The launch party was held in a ballroom at a Portland hotel, all white tablecloths and string quartets and a giant poster of Dana's book cover by the door. I walked in with Daniel, Claire, Sophie, and Lydia, and the room went quiet in waves, like a ripple spreading outward from the door. People stared. Whispered. Dana was on the stage, mid-speech, thanking her fans, when she saw us. She froze, microphone in hand, her smile stuck halfway on her face.
Daniel did not make a scene. He simply nodded to the process server, a calm young woman in a gray suit, who walked up to the stage and handed Dana an envelope. Dana opened it, read the first line, and went pale. It was a court order — an emergency injunction, granted that morning by a federal judge, ordering that all sales of *Where the Tide Remembers* stop immediately, pending the outcome of our case. The judge had also ordered that all royalties be held in escrow, not paid to Dana, Marcus, or Richard, until the court decided who the book really belonged to.
Dana tried to keep smiling. She tried to keep talking. But her voice shook, and the audience could hear it. Then Lydia stood up. She walked to the front of the room, holding up a folder, and in a clear, steady voice, she said, "My name is Lydia Marsh. I edited Sophie Bennett's memoir five years ago. And I edited Nora Ellison's lighthouse book, too — because Dana Whitmore brought me both manuscripts and asked me to fix them before she published them under her own name." The room erupted. Cameras flashed. Reporters shouted questions. Dana's husband Richard, who had been standing near the bar, tried to push through the crowd toward the exit, but Frank Delaney was standing by the door, talking quietly to two police officers who had come in with us. Richard stopped, turned around, and sat back down, very slowly.
Then Sophie stood up. She had been shaking when we walked in, but now her voice was strong. "My name is Sophie Bennett," she said. "Dana Whitmore stole my memoir. She paid me $2,000 a month to stay quiet for five years. I'm done being quiet." The applause started in the back of the room and rolled forward like a wave. Women in the audience were crying. One woman stood up and shouted, "Me too! She did it to me, too!" — a writer from Vermont, Grace Ellery, who had flown in that morning with Daniel's help. The ballroom, which had been Dana's stage, had become her reckoning.
Dana left the stage without finishing her speech. She walked past me, close enough that I could see the tears in her eyes — not tears of sadness, but of fury, the fury of a woman who had finally been seen. She leaned in and whispered, so only I could hear: "You think you've won. You haven't. I have a letter from you, Nora. A letter where you gave me the book." A letter from me, giving her the book. I had never written such a letter. But Dana said it with such confidence that for one terrible second, I doubted myself. Then I remembered: I had never written it, and if she had a letter, it was forged like everything else. I looked her in the eye and said, "Then show it in court, Dana. Show it to the judge." She walked away without another word, and the cameras followed her out. The next morning, every newspaper in Maine carried the story. And Daniel called me with the news I had waited months to hear: "Nora, the judge has set a trial date. And Dana's lawyers just asked for a meeting. They want to talk settlement." I almost laughed. Settlement. After everything, they wanted to settle. But I was not finished — not yet. Because a settlement would be quiet, and what Dana did deserved to be heard, out loud, in a courtroom, by everyone.
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