36. Lovely Meeting

36

Lovely Meeting

Amelia Brown stood in the rain, and she knew she didn’t want to be alone.

She winced. “I never sent in that article. I couldn’t.” Because she had realized over quiet dinners at the kitchenette and saving dogs and running from paparazzi—she realized she didn’t want that. She didn’t want a loud life.

She just wanted a good one.

He said, “I know. Thank you.”

She hugged herself tighter. “We’re even, then.”

She cocked her head. “Depends. Is the guitar included?” She motioned to the guitar slung on his back.

She took a step toward him, and they were close enough that all she had to do was reach out her hands and take his, and pull him into the warmth of her house on the Isle of Ingary. “What would you play?”

He reached out slowly, softly, and took her hands in his. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “it would be a song with only the good notes.”

I wrote. And I wrote. For three months, as April turned to May, turned to June and into July, I polished and I edited and I cleaned the draft as I sat in front of a fan and drank sweet tea and fell in love over and over with Amelia and Jackson and their magical Isle of Ingary. I checked my texts, though they were mostly from Rose checking in on me, and Carver asking about plans to propose to Nicki, and even Alice a few times! Though whenever she texted it was mostly about Rose.

I could see that trouble coming from a mile away. My best friend and my little sister? God help me.

I ate takeout Thai from the restaurant down the block and went to bed too late and woke up at noon to fix myself a pot of coffee I would take one sip of before abandoning it as I fell into the story again.

I hadn’t written like this in years, not since I first began writing for Ann.

It felt like everything over the last year, all of my pent-up frustrations, all of my failures, all of my wants and hopes and dreams, they all came tumbling out of me. On the page I could make sense of all of them, mold them into a beginning, a middle, and an end—because all good love stories ended.

And then, just like that, I was no longer in the dark night. I was stepping out into the daylight, into the happily ever after, and it felt good and whole and bright.

And something to be proud of.

One evening, Carver called to tell me, “He said yes,” on a video chat with Nicki, showing both of their golden engagement bands. “And we’re gonna have the wedding in a few weeks at the funeral home. I figured since Alice basically owns it now, she could bump a wake or two and give us a family discount. Bruno is officiating.”

Three weeks later, on the hottest day of July on record, I finished the last book I would ever write for Ann Nichols.

And it was good.

I sent the novel attached in an email to Molly, who then forwarded it to Ben’s new assistant editor, Tamara, the one who had done a lot of the heavy lifting while he was away on medical leave. Tamara knew I was Ann’s ghostwriter, too. I wasn’t expecting to hear back. It had been three months, and if Ben remembered me, if he missed me, then he would’ve found me. He knew how.

A few minutes later, Molly called. And offered me representation.

I told her I’d think about it, just to make her sweat a little for keeping Ann’s death (albeit a secret) from me. Molly was one of the best agents in the business, and I liked working with her, so it was a no-brainer, but you know, I had time to sit and think on it, since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

I’d just finished a book, after all.

Was Ben going to love it? No, I already knew he would. He was going to love it because for a few days during a chilly spring in Mairmont, he loved me, and like Jackson singing a song with only good notes for Amelia, the book was filled with only the good parts of us.

That evening, instead of takeout, I decided to make some celebratory mac and cheese while Rose stopped by the discount liquor store to get our favorite pineapple wine on her way home. My phone dinged as I was draining the noodles. An email.

I looked at who it was—

And my heart slammed against the bony cage of my chest. I almost dropped my phone into the hot noodles.

The email was from Ben.

Miss Day,

It was a pleasure working with you. I wish you all the best on your future endeavors.

Best,

Benji Andor

And that was all it said.

For the next four hours, I paced the apartment trying to decode every secret message within those twenty-two words with Rose and a bottle of pineapple Riesling.

Does he remember? No—he couldn’t. If he did, then he would have contacted me so much sooner than this. That couldn’t be it.

Rose watched me pace from her perch in the middle of the couch, sipping on her wine. “Perhaps it was just a polite email?”

I stopped pacing. “What?”

She took another large gulp. “Tell him you’d like to meet, and then finish up your unfinished business.”

In reply, Rose forcibly set down her wineglass onto the coffee table and reached behind her on the couch to our bookcases. She grabbed one and presented it to me. “Sign, seal, deliver.”

I stared down at my own book, Ardently Yours. The book that Ben said was his favorite in the whole world. And I let out a very long sigh. “Remember your last idea involving Ben?”

She shrugged. “You got to punch Lee, didn’t you?”

She had a point.

So, the next morning, while I nursed a hangover and ate congealed oatmeal, I wrote a reply email.

Mr. Andor,

It was a pleasure. Though I do have something for you. Do you think we could set up a meeting?

Sincerely,

Florence Day

Miss Day,

Would this Friday work, at noon?

Best,

Benji

Mr. Andor,

Noon would be lovely.

