My best friend of thirty years sat on a cheerful yellow sofa on national television, smiling beautifully as she told the world about the book she had stolen, word for word, from my computer.
For a year, I had emailed her every chapter, every raw thought, every painful memory I’d poured onto the page.
She had cheered me on, offered suggestions, and acted as my midwife.
Now she was being celebrated for gutting my life and selling it for parts. She stole my words, my voice, and even the story of the jagged scar on my knee.
What she didn’t know was that her greatest performance wasn’t on television, but in the dozens of emails she sent me, and I was about to give her fawning praise a much, much bigger audience.
The Ghost in the Machine: Static on the Line
The toast popped with a startling finality, the sound slicing through the morning quiet of my kitchen. I was buttering a piece for my daughter, Maya, who was currently a black hole of teenage apathy and cereal, when the local morning show droned on from the small TV on the counter. It was my background noise, the audio equivalent of wallpaper.
Then I heard a name. Chloe.
My head snapped up. There she was, my Chloe, my best friend of thirty years, sitting on that horribly cheerful yellow sofa they used for interviews. She looked fantastic, her blonde hair professionally blown out, her smile a practiced, radiant thing. I smiled back at the screen. It had been a few weeks since we’d properly talked, a long time for us.
“So, Chloe,” the host chirped, leaning in with manufactured enthusiasm. “A debut novelist! Tell us about *Ashes of Yesterday*.”
I nearly dropped the butter knife. *Ashes of Yesterday*. My working title had been *Our Ash-Covered Youth*. A cold dread, slick and immediate, washed over me. No. It was a coincidence. A stupid, impossible coincidence.
“Well, Brenda,” Chloe began, her voice smooth as cream, “it’s a story I’ve been carrying with me for a long time. It’s about two girls growing up in a small, forgotten town, and a secret that shapes the rest of their lives. It’s about the intensity of female friendship, the kind that leaves scars.”
The toast in my hand went limp. The butter knife clattered onto the counter. My secret. Our story. The words she was using, the themes she was describing… they were mine. They were the sentences I’d typed out, hunched over my laptop at two in the morning, fueled by coffee and memory. The chapters I had emailed her, one by one, over the last year. “What do you think of this, Chlo? Is this too much?”
Maya looked up from her phone, her brow furrowed. “Mom? You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I couldn’t answer. I was watching a ghost. A ghost in a J.Crew blazer, stealing my life on live television.
A Year in Pixels
My laptop felt like a crime scene. I spent the rest of the morning scrolling, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. There it was: a digital breadcrumb trail of my own creation. An entire year of my life, archived in a Gmail thread titled “The Book Project.”
*Sent: January 12. Subject: Chapter 1!!!*
*Here it is! Oh my god, I’m so nervous. Be gentle. But not too gentle. Let me know what you think of the opening scene with the bike crash.*
*Received: January 13. Subject: Re: Chapter 1!!!*
*SARAH! It’s incredible. I was right there with you, I could feel the gravel on my knees. You have such a gift. My only tiny thought is maybe make the other girl, ‘Lila,’ a little more… mysterious from the start? But I’m obsessed. Send me the next one NOW.*
Lila. The stand-in for Chloe. The irony was a physical, bitter taste in my mouth.
Page after page, email after email. My words, my vulnerability, my late-night confessions poured into the manuscript. And her replies, a constant stream of encouragement and seemingly innocuous suggestions.
*Received: April 2. Subject: Re: Chapter 7 – The Lake House*
*Wow. This part is… heavy. But so real. The dialogue is perfect. You captured Dad’s voice so well it gave me chills. Suggestion: on page 87, when you describe Anna’s scar, maybe add a line about how she traces it when she’s nervous? Just a thought. It’s brilliant, Sarah. Truly.*
Anna. My stand-in. The scar on my knee, a jagged white line from a rusty nail I’d stepped on when I was nine. A detail so specific, so *mine*, I’d debated even putting it in. Chloe had been the one to convince me. “It’s authentic,” she’d said over the phone. “It makes Anna real.”
I scrolled and scrolled, a rising tide of nausea with every click. Her praise was the soundtrack to my betrayal. Every “you’re a natural” and “this is going to be huge” was another twist of the knife. She hadn’t just stolen my book. She had nurtured it. She had acted as my midwife, all while planning to snatch the baby and claim it as her own.
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