I did not sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table with every draft, every notebook, every printed page of *The Lighthouse Keeper's Widow* spread out around me, and I compared them, line by line, to the free sample chapters of Dana's book that I downloaded at midnight. By 3 a.m., I had a list that made me sick: forty-seven exact matches. Not themes. Sentences. Whole paragraphs, lifted word for word, including a paragraph about my own mother that I had written from memory, about the way she hummed while folding laundry. Dana had never even met my mother.
The next morning, I called my daughter Claire and told her everything. Claire works at Sherman's Bookstore in downtown Bar Harbor, and she went pale when I showed her the list. "Mom," she whispered, "we've been stocking that book all week. Dana came in for a signing last Saturday. She sold two hundred copies in one afternoon." Two hundred copies. Of my book. In my town. While I shelved returns in the back room.
"Mom, you need a lawyer," Claire said. "A real one, not the kind who does wills at the senior center." She was right, but lawyers cost money, and my bank account had $4,213 in it. My royalties from my three small self-published romances came to maybe $300 a month. Dana's book, meanwhile, was climbing higher every day. I checked the rankings again that afternoon: number one in its category, with a little orange badge that said "#1 Best Seller." I felt like I was going to throw up.
Then I did something I should have done years ago. I logged into my Amazon author account — the one I used for my own small books — and I froze. There was a payment notification I had never seen before: a royalty deposit of $18,400, dated three weeks earlier, from a publisher account I did not recognize, under the name "Tidewater Ink LLC." It had been deposited and then withdrawn, all within forty-eight hours, to a bank account that was not mine. Someone had linked my author account to a company I had never heard of, taken the money, and covered their tracks.
I called Amazon's author support, shaking, and after forty minutes on hold, a tired-sounding representative told me the account had been accessed from a new device in Portland, Maine, on the same day Dana had supposedly been "visiting her sister" there. The representative could not tell me more without a police report or a court order. I hung up and stared at the wall. Portland. Dana. Tidewater Ink. This was not a one-time theft. Somebody had built a whole machine to steal from me, and they were still running it.
That evening, I drove to the library and printed everything: my manuscript timestamps, my emails to Dana with draft attachments, the Amazon payment records, the matching passages. I put it all in a folder and labeled it, in shaky handwriting, "PROOF." Then, on my way home, I stopped at the bookstore where Claire works. Dana was there again, signing books, laughing with customers, posing for photos with a stack of my story in her hands. A woman in line said, "I cried through the whole thing — it felt so real, so personal." Dana smiled and said, "It was very personal to write. It came straight from my heart."
I walked out before I said something I would regret. But in the parking lot, my phone buzzed again. Same unknown number. "Check who registered the copyright. You won't believe whose name is on it." I drove home with my heart hammering, logged into the U.S. Copyright Office database, and typed in the title. The registration for *Where the Tide Remembers* listed two authors: Wren Halloway — and, as co-author, Nora Ellison. My name. On her book. As if I had agreed to share it. And the signature on the registration form was a perfect copy of mine, except for one thing: I never sign my last name with a loop on the "E." Whoever forged it didn't know that. But they knew everything else.