With all my best,

Florence

And that was that.

I second-guessed my email the entire week. Was lovely too strong a word? Should I have signed it Miss Day? Should I have addressed him as Benji instead of Mr. Andor? Rose told me that Wednesday that if I spiraled any more, I’d drill myself to the center of the earth.

So I tried to spiral more quietly.

I think I might’ve had a full-on panic attack if it weren’t for having to finalize plans for Carver and Nicki’s wedding that weekend. Right after the meeting with Ben on Friday, I was to take a taxi to Newark and hop on a plane home for their wedding on Saturday. Friday was the rehearsal dinner and bachelor parties, and as the big sister who did absolutely nothing to help with the wedding while I was in the deadline trenches, I had to at least show up for those. I reserved my room at the inn (to John and Dana’s pure ecstatic joy), and walked Mom through the whiplash of “I’m so happy!” and “My baby’s all grown up and leaving the mortuary!” and I managed to talk Rose into coming with me purely because I was the best eldest sister in the entire world and I knew for a fact that Alice would never ask her. She was bold at doing absolutely everything, except when it came to her own happiness.

I guess it ran in the family.

So I gave myself a little leniency when I realized that I hadn’t brought any sort of WELCOME BACK! or GLAD YOU LIVED! card to go with Ben’s gift until I was already in the elevator going up to Falcon House Publishers. I bounced on my heels, quite unable to stop moving.

It was summer in the city, and the men in the elevator looked like they were about to sweat to death in their ironed business suits, the women in flouncy skirts and kitten heels.

And I was in what I felt best in, an oversized blouse and straight-leg jeans with a hole in the left knee, and red Converses. I didn’t look like I fit in here, but looks were deceiving, and best of all?

I didn’t really care anymore. It didn’t matter. What mattered was where I was going.

I wasn’t scared of the looming floor number that we rose to meet. Executive editor Benji Andor had been back in the office for a little less than a month, though I was beginning to suspect he had done more than a little work from home before that. He apparently still had a lot of catching up to do, from what Erin told Rose. Then again, when did editors not have a lot of catch-up work to do? As long as I’d known Lee, he’d been majestically behind on every deadline. But I had a feeling that, unlike Lee, Ben actually wanted to catch up—but then why would he agree to entertain a meeting with me?

I was nervous. What if he thought I was some sort of weirdo who wanted to give him his favorite book? Couldn’t be any worse than a weirdo giving him a cactus, I guessed.

Because it had been three months, and I wasn’t going to lie, quite a few of those nights I spent drowning in a bottle of wine, wondering what happened with Laura. Wondering if she stayed. If he wanted her to. If they decided to try anew.

I was alone by the time the elevator stopped at the floor for Falcon House Publishers, and I stepped out into the clean white lobby. The glass-cased bookshelves looked exactly the same. Ann Nichols’s bestsellers sat on a shelf all to themselves, and the glass reflected me, freckled cheeks and dry lips and messy blond hair pinned up into twin buns.

Erin was reading a book as I came up to the front desk, but she quickly put a sticky note on the page and closed it. When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow.

It came out this week.

Erin gave a pout. “But they have such a good cheese plate.”

Rose wasn’t going to work today; she’d already caught her flight to Charlotte, where Alice would pick her up to drive to Mairmont. After this meeting, I’d be on my way, too. I asked if I could stash my suitcase behind Erin’s desk, and she happily agreed. “I’ll ring Benji and tell him you’re here.”

As Erin called Ben’s office phone, I leaned against the front desk to get a better look at Lee Marlow’s novel. The cover was decent, I guessed. A bit too much like The Woman in the Window for my liking. It wasn’t as if I could forget that Lee’s book came out this week. It had been everywhere in the city—on subway ads, in magazines, an entire article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and even in my favorite indie bookstore. It wasn’t something I could quite escape, but I no longer felt under the shadow of it, either.

Lee ended up not filing a police report after I’d punched him at the hospital. Probably for the best, because I had secrets that could make his life very uncomfortable for a while, and he didn’t need that sort of bad press before the release of his instant bestseller.

After a moment, Erin hung up the phone and said, “That’s odd, he didn’t answer, but he should be in his office. You can head back there, if you want. His door should be open.”

So took a deep breath, and I went.

37

The Dead Romantics

I REMEMBERED THIS walk three months ago. I remembered how terrified I was, how I hoped whoever this new editor was would give me a little slack. I did end up getting the extra time I needed, but it didn’t quite go the way I had planned. I passed meeting rooms separated by foggy glass, and assistant editors and marketers and publicists working diligently to make the machine that was publishing run.

It really was a miracle that anything came out on time. Well, a miracle and way too much caffeine.

