I met Lydia Marsh the next evening at a diner twenty miles outside Bar Harbor, the kind of place with cracked vinyl booths and pie under a glass dome. Lydia ordered coffee with shaking hands and told me a story that turned my stomach inside out. Five years earlier, she said, she had been a freelance editor in Portland, and a young writer named Sophie Bennett had hired her to edit a memoir about growing up in foster care. Sophie's manuscript was beautiful, raw, unforgettable. Then, suddenly, Sophie stopped returning calls. A year later, a memoir with the same stories — the same scenes, the same details about a blue bicycle and a foster mother who kept the good towels locked away — appeared under another author's name. The author was Dana Whitmore, writing as Wren Halloway.
"She changes the names," Lydia whispered, "but she keeps the details. The details are what she can't invent, because she never lived them." Sophie, Lydia said, had been too broke and too scared to fight. She had moved away, given up writing entirely, and last Lydia heard, she was working nights at a diner in New Hampshire. Dana had gotten away with it once. She thought she could get away with it again — with me.
Lydia had kept copies of Sophie's manuscript and her editing notes. She offered them to me, and to Daniel. "I should have spoken up five years ago," she said, tears in her eyes. "I'm speaking up now." We exchanged numbers, and I drove home feeling something I had not felt in days: hope. Not just for my case, but for Sophie, too.
But hope, I was learning, made Dana nervous, and nervous people did worse things. Two days later, I came home from the library to find my front door unlocked. Nothing was smashed, nothing was obviously taken — but my desk drawers had been opened, and my laptop was warm, as if someone had recently used it. My manuscript files were still there. But a folder I kept on my desktop, labeled "DRAFTS OLD," was now empty. Someone had been in my house, and they had taken the early drafts — the ones with the oldest timestamps, the ones that proved how long I had been writing this book.
I called the police, and this time they sent a detective, not just a patrol officer. He dusted for prints — nothing usable, the person had worn gloves — and he asked me, gently, if there was anyone who had a key to my house. There was. Dana. I had given her a spare key years ago, after Tom died, "in case of emergency." I had never asked for it back. The detective wrote it down without comment, but I saw the look on his face. He believed me.
That night, I changed my locks. I also called Daniel, who told me to photograph everything and to stop telling anyone except him and Claire about the case. "From now on," he said, "we assume she is watching." He was more right than he knew. The next morning, a package arrived at my door with no return address. Inside was a single printed page: my manuscript's first chapter, with red pen all over it in Dana's handwriting. At the top, she had written: "This was never yours. You were just holding it for me." I sat down hard on my kitchen floor, holding that page, and I understood, finally, what kind of person I was dealing with. Dana did not think she had stolen my book. In her mind, she had rescued it from someone who did not deserve it. And people who believe that will do anything to keep what they took — including, I realized with a chill, coming back to my house to take the rest.
