Chapter 3

By morning, Ethan had locked me out of every shared book folder.

I carried my laptop, three handwritten chapter maps, and the bent cream envelope into Naomi Price’s office. Submission boxes lined one wall, and morning light warmed the scarred conference table where she had once told me my characters needed more courage.

Naomi looked older than she had eight years ago, but her silence was unchanged. She waited until I placed the photograph of Ethan and Lena’s cover between us.

“Tell me exactly what you wrote,” she said.

“Most of six novels. All but eighty pages of the seventh.”

Saying it aloud made the room feel smaller. I had spent years replacing *wrote* with *helped*, as though the gentler verb could keep my marriage from noticing what it consumed.

Naomi asked whether I had signed a ghostwriting agreement, copyright transfer, or permanent anonymity clause. I had not, but our devices, royalties, and company expenses had been shared for years, which gave Ethan room to call every boundary a marital misunderstanding.

We did not copy his private files. I logged into my personal email and cloud account while Naomi recorded the time, then downloaded messages Ethan had sent me, voice notes addressed to me, and drafts already bearing my account history.

In one recording from the fourth book, Ethan laughed wearily and said, “I killed the motive again. Claire, make him human before Margaret reads this.”

The tenderness in his old voice hurt more than anger would have. He had once known exactly what I gave him; forgetting had become useful only after the books succeeded.

Naomi called Maya Chen, an intellectual-property lawyer she trusted. Maya told us to preserve originals, document every access change, and send the publisher written notice that I claimed authorship in the unfinished manuscript.

My phone rang before we finished. Ethan was downstairs.

Through the lobby glass, I saw him beside our black sedan, tie gone and award-night shirt open at the throat. Wind pushed dry leaves around his shoes while he held the passenger door open, offering the shape of an ordinary ride home.

“Do not turn Naomi into part of this,” he said when I stepped outside. “Come home, finish the book, and we will correct the acknowledgment.”

“A thank-you is not authorship.”

His hand tightened on the car door. “You took confidential files from my system.”

“I preserved messages and drafts sent to me. I will not write the last eighty pages, and I will not let you publish mine under Lena’s name.”

He glanced toward Naomi behind the lobby desk, then lowered his voice. “If you walk back inside, I cannot protect your reputation.”

The threat steadied something his apology might have weakened. I told him in writing that I would not return to the house while the files were disputed, closed the passenger door, and booked a short-stay apartment from Naomi’s phone.

That evening, one suitcase stood beside a narrow bed under a blue-white wall lamp. The unfamiliar radiator clicked in the silence while I sent Maya screenshots of the revoked accounts and asked for a family-law referral; leaving for one night had become the first fact of our separation.

At 9:17, an email from Northstar House Legal arrived with an attached cease-and-desist notice. It ordered me to stop retaining, discussing, or claiming any part of Ethan Rowan’s unpublished manuscript.

Ethan had signed it.

My husband had accused me of stealing the manuscript I had written for him.