At the end of the hallway, Ben’s office door was open like Erin said it would be, and there he sat as if he’d always been there. As if he hadn’t been a spectator during the worst week of my life. His hair was a little longer and wavy, not gelled back like the last time I’d met him, and curling gently against his ears. His sleeves were rolled up, and the slightest hint of his father’s golden wedding ring peeked out from beneath his collar. There was a shallow scar running slantwise across his left cheek, still a little red and tender, but healing. He wore large thick-framed glasses, though they didn’t seem to help him see any better because he was still squinting at something on his computer screen, a pen hanging out of his mouth.

It was a snapshot of his life. I wanted to take a photo of it, memorize how the door framed him in a perfect setting, the window behind him with midday light flooding gold into his office.

I steeled myself—and my heart.

Even if he didn’t remember me, it was okay. It was going to be okay—I was going to be okay.

I rapped my knuckles against the doorway.

He gave a start at the noise. The pen dropped from his mouth, but he caught it and shoved it in an accessory drawer in his desk. “Miss Day!” he greeted in surprise, and quickly stood to welcome me in, knocking his long legs on the underside of his desk. He winced at the pain. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He held out a hand over his desk, and I took it. His was warm and calloused and I thought I had prepped myself for this sort of meeting, but at that moment I realized how woefully underprepared I actually was. Because he was alive. When so long he had been a specter that faded in and out of my life, first a ghost and then a memory and now—

Now he was standing in front of me and no matter whether he remembered me or not, he was here. The feeling of his hand in mine made me happy in a strange and comforting way.

And that sort of happiness, even bittersweet, made my heart so full it might just burst.

I squeezed his hand tightly. “Thank you for fitting me into your schedule,” I replied, smiling. “I’ve got to get to Newark, so I won’t be staying long.”

The Swell of Endless Music would have been a damn good revenge fantasy.

But it was a better romance.

To my surprise, he had kept my apology cactus. It was sitting on his desk beside his monitor, and it was still alive. He’d made room for it, on his tidy desk where everything had its place.

I had changed so much in these last few months, and I wondered how much he’d unknowingly changed. If somewhere deep down beneath his flesh and bones there was an echo of moonlit walks in graveyards and screaming in the rain and dandelion fields and funerals.

Or were they my secrets now? I held them close either way, though not as close as I held my purse right about then.

He smiled softly. “You were right. And the title? The Swell of Endless Music is so lyrical and soft. It’s great. I think we might use it—where’s my manners? Would you like something to drink? I’m sure the break room has tea or burnt coffee, if you’d prefer that?”

He grinned. “Might be for the best. Your zoom-zoom juice might backfire on the flight.”

I gave a start. “My what?”

We sat for an awkwardly quiet moment.

Then he cleared his throat. The redness of his ears was inching down toward his cheeks now, and he checked his watch. “Anyway, there’s a reason you wanted to meet with me?”

Yes, but I didn’t want to leave after this, and go on about my life. I wanted to stay in this uncomfortable chair as long as humanly possible, because I knew when I left, I would never be coming back again.

Dad once told me that all good things came to an end, eventually.

Even this.

I opened my purse and took out a book-shaped present wrapped in brown paper. “I wanted you to have this. As a thanks. Or—I don’t know—a get-well present? I was thinking about getting you a card, but it just felt weird to write, ‘Glad You’re Not Dead!’ on it, you know?”

He laughed—actually laughed. It was deep and rumbly. “Apparently, I was pretty close to dead for a few days. I dreamed that I was.”

My throat began to constrict. “Well, good thing it was just a dream.”

He was quiet for a long moment, too long.

Oh god, had I become the weirdo who gave him a cactus and a book now? This was a terrible idea. I knew it was from the beginning. I was going to put googly eyes on all of Rose’s vibrators for ever suggesting this.

I stopped in the doorway, and steeled myself with a breath, and turned to face him. He was staring at me strangely. Then he was on his feet, brown eyes wide, and the way he looked at me, I could have been the ghost.

Maybe I was.

Metaphorically.

I shook my head, and my heart was beating so bright I could barely stand it. “I’m one hundred percent real. I think. But . . . maybe kiss me again to see if I’m actually here?”

He laughed, deep and humming, and kissed me again in the quiet corner office of Falcon House Publishers. “I’m sorry I made you wait. I’m sorry I didn’t realize.”

He scrunched his nose. “Wouldn’t that be a bit cliché?”

Until my starry-eyed ass came back to earth like Armageddon. “Oh—oh god,” I gasped, pulling away. “What about Laura?”

He snapped his eyes open and gave me a strange look. “Laura? She just wanted my Nora Roberts books if I kicked it, I assure you.”

I unwound with relief. “That must be one hell of a collection.”

He chuckled. “I’m proud of it. Do you want to get dinner tonight?”

Ben glanced at the analogue clock on his desk. “Almost twelve thirty—wait, didn’t you say you had a flight?”

