It hadn’t been part of the plan for her to drop out of school as well, but the pregnancy made that decision on its own. Samantha, it turned out, was not one of those girls who could carry on, attend the prom, throw the javelin into the ninth month, and generally power through every single quiz, test, assignment, and term paper, with only the occasional hall pass for the purpose of upchucking in the girls’ bathroom. No, she got diagnosed in month four with upwardly trending blood pressure, was ordered to bed for the sake of her baby’s health, and forced to summarily forfeit her position as a tenth grader without a single complaint from either parent. And not one of her teachers lifted a finger to help her finish out the year, either.

For the five brutal months that remained, she gestated uncomfortably—mainly horizontally in her childhood bed, an old cannonball four-poster that had been her mother’s father’s, or her father’s mother’s—and grudgingly accepted the food that her mother brought up to her room. She read whatever books were in the house—first her own books, then her mother’s from the Christian bookstore outside Oneonta—but already Samantha was noting a disruption in the hardware of her brain: sentences folding in on themselves, meaning draining away by the midpoint of a paragraph, as if even that part of her body had been scrambled by the unasked-for tenant. Both of her parents had given up on trying to ferret out the name of the impregnator; maybe they’d decided Samantha didn’t know. (How many boys did they think she’d slept with? All the boys, probably.) Her father wasn’t talking to her anymore, though it took Samantha some time to figure that out, given that he’d never been all that much of a talker. Her mother was still talking—or, more accurately, screaming—on a daily basis. Samantha wondered how she had the energy.

But at least there was going to be an end point to all of it, because this thing, this ordeal, was going to be finite. As in: it was going to end. And why?

She did not want to be a sixteen-year-old mother any more than she’d wanted to be a fifteen-year-old pregnant person, and here, at least, she dared to believe that her parents felt exactly the same. Therefore, in the fullness of time, the baby would be given up for adoption, and then she, the gestational host, would be returning to high school, albeit in the company of those dull classmates she’d powered past back in sixth grade: a year further from her goal of going to college and getting away from Earlsville, but at least back on track.

Ah, the naivety of youth. Or had she dared to believe her parents might one day recognize that a sentient human, with her own plans and priorities and aspirations, had lived alongside them, lo these fifteen years? She dwelt in the possibilities and even took the step of reaching out to one of those “abortion counselors” (not really an “abortion counselor,” as she well knew) who advertised in the back of the Observer-Dispatch: “A loving Christian home for your baby!” But her mother wouldn’t even look at the pamphlet they sent her.

The wages of her sin, it turned out, had a shelf life of forever.

Wait a minute! she yelled at them. I don’t want this baby and you don’t want this baby. Let’s let somebody who does want it have it. What’s the problem with that?

The problem, apparently, was that God wanted it this way. He’d tested her, she’d failed, and thus, this was what was supposed to happen.

It was maddening, infuriating. Worse: illogical.

But she was fifteen. So that’s what was going to happen.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Why Would She Change Her Mind?

The Twitter account had been mercifully dormant since its inception, but suddenly, in mid-December, the tweets began—not with a bang but with a whimper into the void:

@JacobFinchBonner is a not the author of #Crib.

There was no engagement at all, Jake was relieved to see, probably because there was no one to engage with. In its six weeks on the site, the Twitter user known as @TalentedTom was still depicted as an egg with no biography and from an undeclared location. He had managed to attract only two followers, both likely bots from points far east, but the lack of an audience did not seem to deter him at all. For the next few weeks there was a steady drip, drip of caustic little declarations:

@JacobFinchBonner is a thief.

@JacobFinchBonner is a plagiarist.

Anna went back to Seattle to settle some things. When she returned, Jake drove her out to Long Island for the traditional Bonner Hanukkah with his father’s siblings and their children. He had never before brought a guest to this event, and there was a certain amount of derisory attention from his cousins, but the plank-roasted salmon Anna contributed to the meal was met with stunned gratitude.

Technically, she still hadn’t entirely taken leave of her prior life—the apartment in West Seattle had been sublet and her furniture moved to a storage facility—but she straightaway found a job at a podcasting studio in Midtown and another as a producer on a Sirius show covering the tech industry. In spite of the fact that she’d grown up in a small Idaho town, it took her no time at all to ramp up to the speed with which every other New Yorker raced down the streets, and within days of her return to the city she seemed to become yet another overworked Gothamite, perpetually rushing and with a baseline level of ambient stress that would probably have alarmed anyone outside the five boroughs. But she was happy. Seriously happy, expressively happy. She began every day by wrapping herself around him and kissing his neck. She learned what he liked to eat and seamlessly took over the task of feeding them both (a great relief, as Jake never had learned to properly feed himself). She dove into the cultural life of the city and brought Jake along with her, and soon it was a rare night they were home and not at a play or a concert, or poking around Flushing in search of some dumpling stall she’d read about.

@JacobFinchBonner’s publisher had better get ready to issue a refund for every copy of #Crib.

Somebody needs to tell @Oprah she has another fake author on her hands.

Anna wanted a cat. She had wanted a cat for years, apparently. They went to the pound and adopted a nonchalant fellow, all black but for a single white foot, who did a quick circuit of the apartment, staked out a chair Jake had once liked to read in, and settled in for the long haul. (He was to be known as Whidbey, after the island.) She wanted to see a Broadway show—a real one, this time. He got them Hamilton tickets through a client of Matilda’s who was connected, and a Roundabout subscription. She wanted to go on food tours of the Lower East Side, guided history walks in Tribeca, gospel brunches in Harlem, all of those things native (or at least “established”) New Yorkers tended to turn up their noses at, preferring to maintain a smug ignorance about their city. She started to accompany him, as her own work allowed, when he gave readings or talks—Boston, Montclair, Vassar College—and once they stayed on in Florida for a couple of days, following his appearance at the Miami Book Fair.

He began to notice a basic difference between them, which was that she perceived the approach of a stranger with open curiosity and he with dread (this predated his becoming a “famous writer”—an oxymoron if there ever was one, or so he was in the habit of saying to interviewers as a means of conveying modesty—and had been true even when he’d carried a ring of personal failure around himself like a radioactive Hula-Hoop.) New people began to enter their lives, and for the first time in years Jake was having conversations with people who were not writers or in publishing, or even avid readers of fiction, and those conversations went so far beyond whose book had been bought by whom and for how much, whose second novel was a sales disappointment, which editor was out after overspending on an overrated novelist, and which bloggers had taken which sides in an accusation of “unwanted overtures” at a summer writer’s conference. There was, it turned out, a stunning variety of stuff to discuss beyond the writing world: politics, things to eat, interesting people and what they’d done in the world, and the golden ages of comedy, television, food trucks, and activism that were currently underway, all around him, and which he’d been only peripherally aware of till now.

He noticed, as his own writer friends began to meet her for a second or third time, that they greeted her with warmth, sometimes reaching for her with a kiss or a hug even before they turned to him. Anna remembered their names, their partners’ names, their pets’ names (and species), their jobs and their complaints about their jobs, and she asked about everything, even as Jake looked on, smiling tightly, wondering how she’d managed to find out so much about them in so short a time.