Chapter 4
The revised screenplay arrived the next morning.
I didn’t open it.
Daniel left for the office at six thirty. Before walking out, he stopped in our bedroom doorway and reminded me about the two o’clock meeting with the studio.
“You don’t have to speak,” he said. “Just listen while they explain why the heroine’s age needs to change.”
“I’m not going.”
His fingers paused on his cuff link.
“You made dinner uncomfortable enough.”
“You seated your mistress in my chair, gave her my mother’s pen, and let her explain a character I created. It was uncomfortable.”
“Stop calling her my mistress. At least in front of Sophie.”
He closed the door with just enough force to express anger without waking our daughter.
I waited until his car left the driveway, then went into my office.
The room had once been Sophie’s playroom. After my first novel sold a thousand copies, Daniel removed the toy shelves and installed bookcases himself.
He worked past midnight, measuring every board twice. When I offered to help, he pointed toward my desk.
“You fill them,” he said. “I’ll build them.”
He told me that one day, every shelf would hold something I had written.
Ten novels stood there now.
Every cover said Evelyn Hart.
None carried my name.
I packed my laptop, backup drives, and handwritten notebooks into two suitcases. The velvet-lined drawer where I had kept my mother’s fountain pen was empty.
Her old typewriter was too heavy for a suitcase. I padded a paper box with sweaters and lowered it inside.
My mother had bought the machine at a flea market and taught me to type on it when I was fifteen.
Years later, I wrote the opening of my first novel on those same sticking keys.
Sophie appeared in the doorway while I taped the box shut.
“Are you leaving?”
“I’m moving my work to Grandma’s cottage.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll come home tonight.”
She looked at the suitcases.
“Everyone at school has seen the interview,” she said. “They think that woman is Evelyn Hart.”
“Don’t explain anything for me.”
“But she isn’t—”
“I know.”
I adjusted the strap of Sophie’s backpack.
“If anyone asks, tell them it’s an adult problem. You don’t have to defend me, and you don’t have to lie for your father.”
Her attention returned to the box.
“You’re really coming back?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t promise everything would return to normal. I no longer knew what normal meant in our house.
After she left, I loaded the car.
My mother had left me the cottage by the lake. The roof leaked, and the kitchen faucet never stopped dripping.
I had planned to use the final payment from my tenth novel to repair it and rent it out.
Now it was the only place Daniel couldn’t give someone else permission to enter.
I placed the typewriter on a table by the window and set up my laptop beside it. Still wearing my coat, I changed the passwords to my email, cloud storage, and writing accounts. Then I signed every other device out.
When I opened my manuscript, the cursor waited at the end of Chapter Sixty-Two.
Three chapters remained.
Daniel had copied most of the book, but he didn’t have the ending.
The company had an option to publish the finished novel. It did not own drafts I had never delivered.
Until I submitted the completed manuscript and the publisher accepted it, those pages remained mine.
My heroine had just discovered that her husband had signed an agreement using her name.
In the next chapter, she had to choose between protecting the life they built and telling the truth about what his success had cost her.
I placed the cursor on the blank page.
Then I closed the document.
Daniel called at one fifty. I rejected the first two calls. On the third, he left a message saying the studio meeting had started and everyone was waiting for the ending summary.
I turned off my phone.
At two forty, his car stopped outside.
Daniel tried the door. I had slid my mother’s old dead bolt into place.
“Claire, open up.”
I opened the door only a few inches.
“When will you deliver the last three chapters?” he asked.
“When my identity is restored.”
“You can’t hold the whole company hostage.”
“The company has an option on a finished book,” I said. “It does not own an ending I haven’t delivered.”
“We have a release date. Employees are scheduled. The studio paid a deposit. If you stop writing, I won’t be the only person who suffers.”
“Every time you need me to accept something, you put Sophie, the employees, and the house behind you.”
“They will be affected.”
I kept my hand on the door.
“You don’t enter my files again. Ivy gets no new material without my permission. No one receives the final chapters.”
Daniel looked past me at the boxes.
“Are you staying here?”
“I promised Sophie I’d come home.”
His shoulders loosened. As long as I returned, he could pretend nothing had truly changed.
“Then we’ll talk tonight.”
“There’s nothing left to negotiate.”
I closed the door.
Daniel knocked once more.
“If you withhold that ending,” he said through the glass, “I’ll have to protect the company.”
“From what?”
“From you.” His voice hardened. “I’ll tell everyone why Evelyn Hart had to replace her writer.”