I opened the attachment. Forty pages of my own sentences stared back at me, cleaned up, reordered, finished — including two stories I distinctly remembered never completing. Someone had typed endings onto them. Good endings. Better than what I would have written, and unmistakably in my voice, because they’d been built entirely out of notes I now recognized: margin comments I’d once scribbled to myself at nineteen and never acted on.
Further down the folder: a signed publishing contract from a small literary press, dated four months ago. My name on it — my actual legal name — beside a signature that was, impossibly, mine, in handwriting I would have sworn I never gave anyone permission to reproduce.
I sat very still in the dark living room, my husband asleep eight feet away, and understood that I had been publishing a book for four months without knowing it existed.
I didn’t wait for morning.
“Matthew.”
He startled awake, blinking at the laptop glowing on the table, then at my face, and whatever he saw there made him sit up fast. “Em — what’s wrong?”
“Who is Priya Anand?”
The color left his face in a way that told me everything before he said a single word.
“I can explain the order of things,” he said carefully, “if you let me start from the beginning.”
“Start from seventeen,” I said. “I heard you on the phone. I heard all of it. Whatever you’ve spent five years building, I want to hear every piece of it right now.”
He nodded slowly, and then he told me.
He’d kept every story I ever showed him since high school — not sentimentally, he insisted, but because he genuinely thought they were good, better than I ever let myself believe. When I abandoned the unfinished ones in a drawer sophomore year of college, guilt-ridden over quitting the creative writing program I’d been too afraid to keep pursuing, he’d photographed the pages “just in case,” never intending to do anything with them.
Two years ago, half-joking after a few beers, he’d sent three of my old stories to an agent friend of a coworker, expecting nothing. Priya wrote back within a week, asking who “Emily R.” was and whether she had more.
