.

  Often, she liked to walk right down the center of a street, where there was a gap in the limbs that reached out from the trees planted on either side—a line of stars and sky between the leafy tops. If a car came, its headlights loud like a scream, she’d move enough for it to pass by, acting like it was the thing in the way, not her. She looked in display windows and read, really read, the flyers on telephone poles: yard sales, lost pets, cash for ugly houses.

  She’d pass a flooring place and imagine her life selling carpet. She’d pass a beauty salon and imagine her life doing hair. Mostly, she tried to imagine contentment: the state of being content. She didn’t think it was something she’d ever been before, so it was difficult for her to accurately imagine how it might feel. But she did try.

  Eventually, Merritt got to know which house would have a blue TV glow in its upstairs bedroom window, no matter what time she passed; and which would have the handsome husbands (or that’s how she thought of them) just off shift and still in their hospital scrubs, sitting in their kitchen eating a late-late dinner or an early-early breakfast. A few times they waved at her. She wondered how she looked to them out that window, there in the cast of the streetlights with her humidity-poofed hair. Like a ghost?

  Probably more like an escapee of some kind.

  After a couple of hours, sometimes longer, she’d return home from her haunting, make coffee, and complete the ritual by logging in to Harper’s feeds. Harper Harper on the West Coast, living a life three hours earlier and a thousand times busier than her own. At that hour Harper would inevitably still be out on the town, still getting tagged in pics and posts.

  It was an exquisite kind of torture, cycling through those posts. Merritt judged the clothing, the poses, the captions, the hashtags, all with a level of snark and bile that embarrassed her. She felt immensely sorry for herself, and then immediately congealed that feeling into one of self-loathing. Why the fuck did she care? What was any of this for and why couldn’t she leave it alone and do something worth doing?

  But she didn’t. She’d eat some things. Fall asleep for a while. And the next night she’d haunt again.

  One day, close to the time Merritt’s mother would return from London and Merritt would have nothing but clean closets and a thorough knowledge of the town’s lost pets to show for her weeks of solitude, Harper texted her:

  If you think, fine world, that I am always interesting and striking and admirable, always original, showing up to good advantage in a company of persons and all—why, then you are beautifully mistaken. There are times, to be sure, when I can rivet the attention of the crowd heavily upon myself. But mostly I am the very least among all the idiots and fools. I show up to the poorest possible advantage.

  The words were, of course, Mary MacLane’s. And they were just about the perfect thing Harper could have chosen to send, enough like an apology to be interpreted as one, but with all the Harper Harper glitter.

  This time, Merritt waited a few hours, then she texted back:

  I never learned to sew, and I don’t intend ever to learn. It reminds me too much of a constipated dressmaker.

  These words were also Mary’s. And they earned her what she thought they might:

  Harper: LOLz. I’ve missed you.

  Merritt: What, pray tell, have you managed to find to fill your time if not our repartee?

  Harper: Masturbation.

  Merritt: Heavens! Are we sexting? Is this the sexting the internets have warned me about?

  Harper: Get ready. I’m sending something super erotic your way.

  Merritt waited. It would be a lie to say that it wasn’t anticipatorily, Readers.

  And then, there on her phone: a picture of Harper’s knees and bare feet, the camera held above, probably midthigh or so. She was wearing jeans.

  Merritt sent back a picture of her elbow.

  Harper sent one of her earlobe.

  Merritt sent a close-up of her eyebrow piercings.

  Harper: no fair. that I was there for.

  Merritt: Look again, this time with all the sexual heat of a sexting session.

  Harper: OMG. I seeeeeee it. yes! YAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSS.

  They carried on like this for a while.

  Until, at some point, Harper texted:

  only a few days until we see each other for real and I get to see all these parts in person.

  Merritt: Nice try. Not happening.

  Harper: you’re not even gonna come show me the black apples?

  Merritt: No. May they fall from their trees and rot rotty deaths.

  Harper tried to call her then, her image showed on Merritt’s screen.* But Merritt didn’t answer. Instead she dismissed the call and texted:

  Merritt: I don’t want to have a conversation about it. But if you want to text me about other things, I’ll do that.

