But damn, there was something about knowing that the version of herself she presented to the public wasn’t the true her, or at least not all of the true her. It made him wonder if anything else about her, something that went deeper than hair, was also not as it appeared.
She stood, breaking his trance. “We’re going for a walk. You want to come?”
He was having trouble adjusting to the question. Think. Did he want to go on a walk with Blair and the canine underwear thief?
He did not.
But yesterday, the day of a thousand words, had begun with a morning walk.
Another question: Did he understand that going on a walk—or not going on a walk—had no bearing on his word count?
With his rational mind he did.
“Sure, I’ll join you.”
He followed her through the side gate, then out the front one. She checked each several times. She seemed preoccupied with making sure everything was locked. It made sense; she was a celebrity.
“And we’re off,” she said as they headed up the hill.
Four days later Jack had written another four thousand words, many of them by the pool. The pace needed to pick up in order for him to meet his deadline, but at this point, progress was progress.
He was waiting for Blair when she came out of the main house. They’d established an unspoken routine whereby he joined her and the vampiric beagle on their morning walks. At home, he wasn’t an early riser, hadn’t been since his teaching days. But he was still on central time, so he’d just kept getting up at what was the crack ofdawn here. Or what felt like the crack of dawn. He had come to understand that such a descriptor was relative: he had learned that Blair put in an hour of work in the mornings before their walks.
They took the same route every day, up to the rich-people scenic overlook and back down. Sometimes they talked a lot. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all. They were always home in just under an hour, which meant he was caffeinated, clearheaded, and ready to work by eight. Jack had writtenIn Timein the evenings while teaching. Here, though, he was able to bang out a good chunk of words—relatively speaking—before midday. It was novel.
Also novel: his back didn’t hurt anymore. He hated the fact that he probably had to attribute this to some combination of walking and stretching out by the pool.
Blair herself wasn’t around much after their walks. She spent long days at her office, and that was after her morning session of work at home. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised by her work ethic, which was downright Midwestern. All those evenings she’d answered right away when he texted had made her seem less busy than she actually was.
When they reached the top of the hill, the crow flew by again. Oracrow. He had no way of knowing if it was the same one; he knew only that they’d been seeing a large black bird every day. He reached into his pocket and extracted a handful of the fancy granola Blair had left in his kitchen. He walked toward the tree the crow was perched in, which of course caused it to fly away. But he scattered the granola at its base nonetheless.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Feeding the crow.” When she didn’t say anything, he added, “The idea of a crow army was inspiring.”
He was kidding. Probably. Attempting to make her laugh, anyway, though he didn’t know why. That seemed like an atypical effort on his part.
It didn’t work; she took him seriously. “You’re going to really have to commit if you want a crow army. Come with food every day. And somehow figure out how to gradually lure them home. Even then, will you get an army, or will you get a lone crow warrior?”
Blair was in many ways an enigma. She could be funny as hell, but then she could take what should be a joke—the mustering of a crow army—and treat it with earnest attention.
Hehadbeen joking, right, about wanting his own crow army? What was a crow army going to be, should he be successful in raising one, but a distraction?
“Speaking of crows,” she said as they approached the house toward the end of their walk, “it’s Halloween.”
“I guess it is. Are you going out?”
“I was supposed to go to a party, but I bailed on it.” She paused, and there was a slight stutter in her steps. For a moment, he thought she was going to say something else, something specific about her aversion to this party, but she just said, “I’m not feeling it. What do you usually do for Halloween?”
“I do nothing for Halloween.” Even in his teaching days, he’d refused to join in staff costume contests, or to accept candy from students. He was a Halloween Grinch.
“Esme and I used to watch scary TV on Halloween, in the years after she aged out of trick-or-treating,” Blair said. “She’s watchingThe Last of Usin Portland with her roommate, and she’s been talking about it, so I’m going to try it myself. I should have watched it ages ago. I’m friendly with some of the people who worked on it, but I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to that level of horror. But since I will desperately grasp at any means of connecting with my teenager, I will be overcoming my fear of watching people get their brains eaten. You want to join me? Popcorn and zombies?”
“TV’s not really my thing,” he said reflexively.
“Yeah, you said you didn’t own a TV.”
“I did?” He didn’t remember talking about it.
