Strings begins in the eerie stillness of a nearly deserted airport, where two travelers are trying to outrun the uncertainty of an approaching national lockdown. Grace Wheeler is a Southern journalist determined to protect both her health and her precarious career. Robby Song is a Native American rock star returning to northern Minnesota while the music industry pauses around him. Their first conversation—shared over airport coffee, masks, and a misplaced packet of guitar strings—sets an unexpectedly personal story in motion against the upheaval of the pandemic.
Contemporary Fiction
Date Published: November 23, 2025
A pandemic is spreading across the globe. A national lockdown looms in the United States. A Southern journalist sees a chance to protect her health and jumpstart her career by escaping north to a Minnesota wilderness. Feisty and wary of entanglement, she piques the interest of a bored Native American rock star on his way home.
Robby Song’s career may be on hold, but Grace Wheeler is on a mission to build hers. To Robby, she’s an intriguing challenge. To Grace, he’s a distraction she’s not ready to handle. But the brutal Northwoods winter is coming. Grace flees back south . . . to soul-searching isolation and a puzzling middle-of-the-night call.
The opening situation gives Strings an immediate sense of place and time. Grace and Robby meet in an airport stripped of its usual crowds, commercial noise, and easy anonymity. Surgical masks hide their expressions, flight schedules have become uncertain, and even accepting a cup of coffee requires a new kind of caution. Jan Merritt uses those recognizable details to introduce two people whose lives have been interrupted in very different ways.
Grace approaches the Northwoods as an escape and a professional opportunity, while Robby is heading toward family and an indefinite pause in his music career. Their competing priorities prevent the relationship from beginning as a simple retreat romance. Grace is intent on remaining independent, Robby is intrigued by her resistance, and the approaching Minnesota winter adds another deadline to a connection formed during an already unstable moment.
PART I – THE NORTHWOODS
Chapter 1 – Airports
Empty. No sounds except flight announcements and Covid precautions over the PA as Grace trekked alone through the wide, carpeted corridors, stepped onto the moving walkways, and passed the shuttered kiosks, shops, and restaurants of the Minneapolis airport. The few people she saw, behind counters or scurrying past at safe distances, wore surgical masks, except for one or two who had creative, last-minute coverings . . . red bandannas or black gaiters. The antiseptic smell of hand sanitizer hung in the air, penetrating her mask. If she closed her eyes, she could think she was in a hospital. Her hair probably reeked of the stuff. Of course, her gate was the last one. She shrugged her old, green backpack off and sank into a seat against the wall, leaning her head back and closing her eyes, hoping the flight was still happening. Except for her, the gate area was deserted. Maybe she could drift off.
But it was no good. She couldn’t sleep. She was tired, and the adrenaline had worn off, but she was growing anxious. Maybe she wasn’t as brave or capable as she’d thought. She sat up, pulled the tablet out of her backpack, and began rereading her notes from the last interview she’d done, the one with the middle school English teacher about online classes. She needed to get it written up and into her editor. She could not lose this job, her only income. A seat creaked nearby. She looked up. She hadn’t heard him walk up, but good sign, another passenger. A man was sitting with his head leaned back against the window, eyes closed, long legs stretched in front of him, a guitar case leaning against the next seat with a tan jacket thrown over it. Before long, he sat up, glanced at her over his black mask with tiny gold stars, rose, and walked to the bank of windows at the end of the concourse. He stood there, looking out, a tall, thin man all in black, with a long braid. Quite the silhouette. She looked back at her notes.
“Cozy, huh? A whole airport and just the two of us.”
She jumped. The voice was unexpected . . . and hoarse. He was six feet in front of her. She stared up at him. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”
“Well, I try to look for the positive.” He paused and cleared his throat but didn’t turn away. “I’m going in search of coffee. If you’ll keep an eye on my things, I’ll bring you some.”
“I’ll watch them.”
He moved the guitar and jacket to a seat in her row, then straightening, looked at her. “You want coffee or not? You didn’t actually say.”
They studied each other then, the way people do when they’re wearing masks — all eyes. His were dark, almost black, under barely arched eyebrows. They looked at her steadily . . . with a touch of amusement? Hers were brown, with the beginning of a worry wrinkle between her brows. She looked back with a serious expression.
“Sure. Black, one sugar.” She leaned over to get her wallet and noticed her toenails. She had meant to cover the chips with a fresh coat of blue polish. Oh, well.
“I’ll get it.” He walked off.
A red packet was on the carpet below his jacket. She put her tablet down on the little table between her and the next seat, walked over, and picked it up. D’Addario Guitar Strings. She placed it on the worn suede jacket, under the sleeve but visible, and went back to her notes.
************
“I stopped at a hand sanitizer.”
She nearly dropped her tablet this time. “You need a bell!”
“Sorry.” He was in a seat, reaching across his guitar to place her coffee on the little table. “One of my nicknames growing up was Sneak. But you seem a little edgy.”
