“You, too.” I follow him inside—stepping one foot over the threshold onto the teal hardwood floor. “Like I was saying, I want fifty pages before the act end. No fewer.”
Nathan laughs, his voice echoing in the empty house.
• PRESENT DAY •
When I open the front door, I feel like time has reversed. Nathan waits on the porch, looking exactly the same. Same perfect posture, same shoulder bag, even the same Porsche parked in the same driveway. If I were in the mood for humor, I would find the contrast with my rental car—the first dented Hyundai they rolled off the lot—somewhat comical. But I’m not.
The only differences I notice are how he no longer wears a wedding ring and that he looks absolutely miserable. He’s scowling, and past his mirrored sunglasses, I don’t know if he’s meeting my eyes.
“You made it,” I say neutrally.
“Disappointed?” While it was jarring hearing his voice on the phone, it’s a whole new level of disorienting in person. I’ve replayed so many conversations we had. To be having new ones is unexpected. I’m certain I’ll hear nothing but this combative edge in the coming weeks. The Nathans I knew when we wrote—the playful Nathan, the inquisitive Nathan, the charming Nathan—won’t be coming back.
I hold the door open, then turn, heading into the house without waiting to see if he’s following. “Your room’s ready. Let me know if you need anything and I’ll have it brought over.”
When I face him again, I find him halted in the entryway. His eyes roam the house, and I know what he’s seeing within the white walls. Memories. I see them, too. Some of the best of my life. When we forgot we put dinner in the oven and wound up so engrossed in writing we set off the smoke alarm. When we kept challenging each other to writing sprints and ended up finishing twenty pages each in one exhausting day. When I walked in the door wet with seawater and rain, my skin remembering where sand had clung to my face.
Some of the worst memories of my life, too.
“I was surprised when Jen said you’d rented the Only Once house,” Nathan says, his demeanor unchanged.
“I didn’t rent it,” I say. “I own this house. Chris bought it for me for our first anniversary.” I include the final detail deliberately. I don’t want Nathan imagining I’d personally purchased the graveyard of our partnership. Chris meant the gift to be thoughtful. He didn’t know everything that’d happened here. But of course, nothing with Chris comes without a degree of pressure. Here’s your house. Write your next bestselling novel in it. I’ve visited as infrequently as possible, choosing instead to rent the place out to MFA students.
The mention of Chris sours Nathan’s expression further, impossibly. “How nice of him,” he says, scowling again. “Now we’ll write another book here. You always were a master of irony. Shall we pick up right where we left off?”
In my head I hear doors slamming, tires howling on the driveway. Where we left off is the last place I want to start. “Us writing here was Chris’s idea. I couldn’t very well object.” I stare him down, hoping he’ll challenge me. I want to break open the rib cage of this conversation and examine the wounded heart underneath. I know we never will. It would require honesty, and the only place Nathan’s ever honest is on the page. “Everyone wants to bottle lightning. Re-create the circumstances of success,” I go on when Nathan, as expected, says nothing.
“Oh, I get it now.” He removes his sunglasses, his eyes flashing.
“What?”
“Will Chris be writing with us as well? Conference him in? Fly him down every weekend?” he says spitefully. While he’s joking, it’s a grim vision. Me and Nathan in this house is bad. Chris and Nathan in this house would be worse. Between Chris’s resentment toward Nathan for firing him and Nathan’s resentment toward Chris for various other reasons, it’d be less Jonathan Franzen and more Truman Capote in here.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I reply.
Nathan shakes his head and walks toward the stairs. “I’m going to shower. Then we’ll decide how we’re going to do this.”
He passes me in the hallway without pausing.
“Good to see you, Kat,” he says bitterly, before disappearing upstairs.
8
Nathan
I soak in the steam for what’s surely the longest shower of my life. Only when I close my eyes does this bathroom not feel like the prison in which I’m stuck for the next couple of months. I use my imagination to conjure up other showers I’d rather be in. Danielle, the social media strategist whom friends introduced me to in Chicago and in whose bed I found myself weekly before my book tour, had this stone shower with plenty of room for two.
We weren’t serious—I haven’t been serious with anyone since the end of my marriage. Resetting my life following my divorce wasn’t easy. Returning to the single life, I often felt like I was watching reruns of a show I hadn’t enjoyed very much on the first run. Leaving New York helped. In Chicago, I reconnected with college friends, forced myself to find new restaurants and new coffeehouses—and, of course, threw myself into work, first on several discarded ideas and finally on Refraction.
Every day was routinized, until one morning I woke up and found those routines resembled a life. I got closer with my father, weirdly, or he wanted to. If we would never have working for Goldman Sachs in common, we now had divorce. My mom had left him for some photographer she’d met on the charity gala circuit. Edward Van Huysen had continued to date decades below him, women he would mention to me like I knew them, “Josie” or “Samantha,” and who would be gone from his life by Thanksgiving. I got disjointed texts from him with oddly specific words of “wisdom,” which eventually turned into requests for book recommendations and, even unlikelier, congratulations on selling Refraction, until he died a year ago.
Through everything, writing was my nourishment. It helped me feel human, the way it had when I discovered the craft in high school. It made me feel like myself. If I no longer had something larger I was living for, the comforting context of my life with Melissa, I had enough to keep me living. The earnings from Only Once, and each empty page in front of me.
Everything eventually returned—except dating, which happened only in fits and starts, noncommittal and evanescent. Danielle, blonde and dimpled, knew this going into our whatever-it-was. We’re over now.
Still, memories of her are the perfect distraction to keep me from facing Katrina downstairs.
Chris. Of course Chris is behind Katrina’s willingness to collaborate. It explains everything. The only reason Katrina would return to writing is if her fiancé pushed her to. I know Chris well from when he represented me—he’s not a very good man. He’s not a very good fiancé or agent, either, if he’s pushing his wife-to-be and client into this collaboration. Her dream is writing, not writing with me.