The Ghostwriter

Chapter 5: Town

The nearest town was called Averill’s Landing, population eleven hundred, and Julian hadn’t set foot in it in over a year, which was why Nora insisted he come with her for supplies instead of hiding at the house while she went alone.

“They’ll stare,” he warned her, pulling the truck out of the long gravel drive.

“Let them stare.”

They didn’t just stare. The woman at the general store’s register — a sharp-eyed sixty-something named Dot who clearly ran the town’s entire information economy from behind that counter — went very still when Julian walked in, then recovered fast enough to greet him by name and ask, pointedly, how the new book was coming.

“Slowly,” Julian said. “This is Nora. She’s helping.”

Dot’s eyes moved to Nora with an appraisal so thorough it bordered on rude. “Helping how?”

“Editorially,” Nora said, before Julian could answer for her.

Out on the sidewalk after, loaded with grocery bags, Julian exhaled like he’d been holding his breath the whole transaction. “That was Dot. She knew Elena. Everyone here knew Elena — she grew up two streets from where we’re standing.”

“I didn’t realize she was local.”

“She wasn’t, by the time I met her. She’d left for the city years before. But she came back that last summer, and everyone in this town watched the whole thing happen, and then everyone in this town watched it end.” He said it without self-pity, just fact, the way he described most things about himself. “I stopped coming into town after the funeral. It got easier to have Marcus, my agent, ship everything to the house.”

“How long ago?”

“Nine years, almost exactly.” He glanced sideways at her. “You’re doing the math.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were. Everyone does.” He shifted the bags to his other arm. “The book is about her. Obviously. You’ve probably known that since chapter one.”

“I suspected.”

“It’s not really fiction. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to telling the truth about it, and I’ve spent four years unable to finish because finishing it means admitting the ending is real.”

They walked back to the truck in a silence that felt less like the closed kind from Wednesday and more like something being carried together instead of alone.

“Thank you for telling me,” Nora said as they climbed in.

“Don’t thank me yet.” He started the engine. “I’ve told you the fact. I haven’t told you what happened. That’s a different conversation, and I’m not sure I have it in me before dinner.”

“Then we’ll have it after.”

He almost smiled. “You really don’t quit, do you.”

“Not my strong suit,” Nora said, and watched Averill’s Landing shrink in the side mirror as they drove back toward the lake.