When I finished, though, I knew I’d written something for her to see. The chapter finds Michael hitting the town with a friend, indulging in soon-to-be unmarried life. Yet the whole evening, everything he sees, everything he does, he filters through memories of Evelyn and their marriage. He knows that while they can divide their lives, physically and legally, they’ll never be separate from each other.
I wrote with Melissa in mind but also Katrina. Being with her now is proof that you can think you’ve rebuilt, shored your walls, and yet still a person to whom you’ve given too much of yourself is a hurricane who can sweep in with a shared smile over a glass of wine in the early evening.
The pages pulled me into the hallway, up to Katrina’s door, where they have left me. Hesitating, unsure and certain, confused and clear.
I knock.
Katrina opens the door within moments. She hasn’t yet changed for bed. Her narrow shoulders are relaxed, and surprise—maybe even pleasant surprise—livens her expression. When her eyes drop to what I’m holding, I answer her unspoken question.
“We don’t have to use them,” I say. “You don’t even have to read them.”
“I want to read them,” she says immediately. Her gaze rises to mine. “You’re . . . sure?”
I know what she’s really asking. Do I really want to go down this road with her again? It’s one I’ve refused out of self-preservation. Flying past the guardrails I’ve constructed for us could end disastrously.
I hold the pages out to her.
“I had a nice time tonight,” I say.
Katrina’s expression softens. I have the impulse to look away, like I’m witnessing something secret. I don’t. I stare, starting to lose myself in the warm brown of her eyes. “I did, too,” she replies.
It’s the end of the conversation. “Good night, Kat.” The name slips off my tongue with frightening ease. When I see its effect on her, the nearly imperceptible flickers of pleasure I catch lighting her expression, it wrecks me.
“See you in the morning.” She shuts her door.
I return to my room, having forgotten each of the contradictions I felt when I walked up to her door. They’re covered over now, underneath warm brown eyes and a secret smile. For the first time in weeks, I know I’ll sleep soundly.
* * *
• • •
When I wake, I find my pages under the door. I get out of bed hurriedly, nearly knocking my elbow on the wall, ignoring how naked my excitement is. Picking up the pages, I immediately flip through.
Katrina’s handwriting is everywhere.
My heart constricts. I love the feeling. Following the lines of her loping penmanship, chasing her thoughts from page to page, I feel like I’m easing into a rhythm I never forgot. It’s one of the joys of working with Katrina. I’m never self-conscious reading her revisions. I’m excited by them.
Under the final line of the chapter, she’s written a note for me.
Stayed up late working on the next scene, so I went to get tea. Text me if you want coffee.
It’s innocuous, and it’s everything. What’s happening here, in red ink on fresh pages and tossed-off kindnesses, is irreversible. It’s the beginning of our lives fitting back together, finding the impressions left when we pulled them apart.
37
Nathan
I pace the living room, glancing at the stairs. It’s been fifteen minutes since Katrina called down saying she was just putting on her shoes. Fifteen minutes . . . of her putting on shoes. Out of the corner of my eye, I’ve watched the night darken from periwinkle to navy past our shutters. She’s having second thoughts. She has to be.
For two weeks now, we’ve traded pages every night, passing them under each other’s doors like clandestine letters. Which, in many ways, they are. I feel us getting closer. Compliments come easier on paper, confessions, casual thoughts. It’s how writing is. It cuts to the core, suffering no obfuscations. It’s where the truth is laid bare. I’ve learned things big and small—how Katrina wants more from her life, how she yearns for and fears the world of writing and publishing, how she hates the smell of basil. She gifts me these secrets, sometimes in the words she slashes, sometimes in the feelings she chooses to elaborate or the feelings she chooses to remove.
With the two of us writing simultaneously, we’re making startling progress on the manuscript. When we both took stabs at a scene where the newly separated Evelyn goes to a nightclub, looking for a rebound, Katrina suggested in a comment on the pages we do some setting research.
We’re an hour from Miami, she’d written. Sunday?
I’d replied beneath her question the next morning. I’ll pick you up at seven.
It’s 7:21. I’m preparing to head up to her room and ask if she wants to call off the plan when I hear her door open and shut.
When she emerges from the hallway, pausing at the top of the stairs, I forget I’m halfway on the first step. I forget everything. I forget I’m Nathan, who went years not exchanging even an email with the person in front of me now. I forget she’s Katrina, who fled from everything we had. I only know this woman is breathtaking.
Her dress, the palest pink, drapes over her curves, dipping low in the front. The hem hits high on her thighs. In between the silk and her black heels is a mile of skin I’ve spent twenty-one minutes and four years waiting for. Her hair drawls loosely down her back, the lipstick kissing her mouth a dark rose. When her eyes meet mine, her long lashes flicker.
“What?” she asks.
I want to say she’s gorgeous. Heart-stopping. If I started, I don’t know how I would stop. I’ve worked my entire adult life to marshal the English language into whatever I wanted. But were I to try to capture Katrina with it, it would best even me.
I don’t try. “I wondered if you were standing me up,” I say instead.
She laughs. It makes my heart pound. “Pretty sure you can’t stand up the person you live with.” She descends the stairs, stopping in front of me, so I’m looking up while she looks down. I notice she’s gripping the bannister, her knuckles white. “I called Chris and told him what we were doing tonight,” she says.
Hearing Chris’s name stuns me for a second. Katrina never mentions her fiancé without prompting. “What’d he say?” I ask cautiously.
“He just wanted to hear about our progress on the book.” She worries the finger and thumb of her other hand. “Then he told me to have fun.” Her words come out bitter.
I remember what she said on our walk. Chris gave her permission to do whatever she wanted with me. I hear in those two resentful syllables—have fun—how it hurts her knowing her fiancé values her writing over her fidelity.