I didn’t want to say no. I didn’t want to leave. And then I found myself thinking about what came next. Dates, and movies, and holidays, years passing in a single blink. He’d keep his hair floppy, and I’d cut mine short, and we’d be somewhere else in the story, or maybe secondary characters in someone else’s. And I thought about years after that, when he’d gotten used to my chaos and I his caution and the world was a little blurry. I didn’t know where we would be, or if he would get tired of me, or if I would break his heart—

But I thought—I thought I wanted to find out.

I said, “Come home with me.”

He didn’t even think. He didn’t weigh any odds. He didn’t pause to find his words. They were there, as sure and certain as his smile. “Can we swing by my apartment first on the way to the airport?” he asked.

38

Body of Work

The North Carolinian afternoon was sweltering hot, so all the windows were opened to let the golden sunshine spill in. Mairmont’s only bed-and-breakfast looked so much different in the summertime, with the wind catching on the sheer curtains, and the sound of insects humming through the old house. All of the flowers and bushes outside in the garden had flowered into blooms of reds and purples and blues, and ivy and jasmine crawled up the terraces on either side of the house. It was oddly picturesque.

I hugged Dana as they came around the desk. “It’s nice to see you! How’s John?”

At the airport, he used the miles he had accrued from years of traveling to writing conferences and book expos to buy a ticket, and he’d traded seats with a nice older lady who had never flown first class before, and she was delighted. Ben squeezed himself into the aisle seat beside me, and curled his fingers through mine, and it was as simple as that, as if he had always been a part of my life, and I had been a part of his.

He did this thing where he rubbed small circles around my thumb joint with his own thumb, and it made the skin there tingle. We talked about our favorite places we’d been, and he was a lot more traveled than I was thanks to Ann’s book tours, and he hated flying almost as much as I did, but we both wanted to take a cross-country drive. He hated skiing, but we both liked snow tubing and burnt marshmallows. His comfort food was ranch dressing on Hot Pockets, while mine was box mac and cheese, and neither of us cared about that new hipster deconstructed meatball joint in SoHo. We were indifferent about the beach, but we loved beach reads, and the two-hour flight felt like two minutes.

Then we’d rented a car from Charlotte, and he’d rolled up his sleeves and said that he could most definitely drive an SUV, but after accidentally knocking the car in neutral and almost running into the airport bus, we swapped places and I drove the distance to Mairmont. He was much better at picking the driving music, anyway.

I squeezed his hand tightly, too. It was a reassurance to myself, standing in this small bed-and-breakfast, that he was actually here. Real. The girl who saw ghosts standing beside a man who had once been a little bit ghostly. Mairmont’s gossip ring could eat their hearts out.

Dana’s eyes flicked to Ben. “And who’s this?”

They accepted it. “We’ve met before?”

They grinned. “I do, don’t I?” They checked us in and took a key off the hook behind them and dangled it from their finger. “Enjoy.”

I took the key. “Thanks,” I replied, and grabbed his hand again, and we disappeared up the stairs with our suitcases in tow. I liked how he felt beside me. I liked the company we kept. And whenever he brushed his thumb against my knuckles, there was a shiver that went from my toes all the way to my scalp, and I couldn’t stand it. Not in a bad way.

But in a way that drove me crazy.

At the end of the hall was the hotel room with the wolfsbane on the door. I’d booked it again for old times’ sake, before I’d ever asked Ben to come with me. I thought I would be spending it alone. Funny how a few hours could change everything.

I unlocked the door, and he rolled our suitcases inside. Sunlight spilled through the sheer curtains, catching the dust motes that floated in the air. I remembered a lot about this room—from the fake wolfsbane in the vase on the dresser to the knot in the hardwood I kept toeing the night I wrote my dad’s obituary because I couldn’t stop pacing to the side of the bed where Ben slept the night things started to spiral, the night before Dad’s funeral.

The hotel room hadn’t changed at all. Still could use more purple, but I was far from caring what color the room was. All I could see was Ben drawing a shadow against the window, sunlight shining golden on his dark hair, and I’d read about aching before. I had ached before.

But this was—I was—

I remembered the morning we woke up together, and the things he said he’d do to me, for me, and it all came back in such vivid detail I had to tell my brain to slow down. Breathe. I wasn’t some weirdly horny teenager anymore—I was absolutely a refined woman with exquisite taste in rum and Cokes, thank you very much, and—

Oh, who was I kidding.

Don’t climb the man mountain, I told myself. Don’t climb the man mountain. Don’t climb—

Then I took hold of the front of his jacket and pulled him close, and to my surprise he met me halfway. Our lips crushed together, and then he pulled away, whispering, “Sorry, sorry, you’re just so beautiful and I finally get to touch you and—”

A lot, it turned out.

