Chapter 10

Saoirse walks around the quiet house the next morning giddy with excitement, the lines of the poem she stayed up half the night completing whirling around her head like the words of a lover. That is, until her father’s words eclipse them: I’ve got an idea ... how about focusing less on your stupid writing and more on finding a job?

Saoirse sighs. She feels any prospective employer would be satisfied with the “My husband died in January, so I didn’t have the stomach to continue working” excuse, but she also knows her safety net won’t last forever. She tries to recall the location of her computer. She wrote the new poem out by hand, snapping a photo of it on her phone to reread later. Since the poem is in her notebook, her computer should be wherever she left it after transferring the Wi-Fi into her name.

She’s on her way to the kitchen when something catches her eye. A piece of card stock on the small marble table in the foyer, propped against the wall, angled out like a cherished photograph. She walks to the table, resisting the urge to look behind her. She’s alone in the house—no matter what her spooked mind tells her, no matter the presence of this flyer. She lifts the card stock and reads the words printed there. It’s an invitation to a career fair, today at twelve thirty, at Brown University.

There are several bullets beneath the heading, but Saoirse’s fixated on the event’s location. The career fair is intended for Brown University students. She was a Brown student twelve years ago . How had the flyer ended up in her house?

Saoirse’s eyes travel up from the flyer. Slowly, she turns to look behind her, her gaze sweeping from one side of the room to the other. Last night, in a room thick with the honey-sweet scent of candles, Mia had told Sarah Whitman that the new inhabitant of her house needed help. Had the Divine Poet actually intervened?

“Sarah?” Saoirse says softly. “Did you leave this for me to find?”

She feels foolish the moment the words are out. She will take the mysterious flyer as a sign that her luck is changing and get herself to campus. Not because it’s what her father would want her to do, but because she should explore her options. Mind made up, she hurries to her bedroom to change, donning clothes she hasn’t worn since ...

Since when? Since before Jonathan had stopped seeing her as a person with an identity that was anything other than his wife ? Since he’d begun speaking to her only about ovulation cycles, and what position she should lie in after sex for his sperm to have the best chance of fertilizing one of her eggs? Saoirse shakes her head violently, willing the thoughts away. Today will be about her future. Not the past. Jonathan’s memory already permeates the Athen?um, the university buildings, the city. He can’t have her mind. Not anymore. She’d given that to him, too, once, and it still wasn’t enough.

An hour later, Saoirse enters Chafee Garden. The area at the foreground of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library is abloom with powdery goldenrod and cheery helenium. Far more students than she expected mill about. Members of the Brown Band tap their drums and blow animatedly into their horns. So this career fair is a big deal. Saoirse eyes the booth closest to her, and when a pair of young men in suits move away, she steps up to the table.

“Hi there,” says the woman.

“Hello.” Saoirse glances at the materials spread across the tablecloth. Goldman Sachs. Of course it’s Goldman Sachs. She makes noncommittal small talk for several minutes before thanking the woman and moving along.

The names of the tables blend together quickly. Google. Harvard. Microsoft. Does everyone want to work for a Fortune 500 company these days? Saoirse collects a modest number of pamphlets, but if her earlier optimism is a bird, it’s one who’s flown over a body of water too vast for its little wings to handle. After twenty-five minutes, she is ready to go.

The marching band has struck up a strangely somber tune—the horns all melancholy wails and the drums a low, pressurized thudding. She crosses the gardens, trying not to make eye contact with any of the employers positioned alongside the far-right wall as she passes. How disappointing. The rest of the day now looms before her, each hour threatening to last twice as long as the one preceding it. She could look for a job the old-fashioned way: inquire, in person, whether an establishment is hiring. She could go home and crawl into bed. She could ...

She could write.

It’s not the thought itself that causes her to stop abruptly, but that the thought is accompanied with neither an Are you crazy? nor the sudden onset of dread she’s become accustomed to. She is still standing in the middle of the sidewalk when someone careens into her from behind. The binder she’s holding shoots out from under her arm, and the air whooshes from her lungs. A hand grabs her by the elbow, keeping her from tumbling to the ground after the pamphlets and business cards.

“I am so, so sorry,” a deep voice says. “Are you all right?”

