I sat very still in the dark living room, my husband asleep eight feet away, and understood that I had been publishing a book for four months without knowing it existed.
I didn’t wait for morning.
“Matthew.”
He startled awake, blinking at the laptop glowing on the table, then at my face, and whatever he saw there made him sit up fast. “Em — what’s wrong?”
“Who is Priya Anand?”
The color left his face in a way that told me everything before he said a single word.
“I can explain the order of things,” he said carefully, “if you let me start from the beginning.”
“Start from seventeen,” I said. “I heard you on the phone. I heard all of it. Whatever you’ve spent five years building, I want to hear every piece of it right now.”
He nodded slowly, and then he told me.
He’d kept every story I ever showed him since high school — not sentimentally, he insisted, but because he genuinely thought they were good, better than I ever let myself believe. When I abandoned the unfinished ones in a drawer sophomore year of college, guilt-ridden over quitting the creative writing program I’d been too afraid to keep pursuing, he’d photographed the pages “just in case,” never intending to do anything with them.
