The Ghostwriter

Chapter 8: The Visit

Marcus arrived on a Tuesday without warning, which Nora would later learn was the only way he ever arrived, because Julian would find a reason to cancel if given more than an hour’s notice.

She heard the car in the gravel drive before she saw it — a sleek black sedan that looked entirely wrong parked next to Julian’s mud-splattered truck — and came around from the manuscript room to find a compact, silver-haired man in his sixties standing in the front hall, already mid-argument with Julian without having said hello first.

“You didn’t answer four calls,” the man said. “Four, Julian. I had to drive two hours on the strength of a hunch that you were either dead or ignoring me, and I genuinely could not tell you which felt more likely.”

“I’ve been working,” Julian said.

“You’ve been working.” The man turned, seeing Nora for the first time, and something in his face shifted from irritation to open curiosity so fast it was almost comic. “You must be Nora.”

“Marcus,” Julian said, with the flat tone of a man performing an introduction he’d rather skip. “My agent. Nora Kessler.”

“The ghostwriter.” Marcus crossed the hall and shook her hand with both of his, warm and overly firm, the handshake of a man who negotiated for a living. “I sent him your manuscript, you know. Years ago. I have opinions about what he did with that information, most of which I’ll keep to myself for now.”

“Marcus,” Julian said again, a warning this time.

“I’m being polite. You should be grateful.” Marcus finally let go of Nora’s hand and turned the full weight of his attention on Julian. “Sixty new pages. Your assistant emailed me the count, which is more communication than I’ve gotten out of you directly in eleven months. I drove out here to see it with my own eyes before I believed it.”

“It’s not finished.”

“No book is ever finished until it’s finished. That’s not the point. The point is you’re writing again, and I would like to understand why, specifically, before I go back to New York and tell your publisher there’s actually a reason to hope.” Marcus glanced at Nora again, less subtly this time. “I have a theory, for what it’s worth.”

“Your theory is wrong,” Julian said, too quickly.

“I haven’t stated it yet.”

“I know your theories. You’ve had the same one since you sent me that manuscript. Don’t.”

Nora, standing in the middle of what felt increasingly like a conversation she wasn’t meant to witness, cleared her throat. “I can give you two some privacy.”

“No,” Julian said, at the same moment Marcus said, “Please stay,” and the two men looked at each other with the particular irritation of people who’d known each other twenty years and had long since stopped pretending to defer.

In the end she stayed, mostly because Julian’s no had come out sharper than he seemed to intend, and softening it by leaving would have made it into something it didn’t need to be. They moved into the kitchen. Marcus made himself at home with the ease of a frequent guest, found the good coffee without being told where it was, and settled at the table like a man prepared to stay through dinner if that’s what it took.

“How is he,” Marcus asked Nora directly, once Julian had gone to the study to retrieve the printed pages, “when I’m not here to annoy him into transparency?”

The question caught her off guard with its bluntness. “He’s writing. Every day. More than he apparently has in years.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Nora considered how much belonged to her to say. “He’s tired more than he lets on. I don’t know the specifics of his health — that’s not something he’s discussed with me directly — but I notice things. He sleeps late some mornings when he never used to. There’s a pill organizer on the kitchen counter I’ve never asked about.”

Something crossed Marcus’s face — not surprise, but a kind of tired confirmation. “He didn’t tell you the timeline.”

“No.”

“That’s very like him.” Marcus turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, not drinking it, just needing something to do with his hands. “I’m not going to be the one to tell you either, if that’s what you’re hoping. It’s his to say. But I’ll tell you this much, because I think you deserve to know what you walked into: he didn’t hire a ghostwriter because he needed help finishing a book, Nora. He’s finished harder books alone. He hired you because I told him, in no uncertain terms, that if he was going to spend whatever time he has left on this earth locked in a lake house refusing to speak to another human being, he could at least spend it finishing the one thing that’s haunted him for nine years. And somehow — I genuinely don’t know how — it worked.”

“Marcus.” Julian’s voice came from the doorway, quiet, and Nora didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. He held the printed manuscript pages against his chest, sixty new pages heavier than the last time Marcus had seen it, and his face had gone carefully, deliberately unreadable. “That’s enough.”

“It’s true, though,” Marcus said, unbothered, standing to take the pages from him. “I’m allowed to be right occasionally. It happens rarely enough that I like to enjoy it when it does.”

He sat back down and began reading immediately, the room going quiet except for the turn of pages and the low hum of the refrigerator, and Nora watched Julian watch his oldest friend read the truest thing he’d ever written, his jaw tight, his hands not quite steady, a man bracing for a verdict he’d spent four years too afraid to ask for.

It took Marcus forty minutes. When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet in a way he made no effort to hide, and he said only, “Finish it. Whatever this is doing to you — finish it,” before he reached across the table and gripped Julian’s hand, once, hard, and neither of them said anything else about it for the rest of the visit.

Nora excused herself not long after, giving the two old friends the room, and stood on the porch in the cooling evening air thinking about pill organizers and timelines and the particular cruelty of a man who’d decided, alone, exactly how much of himself he was allowed to give away before it ran out.