After the break-in, I stopped sleeping in my bedroom. I slept on the couch with my phone beside me and my laptop locked in my car trunk every night, like a woman under siege — because I was. Claire begged me to stay with her, but I refused. This was my house, Tom's and mine, and I was not going to be chased out of it by a thief. Instead, I bought a cheap security camera for the porch and a second one for the back door, and I started keeping a notebook by the phone, writing down every strange call, every unknown car, every time I felt watched.
Daniel, meanwhile, was digging into Tidewater Ink LLC. What he found made the whole picture darker. Tidewater Ink was registered in Delaware, but its mailing address was a UPS store in Portland, Maine. Its listed owner was not Dana. It was a man named Marcus Bell — my literary agent. Marcus Bell, the man who had represented my three small romances for six years, the man who had told me, just last spring, that my lighthouse book "wasn't commercial enough" and that I should "put it in a drawer." He had put it in a drawer, all right — his own drawer, and then handed it to Dana.
I felt betrayed all over again, deeper this time. Marcus had been my agent, my advisor, the person I trusted to protect my work. He had read my manuscript, too. He had praised it in an email — an email I still had — calling it "the best thing you've ever written" before telling me, weeks later, that no publisher wanted it. Now I knew why no publisher wanted it. He had never sent it to any publisher. He had been saving it for Dana and himself.
Daniel subpoenaed Marcus's records, and Marcus responded by sending me a letter — not through a lawyer, but personally, handwritten — saying that I was "misunderstanding a standard co-authorship arrangement" and that if I dropped the case, he would "make sure I was taken care of." Taken care of. Like I was a problem to be managed. I gave the letter to Daniel, who smiled for the first time since I met him. "He just admitted he knows about the arrangement," Daniel said. "And he just tried to bribe a witness. That's evidence."
But Marcus and Dana were not finished. The next week, my daughter Claire called me in tears. Someone had posted a fake review on her bookstore's page, claiming Claire was "helping her mother run a scam against a beloved local author." Then Claire's manager called her in and asked, awkwardly, if there was "a conflict of interest" in her stocking my books. Claire was being punished for being my daughter. That night, she came to my house and we sat at the kitchen table, holding hands, both of us crying. "Mom," she said, "I'm not backing down. She's my mother, and she's a liar. I mean — Dana's a liar. I will stand up in court and say so." I hugged her so hard I thought I might break her. My daughter believed me. That mattered more than any bestseller list.
Then, just before midnight, my phone buzzed with a third message from the unknown number. This time it was longer: "Marcus isn't the only partner. Ask Dana where the audiobook money goes. There's a second company. And a second author who already got paid to stay quiet. Find her before they do." A second company. A second author paid to stay quiet. Sophie? Or someone else? I forwarded the message to Daniel immediately, and he called me back within minutes. "Nora," he said, his voice tight, "we need to move fast. If there's a second victim who took money, they'll try to discredit her — or buy her silence again. We find her first." I agreed. But as I hung up, I heard a car door slam outside my house, and when I looked through the curtains, a dark sedan was pulling slowly away from my curb. Someone had been sitting outside my house, in the dark, listening. Or waiting. And I had no idea how long they had been there.
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