The Love of My Afterlife(87)
Merritt rests her cheek on his chest, eyes squeezed shut, the corners of her mouth lifted. Cooper pulls away and holds her face in his hands, using the crook of his forefinger to tenderly wipe away the tears that have begun streaming down her face. His shoulders, always so hunched and stiff, lower, sinking into something resembling relief. He starts to speak, but whatever he’s about to say turns into a deep sob as he pulls Merritt back to him. Merritt laughs, right from her belly, and then Cooper laughs too, a quick bark of a laugh. The two of them are just desperately clutching each other, laughing and sobbing at something only they are privy to.
“Is this real?” Cooper says eventually. “Are you real? Is this a dream?”
Merritt takes a deep breath and exhales slowly as if she’s trying to steady herself. “It’s real, Coop. Not in any way the kind of real that you’re used to. But I’m here. And you’re here.” She clasps his hands in her own. “And my god I missed you.”
Eric watches on, an indulgent smile on his face as Cooper shakes his head, looking around the room in astonishment. His eyes are wide, and though he looks confused and light-headed, he doesn’t look frightened at all. He looks almost happy. I don’t understand.
“Wait…” he says, taking in the decor of the room. “What the fuck is this? Is this Franny’s Launderette in Barnet? You absolute weirdo.”
“You know I loved hanging out there,” Merritt says with a shrug. “But I’ve been getting some less-than-stellar client feedback about it. Apparently, what might be a calming environment to me could come off as creepy to other people. Should probably change it to something super basic that everyone gets. The apartment from Friends, maybe. Or just something generic and beige like a hotel lobby. What do you reckon?”
“Stop!” I choke out, utterly confused. Fuck. What if this is not Evermore? What if it’s some weird alternate reality? What if the Higher-Ups caught on to the plan and now they’ve sent me to some place where my destiny is just to be perplexed for the rest of forever? “Why are you all acting like this is normal?”
“Delphie?” Cooper finally realises that I’m standing right there at the back of the room. He hurries over to me, his face crumpling into a dark frown, like he’s finally cottoned on. “Fuck, are you okay?” He tilts my chin up with his hand, inspecting my face, then running his eyes across my body. “Are you hurt?” He pushes a hand through his hair, causing the curls to stick up at odd angles. He glances at Merritt. “How long can we stay here with you for? When can we go back? Is Delphie safe?” He turns back to me, eyes staring deep into mine. “As soon as you said Merritt, I knew you were telling the truth. I thought it was some sort of cruel trick at first, but you’re not the cruel-trick type. And then when you said about the romance novels, I knew it was my Merritt.”
“Your Merritt? Wait, are…are you in on this whole thing?”
Tears of frustration threaten to spill.
Cooper grabs Merritt’s hand and pulls her over. Eric is holding Merritt’s other hand, so he gets yanked over too. A chain of very attractive people who are all acting very, very strangely indeed.
“Delphie, this is Em! It’s Em. My sister.”
I look between them, and it suddenly occurs to me that their eyes are not only the exact same shade of dark emerald green, the exact same big almond shape, but that they are tilting their respective heads at the exact same angle.
“But…but this is Merritt. I thought your sister was called Emily?”
“Her name is M,” Cooper explains. “As in the letter M. Not E-M.”
It dawns on me like a drizzle at first. And then a cloudburst. Em is M. For Merritt. Not Emily. Cooper’s bookish twin sister is…Merritt? I notice then that she’s wearing the earrings that Cooper lent to me for the gala. She must have swiped them from his flat the day we got back! Merritt sees me looking and touches her hand to her ear.
“I missed them.”
“The Irish accent,” I mutter with a frown.
“I went to Trinity College. Lived in Dublin for ten years.”
I had assumed she had gone to Trinity College Cambridge. Cooper stares at his sister in wonderment. Now it makes sense why he’s not more scared, why he seems elated, why he doesn’t seem to have fully caught on to the ramifications of what all this means. I know how much his heart broke when he lost his sister. How did he describe it that night? Like his heart had cracked, and while he could find ways to plaster over those cracks, he knew they’d never truly mend. And now…
Merritt looks back and forth between us. I feel a weird surge of anger on behalf of Cooper. Because while he’s still in the midst of shock and delight at seeing his dead sister again, it doesn’t change the fact that she willingly brought him here. Away from his life for her own benefit. Was this the plan all along? Was I part of some sick ruse?
Merritt shakes her head as if she’s reading my mind.
“I was never planning on Cooper coming here!” she protests. “Of course I wasn’t, I’m not a total monster. I was initially planning to just have you, Delphie. But fate intervened and, as we know, fate is bigger than anything at Evermore.”
“You’re saying the crash…That wasn’t you?”
“No!” Merritt presses a hand to her chest, offended. “A crash? I would never. So prosaic. Crashes are dark. I was planning to have you fall into an open manhole for the comedy of it. That crash was fate. Cooper being here is fate. And human will? That’s even more powerful than anything we can conjure up here.”