Saoirse takes a breath, wincing as the muscles where she was struck twinge, then hurries to collect the various career fair detritus before it can be carried off by the wind. From the corner of her eye, she sees the man who ran into her drop to his knees to help. She wants to tell him not to bother, but he’s already plucking up a piece of card stock printed with a large QR code. Saoirse grabs the last dirt-smudged business card, climbs to her feet, and shoves everything back into the binder.

She turns, and the man’s hand holds out the QR code. The arm of his thick wool peacoat is black and velvety. Saoirse takes the card stock, resisting the urge to mutter to herself that she hadn’t wanted any of this junk in the first place. Finally, she looks up.

Into the face of the man from the Athen?um.

“Shit,” Saoirse squawks and jumps back, unable to help herself. It’s not just that the images from the séance are too fresh for her not to be startled; it’s that, after two previous occasions of running into this man, there’s no way the third can be a coincidence.

“Are you following me?” Saoirse asks. “Did Aidan send you because I wouldn’t talk to him? First the Athen?um, then the coffee shop, then—” She almost says my basement last night , but stops herself in time. She needs to keep the upper hand, not sound like some lunatic. “Then today,” she finishes. “What the hell do you want?”

The man shows none of the unsettling intensity he’d displayed on earlier sightings, but he doesn’t manage to look apologetic either. “I don’t know anyone named Aidan,” he says, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. He looks in the direction of Benefit Street. “But I did see you at Carr Haus,” he admits. “We could go there now? I’ll buy you a coffee and exp—”

“No way,” Saoirse interrupts. “I want an explanation now. Why do I keep seeing you everywhere?”

The man scrunches his wide, smooth forehead and runs a hand through hair that is dark and a bit unkempt. He looks a little like the lead in a romantic comedy who’s been waiting on the stereotypically adorable but klutzy woman to clean up his act, and this puts Saoirse on edge even more than her certainty that his running into her was not an accident. But then his dark-brown eyes squint in a way that says he fears he’s about to embarrass her.

“I was running to catch up with you after I saw you at one of the booths. I didn’t expect you to come to a complete stop on the sidewalk.” He squints further. “But I was running after you to ask why you’ve been following me.”

Saoirse stares at him, dumbfounded. “Why I’ve been following you ? Are you kidding?”

“You stared me down at the Athen?um so intently that, for a second, I thought I knew you,” he says. He’s animated now, dark eyebrows bobbing, one side of his mouth popping up between words in a nervous half smile. “Then you show up at my regular coffeehouse.” He gestures at the gardens around them. “Now you’re at one of Brown’s career events.” He pauses, shrugging his leather messenger bag higher onto his shoulder. “Are you even a student here?”

Saoirse is still trying to process the one-eighty the conversation has taken. “I’m—” She hates how shrill she sounds, having been put on the defensive. “I was a student here,” she huffs. “Are you ? You look old enough to be a professor.”

He gives her that squinty-eyed look again, the one that says he’s sorry she keeps putting her foot in her mouth. And why had she said that? He doesn’t look any older than she is.

“I am a professor,” he says. “An associate one, anyway. In my third year. I’m a member of the fiction faculty for the Literary Arts MFA program. That’s sort of why I thought you were following me. I’ve been warned by colleagues not to be surprised if prospective students attempt to stage impromptu meetings with me, try to get a one-up on the other applicants by showing me their writing sample, that sort of thing.”

Saoirse doesn’t respond. She can only stare at the man who, five minutes ago, she would have sworn was stalking her, the man whose eerie resemblance to Jonathan—as if he were her husband’s long-lost (and more attractive) brother, or maybe a cousin—makes her breath catch in her throat, and who she was going to go as far as accuse of following her home from Carr Haus so he could sneak a career fair flyer into her foyer four days later. Now that same man is suggesting she is stalking him . Saoirse looks away, then back, to find the man’s expression has changed yet again. Now he’s eyeing her like he thinks she might be a little unstable.

“ Are you a writer?” he asks in the same tone one might use to ask someone if they had a gun.

“No!” Saoirse bursts out. “I mean, yes, but not like that.” He cocks his head. “Not to where I’d be pursuing you, staging ‘impromptu meetings,’ or whatever the hell you said people do. Jesus, that sounds crazy. I sound crazy.” She stops and takes a deep breath. “I stopped writing a long time ago. I did just start again, but I’m certainly not looking to pursue an MFA, and I had no idea you were a writing professor. I saw you watching me at the Athen?um last week and thought it was weird you were at the coffee shop a few days later. Though, I suppose you could have been there first,” she admits.