“Maybe.” She noticed his long, slender fingers and wondered if that was good for playing guitar. Her mother’d always said it helped with playing the piano. She picked up the cup and went to remove one side of her mask, but the loop was tangled in her hair. She put the cup back down. Masks were proving to be a challenge. She’d given up trying to control her hair long ago, but masks weren’t optional. Her hair was dark red, dark enough it was hard to see the red unless she was in the sun. The kind of red hair that’s big and ends up in long twirls unless you comb or brush it which only makes it a bigger, frizzy mess. She tried to free first one side of her mask, then the other, finally getting one, then a sip of coffee. She looked his way. He was watching her. “I hadn’t realized how much I needed this. Thanks.”
“You have a lot of hair.” He turned away, removed his mask with one hand, took a sip, and turned his face toward her, pausing, then going on, “I knew how much I needed it.” Leaning forward, he put his forearms on his thighs and held the coffee between his knees. He was not unattractive, in an angular, ascetic kind of way — prominent cheekbones, straight nose, full lips, and the dark eyes.
He’d bought her coffee, so she figured she should try to be sociable. “Have you come a long way?”
“Not today. Just from my apartment. But I’ve been traveling. Got in late. You?”
“This is my third airport since five this morning.”
“Sounds like you’ve come a long way. Got somebody in Duluth?” He sipped.
“I wish. I have no idea what I’m doing next.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked over at the clock. “I’d say you have about an hour and a half to figure something out.” Just then, an agent walked up to the check-in desk.
“Do you think they’ll take us, if it’s only us?”
“I don’t know. Probably depends on whether they need to get a plane to Duluth, for commuters. I guess we’ll see. I’ve never had this flight cancel.”
“You’ve done this before?”
He nodded, swallowing a sip of coffee. “Every four . . . six months or so. I’ve got family all around Duluth . . . and this time, I’m staying . . . a while. I figure I’m safer up there than most anywhere.”
“Me, too.”
The PA system came on. “Good afternoon passengers. This is the pre-boarding announcement for flight 2514 to Duluth. We are now inviting those passengers with small children, and any passengers requiring special assistance, to begin boarding at this time. Please have your boarding pass and identification ready. Regular boarding will begin in approximately ten minutes time. Thank you.” The agent looked in their direction and shrugged. “If you guys are ready, you can board.”
They gathered their belongings. He noticed the strings and looked over at her, but she was putting her tablet away. As she passed him, he said, “I’m Robby.”
She replied, “Oh . . . Grace.”
Strings is likely to connect with those drawn to character-centered contemporary fiction shaped by recent history. Grace and Robby meet under circumstances that make ordinary social rituals feel unfamiliar, so their early exchanges carry the awkwardness, caution, and unexpected intimacy many people associate with the first months of the pandemic.
The novel may also suit those interested in stories that contrast regions and personal backgrounds. Grace brings her Southern perspective and career ambitions into Robby’s Minnesota world, while the Northwoods setting introduces isolation, family ties, and a winter severe enough to influence her choices. Music, journalism, cultural identity, and the tension between independence and attachment all contribute to the relationship taking shape between them.
Jan Merritt lives on the coast of South Carolina with strong ties to northern Minnesota where her dad was born. Her early life was filled with rich, but conflicting narratives. On the one hand, her dad regaled her with pioneering stories from Minnesota: Merritt boys tramping through tamarack swamps and the Northwoods, learning from their Ojibwe neighbors; surviving -60° winters; and the saga of her great-grandfather leading them to discover iron ore on the Mesabi Range only to lose that mining fortune to John D. Rockefeller in a New York City courtroom. But on the other hand, Jan’s education in an elite private girls’ school in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, led her into a privileged, old South social set she wasn’t born into, one with a different set of values. These opposing values simmered in Jan’s head.
She grew up passionate about teaching, both in the classroom and on horses. She married and had a family. Life was good, but it came to a halt when she discovered by accident that she had brain cancer. She has survived, but after the surgeries and treatments, her brain is not the same. She can’t ride or teach school, but her new brain is busy. It creates conversations. One night toward the end of Covid, Jan gave up trying to sleep and decided to write down what the people were saying … maybe if she got the chatter out of her head, she could sleep. It didn’t work but she hasn’t stopped writing. Jan has a new passion.
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The packet of guitar strings Grace finds beside Robby’s jacket is a small object, but it neatly connects the novel’s title to the first fragile line drawn between them. Both characters are traveling toward uncertain futures: Grace does not know what she will do after landing in Duluth, and Robby knows only that he plans to remain near his family for a while. Their meeting occurs before either can understand how thoroughly work, geography, and isolation will reshape their plans.
Strings places that relationship inside a period when distance could mean safety, loneliness, or both. The Northwoods may offer Grace the separation she believes she needs, but the puzzling call that follows her return south suggests that leaving Minnesota will not neatly sever what began there.
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