In a scattered mess we tipped back toward the bed, stepping out of our shoes, dropping my purse to the carpet, his tie abandoned somewhere on the bench at the foot of the bed. He lifted me up and sat me on the bed, and kissed me like he wanted to devour me, teeth scraping against my skin, nibbling my lip, and I couldn’t get enough of him, either.

I wanted to explore the curve of his neck as my fingers slid down it, and I wanted to ask about the scar just above his collarbone, where his father’s wedding ring always seemed to catch. He kissed the birthmark under my left ear that I always kept hidden because it was shaped a little like a ghost and that was too on the nose for me. It was electric, our contact skin to skin, as if little sparks ignited between our cells every time we touched. If our pasts sang in the wind, our present was in the touch of his hands on my waist, the way his fingers trailed across my body, the breathless kisses he planted against my mouth, as if he wanted to write me into his memory—burn it there.

My fingers tentatively found their way underneath his charcoal-gray jacket as I began to slip it off his broad shoulders, and he shrugged it off the rest of the way. It puddled on the floor. He leaned into me, deepening his kisses, and I just wanted to sink into him, and bury myself into the crook of his body, and stay there forever.

I pressed my hands against his hard chest—and paused. Came back to myself for a very, very brief moment. “Wait. Wait-wait-wait,” I muttered to myself, and started to unbutton his pristine white work shirt. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I most definitely had felt— “Oh sweet chiseled Jesus.” I traced my fingers across his hard chest to his abs and very distinctive V cut into his trousers. “What are you—an underwear model? Are these suckers airbrushed?”

His ears went red with embarrassment. “I’m an anxious person. I swim when I’m anxious. Which means I swim a lot.”

He pressed his mouth against mine, still ravenous, and made me shut up. And you know? It was sexy and I was super okay with it because whatever I’d been about to say succumbed to the part of my brain that seemed to always go offline whenever he kissed me that hard. And quite frankly, my brain had been on for way, way too long. It needed a hard reboot.

At some point he undid my bra, and at some point, I slid off his belt, and at some point he was kissing me—everywhere. He pressed a kiss between my breasts, then just below them, then against my soft stomach. He went lower and lower, muttering in a love language of tongues.

As an English major, I had studied rising actions, I had charted climaxes. Making love and making stories were close to the same thing. You were intimate and vulnerable and wandering, traveling across the landscape of each other, learning. You told a story with each gesture, each sound—every kiss a period, every gasp a comma.

And the way Ben touched me, the way he played his tongue across my skin and burrowed his fingers into me, made a story with my body—the way I bit my lip to hush a moan, and curled my fingers around the duvet—I wanted him to read every word aloud until the very last page, when our lips were swollen and our bodies intertwined into each other’s spaces, and he threaded his fingers between mine and raised them to kiss my knuckles.

After a moment, he asked, “I have a question,” in a soft and thoughtful voice.

I shifted a little to look at him better, flattening out the fluffy feather pillow. “I might just have an answer.”

My eyebrows shot up. “You ask that now?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Well, this—us—we’re a bit strange. Technically we’ve only known each other for a week and some change but . . .”

He closed his eyes, and there was a moment of pause when he was searching for the right words. “I like you a lot, bordering on the bigger word, but . . .”

I tilted my head. “But?”

He admitted, “It’s a bit cliché this soon, and if we’re going to tell our children this story in ten years . . .”

I laughed, because of course he would flag that in this story. “Then I’ll say it first,” I said as I sat up and leaned close to him, my hair falling in a curtain around us as I pressed my forehead to his. “I love you, Benji Andor.”

He smiled so wide it reached his brown eyes, and turned them ocher, as if that were the happiest thing he’d ever heard. “I love you, too, Florence Day.”

He gave a long sigh and sank farther into his pillow. “Okay, we can do that—”

I playfully shoved him in the shoulder. “Fine. Let’s be bunkmates, then.”

The light began to leave his eyes.

He quirked an eyebrow. “Second?”

I thought Ben was going to die—again. When the door was closed, he pulled the covers over his head and disappeared beneath them. “Please kill me,” his muffled voice moaned. “End my misery.”

Grinning, I pulled the covers off him again, and he looked dejected and mortified in the deathbed of pillows. “Absolutely not, sir. If I have to live with them, so do you.”

I began to crawl out of bed, when he grabbed me by the arm and swallowed me up underneath the covers with him. “Just a few more minutes,” he said, his breath hot against my neck as he held me tightly.

39

Ghost Stories

WE DID NOT end up catching either of the bachelor parties that night, but I was very certain neither Carver nor Nicki remembered the night very well anyway. From what I heard, there’d been an impromptu concert where Bruno almost threw out his back howling the laments of Dolly Parton, Carver accidentally lit the bar counter on fire, and Alice mooned Officer Saget right in the middle of Main Street. Sad that I missed that part, but I was glad we didn’t end up going. Someone had to be coherent on the wedding day.

