Emily R. Me. My initials had been on stories I’d written in college and abandoned in a drawer, half-finished, unsent, unread by anyone but Matthew, who used to ask to see them and who I’d always assumed was just being kind.
I opened the attachment. Forty pages of my own sentences stared back at me, cleaned up, reordered, finished — including two stories I distinctly remembered never completing. Someone had typed endings onto them. Good endings. Better than what I would have written, and unmistakably in my voice, because they’d been built entirely out of notes I now recognized: margin comments I’d once scribbled to myself at nineteen and never acted on.
Further down the folder: a signed publishing contract from a small literary press, dated four months ago. My name on it — my actual legal name — beside a signature that was, impossibly, mine, in handwriting I would have sworn I never gave anyone permission to reproduce.
