Because she’d asked, it only belatedly occurred to him.

With his mother and father they established a monthly brunch in the city, following an Adam Platt review to a dim sum restaurant nestled beneath the Manhattan Bridge which then became their regular destination. He was seeing more of his parents now, with Anna, than he had when he’d been single and theoretically unencumbered by another person’s schedule and commitments. As the winter months passed, he watched her forge a deep familiarity with the two of them, his mother’s work at the high school, his father’s travails with a partner in his firm, the sad saga of the neighbors two houses down on the other side of the street, whose teenage twins were both in freefall and taking the rest of the family down with them. Anna wanted to go yard sale shopping with Jake’s mother (an activity he himself had taken pains to avoid since he was a child) when the weather got warmer, and she shared his father’s long-held penchant for Emmylou Harris (before his very eyes the two of them looked up Harris’s tour schedule and made plans to see her that summer at the Nassau Coliseum). In Anna’s presence his parents talked more about themselves, their health, and even their feelings about Jake’s success, than they ever had when he’d been alone with them, which unsettled him even as he understood that this was good, a good thing for them all. He had always accepted the bald fact that they loved him, but it was more of a default position than an expression of organic preference. He was their child, ergo, and later, when he gave them such unmistakable reasons to be proud, that position was understandably substantiated. But Anna, who was not their child, and who was not a bestselling author of worldwide stature, they liked—no, loved—for herself.

One Sunday at the end of January, after their regular dim sum feast, his father pulled him aside on Mott Street and asked what his intentions were.

“Isn’t it the girl’s father who’s supposed to ask that?”

“Well, maybe I’m asking on behalf of Anna’s father.”

“Oh. That’s funny. Well, what should they be?”

His father shook his head. “Are you serious? This girl is fantastic. She’s beautiful and kind and she’s crazy about you. If I was her dad I’d give you a kick in the pants.”

“You mean, grab her before she changes her mind.”

“Well, no,” his father said. “More like, what are you waiting for? Why would she change her mind?”

Jake couldn’t say why, not out loud, obviously not to his father, but he was thinking about it every single day as @TalentedTom continued to hurl contempt into the void. Jake spent each morning toggling through his Google alerts and torturing himself with new word combinations to cast over the internet: “Evan+Parker+writer,” “Evan+Parker+Bonner,” “Crib+Bonner+thief,” “Parker+Bonner+plagiarize.” He was like an obsessive-compulsive at the mercy of his cleaning rituals, or unable to leave his apartment until he had checked the stove exactly twenty-one times, and it took longer and longer each day to feel safe enough, and then calm enough, to work on the new novel.

Who thinks it’s okay for @JacobFinchBonner to steal another writer’s book?

Why is @MacmillanBooks still selling #Crib, a novel its author lifted from another writer?

Why would she change her mind?

Because of this. Obviously.

Since that day in Seattle and especially since Anna had crossed the country to join him in New York, Jake had been bracing himself for the day his girlfriend finally mentioned the Twitter posts, perhaps with an entirely understandable demand to know why he hadn’t already told her about them. Anna was no Luddite, obviously—she worked in media!—but having established her Facebook and Instagram outposts as a way for her missing sister and aunt to reach her, those two accounts had pretty much ossified from lack of use. The Facebook profile listed about twenty friends, a link to Anna’s University of Washington class page, and a pinned endorsement for Rick Larson’s 2016 congressional run. The Instagram account’s first and only post dated to 2015 and featured—ah, the cliché of it—a latte art pine tree. One of her jobs at the podcast studio was to manage its own Instagram account, posting photographs of the various hosts and guests using the facility, but she apparently had no wish to chase personal likes, shares, retweets, or followers, and she certainly wasn’t monitoring the peaks and valleys of his online reputation. Anna, it was obvious, preferred the real world, and the real-life face-to-face interactions that took place in it: eating good food, drinking good wine, sweating on a yoga mat in a room crowded with physical bodies.

Still, there was always the uncomfortable possibility that someone, knowing she lived with the author of Crib, might mention an accusation or an attack they’d seen floating by on their own feed, or politely ask how Jake was holding up given, you know, that thing that was happening. Every day might be a day the infection of @TalentedTom crossed the membrane into his actual life and his actual relationship. Every night might be a night she suddenly said: “Oh hey, somebody sent me this weird tweet about you.” So far it hadn’t happened. When Anna came home from work, or met him for dinner after yoga, or spent the day with him wandering the city, their talk was about anything and everything but the most consequential thing in Jake’s life. Apart from her, of course.

Each morning after she left for work he sat paralyzed at his desk clicking back and forth from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, Googling himself every hour or so to see if anything had broken through, taking the temperature of his own alarm to see whether he was afraid, or merely afraid of being afraid. Each chime announcing a new email in his in-box made him jump, as did each beep of his Twitter alert and the bell Instagram rang when someone tagged him.

I know I’m the last person on the planet to read #Crib @JacobFinchBonner, but I wanna thank everyone for NOT TELLING ME WHAT HAPPENS COS I WAS LIKE WHAAAAAA????!

Recommended by Sammy’s mom: #Pachenko (sp?), #TheOrphan-Train, #Crib. Which do I read first?

Finished crib by @jacobfinchbonner. It wuz eh. Next: #thegoldfinch (man its loooooong)

He thought more than once of hiring a professional (or maybe just somebody’s teenage kid) to try to figure out who owned the Twitter account, or [email protected], or at least what general part of the world these messages were coming from, but the idea of bringing another person into his personal hell felt impossible. He thought of filing some kind of complaint with Twitter, but Twitter had allowed a president to suggest female senators were giving him blowjobs in exchange for his support—did he really think the platform would lift a finger to help him? At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive. Instead, he retreated again and again into a baseless idea that if he continued to ignore this ordeal it would one day, somehow, cease to be real, and when that came to pass he would seamlessly return to a version of his life in which no one—not his parents, or his agent, or his publishers, or his thousands upon thousands of readers, or Anna—had any reason to suspect what he’d done. Each morning he woke into some utterly irrational notion that it might all just … stop, but then a new speck of darkness would emerge from his computer screen and he would find himself crouching before some terrible approaching wave, waiting to drown.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Only the Most Successful Writers

Then, in February, Jake noticed that the Twitter bio included a new link to Facebook. With a now familiar surge of dread, he clicked on the link:

Name: Tom Talent

Works at: The Restoration of Justice in Fiction

Studied at: Ripley College

Lives In: Anytown, USA

From: Rutland, VT

Friends: 0

His maiden post was short, definitely not sweet, and thoroughly to the point:

Blindsided by that big twist in Crib? Here’s another one: Jacob Finch Bonner stole his novel from another writer.

And for some reason Jake would never understand, this was the post that began, at last, to metastasize.

At first, the responses were muted, dismissive, even scolding:

WTF?

Dude, I thought it was overrated, but you shouldn’t accuse somebody like that.

Wow, jealous much, loser?

But then, a couple of days later, Jake’s Twitter alert picked up a repost on the account of a minor book blogger, who added a question of her own:

Anybody know what this is about?