I busied myself with final wedding preparations, rearranging the flowers in the parlor rooms while sneaking tastes of desserts in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure how Carver talked Alice into letting them have it in the funeral home for free, so I made a mental note to ask him what sort of blackmail he had on Alice for her to be so agreeable about it all.

The Days Gone Funeral Home looked like it was decorated in a flower crown, with large sunflowers on the porch and white ribbons draped across the old wooden roofbeams, and the once-suffocating floral-and-formaldehyde smell was replaced with the scent of bright and beautiful sunshine. The windows were open, as were the doors, and every so often a clever, happy wind raced through the old Victorian house, and the foundation creaked and groaned in hello.

Ben looked so at home in the red parlor, helping me arrange the sunflowers in vases kept from Dad’s funeral, as if he’d been here all this time.

Alice elbowed me in the side and said, with all honesty, “Good catch, sis. Not my type, but good catch.”

Alice gave him a once-over. “You take care of my sister, you hear?”

He raised his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t dare.”

I gave her a salute. “Aye, aye, boss.”

When she was gone, Ben took a sunflower out of one of the vases and tapped me on the nose with it. “Your sister’s doing a great job with the business.”

I rolled my eyes and playfully shoved him away. “Stop being so sappy,” I complained, hoping he didn’t notice my reddening ears. If he talked like that much more, I was going to be in a permanent state of blush.

He liked me; it was still so hard to believe.

Benji Andor adored me.

And for the first time since Dad passed, everything felt almost perfect. The sky was this almost-perfect crimson—the color of Dad’s suit when we buried him—and the sweltering July heat had abated to a soft humidity that still felt sticky, but it was as close to perfect as you could get in the summer, and the entire town had come to watch my brother and his husband say their actually perfect vows.

They slipped on each other’s rings and professed their love under the ancient rafters that had echoed more sobs than cheers, and the purpling light of evening eased softly in through the windows, painting everything in shadowy hues of rose, and it was a fitting wedding for a funeral home.

Dad would have loved it.

After the wedding we popped champagne and played Dad’s favorite burned CD and danced through the parlors to all the good goodbyes, because endings were just new beginnings. And right now, we were happy, and Carver and Nicki were dancing with each other, and Rose and Alice were flirting in the kind of way that would lead to something else.

(What kind of romance writer would I be if I didn’t see how they fell?)

Because the same look was on my face, too, every time I looked at Ben. When he left to get us a refresher of champagne, Mom slid up beside me and gave a hard sigh. “Would it be frowned upon if, during the couples’ dance, I danced, too?”

I offered out my arm to my mom. “I’m not Dad, but I can dance with you.”

And just as she said that, Ben swooped in and offered his hand to—my mom. I gasped, scandalized. Ben said, “Patience makes the heart grow fonder.”

He winked.

(Ugh, this was for saying I’d put googly eyes on his washboard abs, wasn’t it?)

I moped about on the edge of the parlor like a lonely island, swilling the red punch that was most definitely spiked. Everyone had someone to dance with—even the mayor. And here I was, left to lean against one of the tall tables with the owner of Bar None and Bruno. They were smoking cigars that reminded me of the ones Dad liked—strong and sweet.

Bruno nudged his chin toward Ben and Mom dancing. “I haven’t seen your mom so happy in ages.”

I bit the side of my cheek to hide a grin, watching Ben trip over his own feet. He and Mom laughed, and it pulled at something deep in my chest. It ached, but not in the way I’d felt when Dad died. It was a good sort of pain. The kind that reminded me that I was still alive, and there was still life to live and memories to make and people to meet.

I tilted my head. The song ended, and I wondered how to explain it. He was a ghost who haunted me after I failed at turning in his grandmother’s last manuscript—“I met him at work,” I finally supplied. “I thought he was an absolute stuck-up asshole at first.”

I turned around to him. “Is that what you love the most?”

His lips twisted. “That I can say in current company.” Then he offered his hand to me, and I took it. He spun me around, away from the table and onto the dance floor.

A lifetime ago.

He laughed and brought me closer to him. “What love interest doesn’t?” We danced across the ancient oak floorboards, around Mom and Alice, and Seaburn and his wife, and Karen and Mr. Taylor, though I only knew that later, because all I remembered was Ben. The music was a little dampened, and the evening light slid through the open window in lazy hues of oranges and pinks, and he looked so perfect painted in it.

We danced slowly, his hands soft on my hips, swaying to a slow song that I didn’t know, but I liked it. It was sweet, with violins, with lyrics about want and yearning and everything that you really needed for a good love song.

A glimmer in the corner caught my eye. I glanced over.

An old woman with beautiful wide brown eyes stood in the doorway to the parlor, her hand outstretched to an elderly man in an orange sweater and brown pants, who took it tightly and kissed her knuckles. They shimmered in that star-glitter way spirits did. Ben glanced in the direction I was looking.