  Harper: uggghghghghghghgghghhghghghghg. you’re impossible, Saguaro. but I vow not to give up on you.

  Merritt: Your inevitable defeat. Tell me about something I’ll like.

  And, Readers, Harper had. For days she had. They started one of those endless text threads that picks up at random and continues that way, sometimes intensely, with rapid back-and-forths, and sometimes with hours-long pauses in between, one of them waiting for the other’s reply. Merritt would send Harper lines from Capote correspondence and Harper would send back candid pictures from a fashion shoot. Harper would tell Merritt about the pile of really shitty scripts she’d been sent and Merritt would tell Harper about the gruesome details of the true crime podcast she was currently listening to even though it was freaking her out.

  Without planning for it or even commenting on it, their texts grew increasingly personal and revealing: Harper told Merritt about her worry that her mother was drinking again and hiding it well, managing it until she didn’t—which was something she could stretch for months into years, Harper said. Annie had told her to confront her mother but Harper hadn’t. Not yet.

  This mention of Annie had eventually trickled into an exchange about open relationships, during which Merritt revealed to Harper that, for most of her own life, anyway, her parents had been in one. Harper seemed really interested in this, especially as the concept applied to old straight people, so Merritt told her the basics: that her parents had sat her down and explained it to her in the most clinical and nonshamey way when she was ten or so. She also told Harper about how occasionally one of her parents’ friends might join them for dinner, or they’d vacationed with other couples a few times, but that they didn’t have the kind of situation where anyone ever moved in with them or anything. Mostly, it did not affect her day-to-day, Merritt said. Via text, it was easy to make it seem both amusing and banal.

  Merritt did not share with Harper that she sometimes thought her mother liked the marriage this way better than her father did. She did not share this because she didn’t always believe it, she only sometimes did. And when she did, it made her hate her mother. And she didn’t want to. And she didn’t think it was necessarily fair to.

  Even if Merritt didn’t share these specifics, it was still really nice to talk this way to someone she wasn’t paying to listen to her talk this way.

  But whenever Harper tried to bring up the movie, Merritt would shut down and refuse to reply until Harper offered something else. And then Merritt’s mom came home from London. And then it was time. Enough days had piled up and it was August and it was time. One of the studio assistants cc’d her on all the relevant emails and sent her schedules and travel options and asked her to call them, to get in touch about her plans.

  Merritt ignored those messages.

  Soon Harper texted:

  I’m here. I’m fucking here at brookhants and it’s unbelievable and I can’t believe you aren’t here with me. We could be acting out our favorite flo/clara scenes by tonight. Get your ass here.

  Merritt: You’ll soon have Audrey there for that. She is Clara, after all.

  She knew it was small and tacky to respond this way. She did it anyway.

  Harper, no doubt a frequent recipient of jealousy-tinged texts, did not respond for a few days, and when she did it was with a picture of the crew working on The Orangerie, which Merritt almost didn’t recognize, given its face-lift.

  Harper: it’s still incredible and you’re still missing it.

  Merritt didn’t respond to that. Well, let me put it another way, Readers: she didn’t text a response to that, but she did respond by poring over Annie’s Instagram, scrolling through pictures of all of Annie’s angles at Art Basel Hong Kong, clicking through the links to her latest exhibitions and reading reviews in various online forums. They were predominately positive. And it seemed she was donating 100 percent of the proceeds from a recent auction of her work to disaster relief in Puerto Rico. So she was talented and beautiful and good, too. Certainly, she was not plain and bad.

  That night at dinner, Merritt’s mother said, as she passed Merritt a huge wooden bowl of salad, “So you’re still not planning to go to the set?”

  “Nope,” Merritt said, using the tongs to pick around the salad components she did not care for.

  “Why do you think it’s baby and bathwater with you, Merritt?” her mother asked. “Since you were little. Your impulse is always to toss out the good with the bad if it’s not going exactly your way.”

  “Gosh, I wonder. Wherever might such an approach have been modeled for me?”

  “But not when I was in my twenties!” The professor poured herself a lot of white wine from the sweating bottle she’d set beside her glass. “I calcified along with my experiences, not before I’d even had any.”