He stares at her, lips pursed, but then the small smile returns to one corner of his lips. “Are you sure you’re not a writer looking to get into the Literary Arts program? This sounds like the start of the conversation in which you ask me to review your personal statement.”

Saoirse huffs out a breath of laughter, despite herself. “I suppose it does. Alas, sorry to disappoint you, Mr.—”

“Powell. Emmit Powell.”

Saoirse almost drops the binder again. “Emmit Powell?”

He grins. “That’s right.”

“As in, the Emmit Powell whose debut novel won the Pulitzer a few years ago?”

She doesn’t add, And whose second novel was the subject of a reportedly historic auction among the top five publishing houses , or, Emmit Powell, the darling of the national literary scene .

“The very same. And you are . . . ?”

“Saoirse White.” Emmit holds out his hand, and she shakes it. “Well, shit,” she says.

“What?”

“Not only did I come to a career fair where I found zero job prospects, a career fair that someone probably invited me to as a mistake, but I’ve accused Emmit Powell of stalking me.” And of being a pawn for my husband’s best friend’s vendetta, she thinks but doesn’t say. Saoirse slides her binder into her backpack, ignoring the haphazard corners of paper sticking out from every side. “I should call it a day.” She holds up her hand in a self-deprecating little wave, turns, and starts down the sidewalk. “Nice to meet you, Emmit Powell,” she calls over her shoulder.

“Wait a minute,” he says from behind her. “It all sounds way worse when you put it like that.”

She turns back, and he’s smiling. Not the half smile but a full one. The smile transforms his face, and suddenly he doesn’t look a thing like Poe or Jonathan. Neither, however, does he look like the handful of photographs she’s seen of Emmit Powell online and in newspapers, photos of a professional, respectable author. She remembers how he watched her across the open air of the second-floor Athen?um and from behind the paned glass of the coffee shop. The intense, knowing stare; the mischievous curve of his lips. This man—somehow—seems like dozens of different men, personas he embodies, roles he tries on as easily as slipping on a mask.

He’s lying, she thinks abruptly. He knows she wasn’t stalking him, just like he knows he’s the one who initiated this supposed run-in. No man looks at a woman like that, shows up at the same location she is on three separate occasions, without some sort of nefarious intent. Just as quickly, however, the rebuttal comes: How could he be lying? He’s an accomplished writer who, if not well known outside of the writing world, certainly has a reputation worth upholding. He’s a professor at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Her alma mater, no less. He’s polite. He’s charming. He’s laid out ample reasons to be wary of her .

You’re confused, Jonathan says from her head. The séance last night really scrambled your brain.

Saoirse forces herself to meet Emmit’s eye. “It sounds bad no matter how I say it,” she quips.

“How about we do go to Carr Haus for that coffee, then? Change the narrative.”

“Change the narrative.” She repeats his words slowly, skeptically.

“We’re both writers.” He winks. “We shouldn’t have any problem with a little editing.”

She hates how that wink causes a quiver of excitement in her stomach, and tells herself it’s the same pathetic anticipation she felt when Lucretia asked her to go for coffee. It’s because I never go anywhere or do anything, and it’s so hard to fill the hours. I’m moved by the prospect of not having to trudge home yet, not by the idea of sitting across from an intelligent and charismatic man. Still, does she want to fill her hours chatting with someone she has no intention of seeing again?

“I don’t know,” she says. But Emmit has already started up the sidewalk, ushering her along with him, slipping her bag off her shoulder as he goes and easing the binder—which was sticking out at an awkward angle—all the way into it. He slides the bag to the top of her shoulder again and gives the strap a pat.

Again, the quiver of excitement, and again, she chastises herself for being so ridiculous. He probably feels bad for her. The unemployed, washed-up writer she’s somehow become.

“Fine,” she agrees. “But just for a quick cup of tea. I’m sure you have student manuscripts to critique or your own writing to work on.”

Emmit laughs a little bitterly. “Hardly.” He puts a hand on her back at the end of the sidewalk and guides her right onto Benefit Street. Pathetically, she thinks, This is the most physical contact I’ve had with another man since Jonathan.

As they pass the Athen?um, Saoirse keeps her eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. She has the notion that, should she turn toward the glass doors at the library’s entrance, she’ll see her dead husband, his depthless black eyes charting her progression—on the arm of another man—down a street along which they used to walk together. A ghost leering out from the broken windows of his haunted house.