It meant I wasn’t alone.

When I looked back toward the couple, they had already melted into a brilliant flash of sunlight, and Heather walked through the doorway, arguing with her husband about their babysitter, as if nothing had been there at all.

I gave him a surprised look. “You’re asking?”

Life happened in old funeral homes, too.

The cemetery was warm and quiet in the summer evening. The iron gate was already closed, but we knew the perfect little broken bit of wall to climb over, and we held each other’s champagne as we did. My family had been busy, it seemed, since Dad’s funeral. Almost all of the tombstones were washed, gleaming like bone shards sticking up from the hills of bright green grass.

Dad was waiting for us on his favorite hill in the cemetery, in a nondescript shaded plot close to his favorite old oak tree, easily lost in the sea of stones. His marker was pristine and the weeds plucked out. Mom had put fresh orchids in the vase, and I picked out the spoiled leaves with care. His plaque only had a single word—beloved. Mom said it was because there were so many things Dad had been to so many people—“Beloved son, beloved parent, beloved husband, beloved pain in the ass . . .”—but secretly I knew Mom had requested only that word because it was her word to him. Her soft I love you.

Her beloved.

I brushed a ladybug off the plaque.

It still felt like he was here some days, like the world still turned with him in it. And parts of him still were.

Ben crouched down beside the tombstone, and I let him have some privacy as I followed the path up to the bench under the oak tree and sat down. The night had cooled off, and the wind whispered through the trees, and a murder of crows cawed in the distance. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine Dad sitting beside me like he used to, chatting about rates of flower arrangements and the cost of coffins and Carver’s newest chair he built and Alice’s latest chaos. I breathed in the sweet scent of freshly cut grass.

And things were okay.

Ben came over to sit down beside me after a while.

Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?”

And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.

Eccentric Circles

IN THE DAYS Gone Funeral Home, in the back corner of the largest parlor, there was a loose floorboard where I once kept my dreams. I kept them locked tight in a box, storing them like treasure, until the day I could take them out and brush them off, like old friends coming to greet each other.

I didn’t store my dreams in a small box underneath the floorboards anymore. I didn’t need to.

But there was a girl who was a little bit tall and lanky for her age, dark hair and wide eyes, who wrote her dreams on spare pieces of paper and put them in a jar like fireflies, and when she found her mother’s old metal box and its smutty, smutty X-Files fanfic, she decided to store her dreams there, too.

And the wind that whistled through the old funeral parlor sang sweet and soft and sure.

Like love ought to be.

Acknowledgments

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it took a village to raise Benji Andor from the dead. The Dead Romantics couldn’t be possible without a lot of people, most of whom I will probably forget in these acknowledgments, but you know who you are. Thank you for giving Florence and Ben a ghost of a chance.

This book wouldn’t be possible without the tender love and necromancy of my agent, Holly Root; my phenomenal editor, Amanda Bergeron, and assistant editor, Sareer Khader; my copyeditor, Angelina Krahn; my wonderful publicist, and the whole team from managing to production to marketing, Christine Legon and Alaina Christensen and Jessica Mangicaro and everyone else. And to my critique partners—Nicole Brinkley, Rachel Strolle, Ashley Schumacher, Katherine Locke, and Kaitlyn Sage Patterson—for being the Rose to my Florence and encouraging me when I was at my lowest.

Speaking of lowest, I would also like to give a very enthusiastic fuck you to my anxiety. Thanks for, as always, being the worst.

And finally, to anyone who has proclaimed drunkenly at a bar that love is dead—I’ve been there and trust me, love is not dead. It’s simply sleeping off a raging hangover. Give it two Tylenol and tell it to call you in the morning.

Thank you for reading this book. I hope you find a little bit of happiness wherever you go.

READERS GUIDE

The Dead Romantics

•   •   •   •   •

BEHIND THE BOOK

I SEE DEAD people.

Kidding. I really don’t, and if I did I would probably:

One, talk to my therapist and—

Two, schedule an exorcism.

Joking aside, I do kind of see dead people. We all do. We see them in family photos, when we remember the way your grandma used to talk to her flowers; and the way your granddad happily sat in his favorite rocking chair on the porch, watching lightning arc across summer storms; and the way your aunt used to have a laugh so infectious she would light up a whole room. We read about them, all the time. English class is full of dead people. Jane Austen? Dead. Shakespeare? Doth be dead and buried. Charles Dickens? A tale of two deads. We listen to them on the radio, we watch them in films, without really thinking that they—you know—caught the midnight train already.

But, honestly?

Death scares me.

That’s the crux of it. Death itself, in all its ferocious unknown, scares the living crap out of me. So why—why god, why—do I gravitate toward ghost stories? And if there’s a ghost romance? You bet your ass I’m going to be up all night reading it. Death and ghost stories go hand in hand, like peanut butter and getting it stuck to the roof of your mouth.

