Chapter 22

Saoirse spends the morning plotting out an itinerary for her “all-day date” with Emmit and writing poetry while she waits for him to pick her up. The time passes pleasantly, except for the feeling of being watched from the corners of the quiet house. Once, when she turns around, she thinks she catches a fleeting glimpse of white, like the trailing wisp of one of Sarah’s oft-worn scarves. And on several occasions, a strange knocking comes from the direction of the secret passage into the house.

You will listen to what I have to say . She hears the words Aidan spoke after Jonathan’s funeral in her head. And you will look at the text message Jonathan sent me that night, right before you — Saoirse digs her pen into the paper, refusing to let her mind finish that statement. She recalls her own words to Aidan in the cemetery: “Jonathan died of a heart attack. The autopsy confirmed it.” The autopsy confirmed it.

When Emmit’s gray Mercedes pulls up, Aidan’s threats leave Saoirse’s head and Mia’s warning enters it: He is not who he says he is. But then Emmit is getting out and coming up the steps and kissing her as passionately as she’s ever been kissed, dipping her low and exploring her mouth so hungrily she can barely breathe. When he pulls away, Saoirse sees an explosion of twinkling dust like stars.

“Did you decide where you’d like to go?” Emmit asks, but his voice is low and thick. There’s undisguised longing in his face and an intensity that—she already knows from experience—must be burned out of him. One hand is on the small of her back, the other on her waist. They are both breathing as if their bodies are on fire.

“I was thinking—” Saoirse starts. “I thought—” But she doesn’t want to say what she was thinking, doesn’t want to utter the words that will result in them walking down the stoop and into the car. She wants only to be led inside and up the stairs, wants him to draw the shades and peel off her clothes, wants to take him into her until the sun no longer has control of the sky.

Emmit reads this desire within her as if it’s words on a page. Inside, they fall atop the peach settee while golden late-morning light streams in from the sidelights, patterning their bodies like the ridges of seashells or ripples in the sand after the tide rolls out.

At lunchtime, they order curry dishes and rice paper rolls from the same Thai place Saoirse ordered from the night before. They eat in bed, make love again, read poetry to one another, coo over Pluto whenever the black cat enters the room, pick at leftovers, make love a third time, talk about writing. When the light coming in from the balcony turns the shadows in her bedroom long and toothy, Saoirse reaches for her phone and checks the time.

“Oh my god. It’s almost six o’clock.”

“So?” Emmit smiles at her lazily.

“So we’ve been in this bedroom for eight hours! How is that even possible?” She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. “This whole day feels like one long dream.”

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night,” Emmit says.

Saoirse props herself up on one elbow. “Did you just quote Poe at me?”

Emmit smiles. “Guilty.”

She flops back onto the pillow and lets out a groan. Emmit leans over her, tracing circles on her stomach, his dark hair falling across his forehead. “I have the feeling,” Saoirse says, “that as long as I’m living in this house and spending time with you, Lucretia, Roberto, and Mia”—she strains to plant a kiss on his lips—“I’m doomed to a never-ending barrage of all things Poe and Whitman.”

“Is that so bad?” Emmit asks. “Culture today, society today, is so vapid and recycled and terrible. TikTok and the Kardashians. AI-generated blog content. AI-generated fiction . God help us. Oftentimes, I wonder how Vulture Eyes even sold as many copies as it did. It doesn’t seem like there are many people left in this country who read anything that doesn’t come as the caption to a fifteen-second dance craze video.” He grips her by the shoulders and lifts her up. “We should embrace this unexpected umbilical cord to the past. This house, the cemetery out there, this wonderful, historic city—we should embrace all of it.”

He releases her shoulders and smacks the bed excitedly. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“If we want to embrace Providence, I have just the thing.” He jumps off the bed and sorts through their clothes on the floor. He lays her sweater, underclothes, and pants on the bed before stepping into his boxers and jeans and shrugging into a white linen shirt. Despite staring at him for the better part of eight hours, Saoirse lets her eyes run up and down him yet again.

How are you here? she wants to ask. How did my life go from being so empty, so haunted, to being so exciting? She hates that this change is attributed to a man, feels she’s become the epitome of the woman she always hated: the one who gets a boyfriend and all her problems disappear.

That’s not what this is, Jonathan says. Because you are still you. Everything you’ve done is still inside you, waiting to rear its ugly head.

It’s going to have to do its rearing later, Saoirse hisses silently. Because right now, I have a date. To hell with Jonathan’s cynicism; she’ll enjoy her newfound happiness just to spite him. To Emmit, she says, “And how do you suggest we ‘embrace Providence’?”

He pats her clothes, and she crawls forward and plucks her bra from the pile. “Remember when I mentioned the Providence Ghost Tours?” he asks.

Saoirse has her sweater over her head and is wiggling into her pants. “Sort of.”

Emmit smacks his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I told you to decide what we were going to do today, and here I am stealing the show.”

Saoirse shrugs and smooths her hair. “I didn’t have anything all that spectacular in mind. Just walking around the city, seeing the sights.” It’s not entirely untrue. She’d planned to suggest they visit the John Brown House and maybe another museum if they could fit it in. But she could ask Roberto to give her a tour of his place of employment another time.

“If you want to see the sights,” Emmit says, “a ghost tour is a legit, if less conventional, way to do it. I’m friends with Courtney, the woman who owns the company. Let me see if there are any openings tonight. After that, we’ll get dinner near the tour’s last stop? Does that sound okay?”

“It sounds great,” Saoirse says, and again, while it’s not an outright lie, it’s not the truth either. Between the séance last week and all the talk of Poe and Whitman, she can do without ghosts for a while. Though, putting a nice long stroll between their multicourse Thai lunch and another meal doesn’t sound like the worst idea.

“Okay then,” Emmit says a moment later, slipping his phone into his pocket. “There’re two openings on a tour that leaves at seven. We can be ready to go by then, right?”

Saoirse agrees, and Emmit stands on the balcony while Saoirse reapplies her makeup. He stays upstairs while she tests Pluto’s blood sugar and injects him with the necessary level of insulin into the fat at the back of his neck. She hears Emmit on the steps as she’s filling Pluto’s food bowl.

“You ready?” he asks from the foyer.

“Almost.” She places the food on the floor beside the water bowl, and Pluto brushes against her legs. “I’ll see you in just a few hours,” she says to the purring cat. She goes to the sink and rinses out the cat food can.

“Serrr-shaaah!” Emmit calls.

“Just need to wash my hands.”

As she grabs for a dish towel, she catches sight of her myriad heart medications and antidepressant in the crack of an open cabinet. I didn’t take any of my meds! She reaches for the bottles, opens them quickly, and counts out the pills—oval white and sky-blue ones, yellow-and-orange capsules. When’s the last time I missed a dose? She can’t remember, but she certainly doesn’t want to start now. It could be disastrous. She throws the pills into her mouth and sips water directly from the faucet to wash them down.

Emmit sticks his head through the doorway into the kitchen, and Saoirse steps in front of the dish drainer, not wanting him to see the telltale orange bottles. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“We only have ten minutes to walk there,” he says.

“I’m ready,” she insists and smiles. When Emmit turns back toward the foyer, she returns the bottles to the shelf and closes the cabinet. Giving Pluto a final pat, she steps out into the coming twilight of the clear October night.