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.
The Architecture of a Lie
By three o’clock, a pristine copy of *Ashes of Yesterday* by Chloe Merritt was sitting on my kitchen table, delivered by an Amazon driver who had no idea he was delivering a hand grenade. The cover was a moody, atmospheric shot of a lake at dusk. It was beautiful. I hated it.
My hands shook as I opened it. The dedication page was blank. A small mercy, I suppose. I dreaded seeing something like, “To my muse.”
I flipped to a random page in the middle. Page 154.
*“Lila twisted the silver ring on her finger, a habit she’d had since it was her mother’s. The stone was gone, lost to the murky depths of Miller’s Pond years ago, but the empty setting was a comfort, a smooth, cool worry stone against her thumb.”*
My stomach lurched. That was my paragraph. My mother’s ring. The malachite stone that fell out during our stupid, drunken attempt to build a raft in high school. Chloe had been there. She’d helped me search for it for hours. But the description, the turn of phrase, the “smooth, cool worry stone”—that was me. I had written that exact sentence.
I flipped to page 87. My breath hitched.
*“Anna subconsciously reached down, her fingers finding the familiar, puckered skin on her knee. It was an old scar, pale against her tan, a permanent, jagged reminder of a childhood that was anything but smooth. She traced its path when the anxiety crept in, a silent prayer to a girl who had survived.”*
She’d used my suggestion. Her suggestion *to me*. She’d woven it right in.
It wasn’t just plagiarism; it was an act of profound psychological violence. She had taken my memories, my pain, my very identity, and repackaged it for mass consumption. She hadn’t just stolen the story of my life; she’d stolen my voice, right down to the quiet, nervous gesture of a girl tracing a scar. Reading it felt like being flayed alive, one perfectly punctuated sentence at a time.
An Unsent Draft
The rage came first, a hot, white wave that made me want to throw the book through the window. I opened my laptop, my fingers flying across the keyboard, composing an email to Chloe that was pure acid.
*Subject: How FUCKING dare you.*
*I saw you. On TV. With my book. My words. My scar. You are a thief. A parasite. A hollowed-out shell of a person who has to steal a life because you’re too pathetic to live your own.*
I stared at the words, my own fury radiating back at me from the screen. My finger hovered over the send button. But what would it accomplish? She’d deny it. She’d call me crazy. She was already on television, polished and poised. I was a freelance copywriter in yoga pants, trembling in my kitchen. Who would they believe?
The back door slid open and my husband, Mark, walked in, dropping his briefcase by the door. He took one look at my face, at the book on the table, and his own expression hardened.
“No,” he breathed. “She didn’t.”
“She did,” I whispered, the fight draining out of me, leaving a cold, heavy dread in its place. “It’s all in there, Mark. Everything. The lake house. My dad’s drinking. The scar.”
He came over and wrapped his arms around me, his chin resting on the top of my head. He didn’t offer platitudes or easy solutions. He just stood there, a solid anchor in my churning sea of disbelief.
“What do you want to do?” he asked, his voice low.
“I want to burn her life to the ground,” I said, the words raw.
“Okay,” he said, not flinching. “How do we do that?”
And that was the question. A screaming email would be a firecracker. I needed an explosion. A simple accusation was my word against hers, a messy, personal feud. I needed proof. I needed a strategy. I looked from the book to my laptop, the screen still glowing with my unsent, impotent rage. I deleted the draft. This wasn’t a fight I could win by yelling. I had to be smarter. I had to be colder. I had to use her own tools—ambition, presentation, and a public forum—against her.
The Stolen Voice: The Invitation
It arrived two days later, not in the mail, but as a glossy, promoted event on my social media feed. “Join local author Chloe Merritt for the official launch of her stunning debut, *Ashes of Yesterday*! Reading, Q&A, and signing at The Book Nook this Saturday at 7 p.m.”
The accompanying photo was of Chloe, head tilted, a pen held thoughtfully to her lips. She looked like an *author*. The image was a perfectly curated lie, and it felt like she was staring right at me, daring me.
The Book Nook. Our place. The dusty, overstuffed independent bookstore where Chloe and I had spent countless teenage afternoons, hiding in the poetry section and dreaming of the lives we would one day lead. The launch wasn’t just a professional event; it was a violation of sacred ground.
“You can’t go,” Mark said, looking over my shoulder at the screen. “Sarah, it’ll be a circus. It’s what she wants.”
“I know,” I said, my voice quiet but firm. “That’s why I have to. If I don’t, she wins. She gets to stand there, in our place, and tell my story, and I’m just at home, silently falling apart. I can’t let that happen.”
Maya, who had been listening from the doorway, chimed in. “So you’re gonna go all Carrie at the prom on her?”
A weak smile touched my lips. “Something like that. But with less pig’s blood and more… receipts.”
Mark sighed, recognizing the resolve in my tone. “Okay. But I’m going with you.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “This is something I have to do alone. This is between me and her.”
The decision settled in my bones, cold and heavy as steel. I wasn’t going there to start a screaming match. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of painting me as the hysterical, jealous friend. I was going to ask a question. Just one. And I was going to ask it in a room full of people.
About the Author