I don’t understand my fascination whatsoever, and you know? I’m not the kind of person to think too much on it, because if I do my anxiety is going to start to spiral and then all I will think about is my unknown, eternal end.

Which is probably why I write.

There’s this illusionary permanence to writing. My books will be here long after I’m gone. I mean, hopefully.

Forever. (Usually.)

People write for different reasons—to feel less alone, to understand their own feelings, to tell stories that make them happy—and people read books for different reasons, too.

For me?

I read because I want to be held. Not like, literally, by a book. (That’d be weird.) But metaphorically. I want to sink into a novel. I want to be romanced by the possibility of sunsets too pretty to describe and kisses that you feel all the way in your toes and love stories too wide and wild for you to ever feel alone.

If anything staves off the creeping unknown of death, I propose that it’s a good book.

Maybe not my book—I mean, I hope it’s my book. Or at least my book is a stepping-stone for what will be your favorite book. I hope I can write one for you. I hope I can write one for me, too.

I didn’t start writing The Dead Romantics to explore my feelings on an author’s legacy and what the dead end up leaving behind. I just wanted to write a fun ghost story! A chaotic gremlin of a woman meets the stern ghost of a man (who, secretly, has a cinnamon roll-flavored heart of gold)! They have sexy high jinks! Everything turns out fine in the end!

Well, I was the fool, apparently, because little did I know, I had the talent to do both.

Somehow.

It might be a one-time deal, so I am relishing in this moment. I managed to do something I didn’t realize I could. (Well, two things. I didn’t think I’d be able to write anything in 2020 but I showed myself that anything is possible with a few healthy coping mechanisms and nowhere to go during a pandemic.) Most of the time, I talk around my own insecurities and make fun of them until the person I’m talking to gets fed up with my turtling and tells me to just write a happy novel.

Well, I did! So joke’s on them! It’s also sad! And a little sappy!

But you know? I like a little corny in my life and I hope that you do, too.

I think, as readers, we all have a comfort read, the one book that protects us in the exact ways it needs to—whether it is a romance or erotica or a thriller or a crime story or a fantasy. A book that we find ourselves in, like looking in a mirror. Oh, you, too? It will ask, as it fills that soft, hollow place in your heart that nothing else dared to touch. I think we all deserve a book like that, whatever yours is.

It’s not about how many books are sold or whether they are turned into films or re-released with different editions that makes a book’s legacy. I think it is the readers, whether there are only seven of them, or seventy thousand. You’re the legacy, you’re the life beyond the story I give you.

Florence’s dad said that the people we love are in the wind, and I believe it. I think that the people we love can be in the pages of books, too.

I hope you find yourself in a book someday.

And I hope that book lives forever.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Florence is a ghostwriter for Ann Nichols. Do you think books written by ghostwriters are just as important to an author’s legacy as those written by the author themselves?

Usually, keeping secrets can shake a person’s trust in someone else. But Florence’s dad kept the secret that he knew who Florence ghostwrote for and had read all of those books. Do you think some secrets can actually build trust once revealed?

Throughout the novel, Florence struggles with trying to write the perfect ending. If you could write any sort of happily ever after, how would it go?

Both Ben and Florence find comfort in romance novels. What are some of your favorite comfort reads?

There are many depictions of afterlives in the media—ghosts, reapers, spirits—from all different cultures. Why do you think the theme of death is so universally explored in stories and the concept of life (or some semblance of it) after death?

What is a book you loved that you believe more people should read? What did you love most about it?

Death, and how a person handles it, is a big part of the novel. If you could leave a list behind for your loved ones, like Xavier does in the story, what would be on it?

If Ben and Florence were put in a punderdome, who do you think would win? Kidding—but in truth, do you think humor and tragedy go hand in hand? Why or why not?

Do you feel Lee Marlow was justified in writing When the Dead Sing? Do you think original ideas exist? Or do we all pull inspiration—knowingly or not—from the experiences we’ve had and the people we’ve met throughout our lives?

If Ben and Florence had a sequel, what do you think it would be about? How do you think Ben will handle his newfound power of seeing dead people?

What do you think Florence will write next?

ASH’S COMFORT READS

Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones.

Beach Read, Emily Henry.

Dragon’s Bait, Vivian Vande Velde.

The Proposal, Jasmine Guillory.

Dating You / Hating You, Christina Lauren.

Well Met, Jen DeLuca.

A Winter’s Promise, Christelle Dabos.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall.

The Princess Bride, William Goldman.

[That one fanfic that will never be named], Unknown.

Photo by Ashley Poston

ASHLEY POSTON writes stories about love and friendship and ever afters. A native to South Carolina, she now lives in a small grey house with her sassy cat and too many books. You can find her on the internet, somewhere, watching cat videos and reading fan fiction.

CONNECT ONLINE

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