The email subject line stopped my heart cold: "Congratulations! Your book is #1." It was not my book on that list. It was hers.
I was sitting at my kitchen table in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a mug of coffee gone cold beside my laptop, when my daughter Claire forwarded me the link. "Mom, have you seen this?" she had written. "This sounds exactly like your lighthouse book." I clicked, and there it was on the bestseller chart: *Where the Tide Remembers*, by Wren Halloway. The cover showed a woman in a yellow raincoat standing on a rocky shore, staring at a lighthouse. My lighthouse. My shore. The description mentioned a widow named Wren who inherits a lighthouse keeper's cottage and finds her dead husband's letters hidden inside the walls.
That was my book. Not similar to my book. Not inspired by my book. My book, down to the name of the dog — a scruffy mutt named Biscuit — and the line about the soup that always tasted like salt and grief. I had written that line at 2 a.m. in January, crying into my tea, six months after my husband Tom died. Nobody else on earth knew that line except one person: Dana Whitmore, my best friend of twenty years, the woman who had read every draft of my manuscript, *The Lighthouse Keeper's Widow*, in our little critique group.
My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped the phone. I called Claire back. "Mom, breathe," she said. "Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe she — " "Claire," I cut in, "the dog's name is Biscuit. The widow finds letters in the wall in chapter nine. I wrote that. Dana read that draft in March." Silence on the other end. Then Claire said, very quietly, "Mom, Dana's been acting strange lately. She quit the critique group last month and said she was done writing."
Done writing. Sure. Done writing other people's work, maybe, because she had already stolen mine. I opened my laptop and pulled up my manuscript folder. *The Lighthouse Keeper's Widow — FINAL DRAFT — 312 pages.* It was all still there, time-stamped, untouched. But a book I had never published was sitting at number one, making someone else rich, while I was still working part-time shifts at the library gift shop to pay my property taxes.
I drove to Dana's house that afternoon. She lived ten minutes away in a gray cottage with white trim, the same cottage where we'd drunk a hundred pots of tea and workshopped a hundred chapters. Her car was in the driveway. The porch light was on. I knocked, and when she opened the door, she smiled the way she always did — warm, easy, like nothing in the world was wrong. "Nora! What a surprise." Behind her, on the coffee table, I could see a stack of hardcover books. *Where the Tide Remembers.* A whole stack of them, still in shrink wrap.
"Dana," I said, "we need to talk about Wren Halloway." Her smile didn't flicker. It got wider. "Oh, isn't it wonderful?" she said. "My pen name, darling. I finally did it." She said it like she was announcing a pregnancy. Like she expected me to hug her. I stared at her, at the woman who had held my hand at Tom's funeral, and I said the only thing I could think of: "Dana, that book is mine. You know it is."
She laughed. A real laugh, light and unbothered. "Nora, sweetie, writers all write about lighthouses in Maine. Don't be silly." Then she closed the door — not slammed, just closed, gently, like I was a salesperson — and I stood on her porch listening to the lock click into place. My best friend had stolen my life's work, and she had just laughed in my face. But as I walked back to my car, my phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number: "Don't confront her again. She has a contract with your name on it. — A friend."
My blood ran cold. A contract with my name on it? I had never signed anything. But somebody out there knew something, and they were warning me. I sat in my car, staring at Dana's cottage, and I realized this was much bigger than one stolen book — and that whoever sent that message might be the only person who could help me prove it.
