Eighteen people responded. None of them did. And for a couple of days he was able to maintain a desperate hope that this, too, would pass. Then, the following Monday, his agent called to ask if he was free later in the week for a meeting with the team at Macmillan, and there was something in her voice that told him this would not be about the second round of the paperback tour or even the new novel, which had now been scheduled for the following autumn. “What’s up?” he said, already knowing the answer.

Matilda had a very distinctive way of delivering terrible news as if it were an interesting insight that had just occurred to her. She said: “Oh, you know what? Wendy mentioned that reader services got a weirdo message from somebody who says you’re not the author of Crib. Which means you’ve really made it now. Only the most successful writers get these wackos.”

Jake couldn’t make a sound. He looked at the phone; it was in front of him, on the coffee table, with the speaker on. Finally, he managed a strangled: “What?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Everybody who accomplishes anything gets this. Stephen King? J. K. Rowling? Even Ian McEwan! Some crazy guy once accused Joyce Carol Oates of flying a zeppelin over his house so she could photograph what he was writing on his computer.”

“That’s insane.” He took a breath. “But … what did the message say?”

“Oh, something really specific like your story doesn’t belong to you. They just wanted to bring Legal in to have a little chat about it. Get us all on the same page.”

Jake nodded again. “Okay, great.”

“Ten tomorrow okay with you?”

“Okay.”

It took every fiber of his will not to immediately replicate his self-quarantine of the previous fall: unplugged phone, fetal position, cupcakes, Jameson. But this time he knew he’d shortly have to present himself in some quasi-responsible condition, and that impeded freefall, or at least irreversible freefall. When he met Matilda in the lobby of his venerable publisher the following morning he still felt impaired: woozy and malodorous, in spite of the fact that he’d forced himself into the shower only an hour earlier. The two of them went up in the elevator together to the fourteenth floor, and Jake, as he followed his editor’s assistant down the corridor, couldn’t help thinking about his previous visits to these offices: for a celebration in the aftermath of the auction, for the intense (but still thrilling!) editorial sessions, for the mind-blowing first meeting with the PR and marketing teams, at which he’d first understood that Crib was going to be given every speck of the magic publishing fairy dust his earlier books had been denied. Later visits here had been for the observation of other astonishing benchmarks: the first hundred thousand sold, the first week on the New York Times bestseller list, the Oprah selection. All good. Sometimes only reassuringly good, other times life-changingly good, but always good. Until today.

Today was not good.

In one of the conference rooms they sat down with Jake’s editor and publicist, and with the in-house attorney, a man named Alessandro who announced that he had just come from the gym, something Jake absurdly took to be a hopeful sign. Alessandro was completely bald and the overhead fluorescents made the top of his head shine. Unless—Jake peered—was that sweat? It wasn’t sweat. Jake was the only one sweating.

“So, honey,” Matilda began, “like I told you, and I mean this, it’s not uncommon at all to be accused of something nasty by a troll. You know, even Stephen King’s been accused of plagiarism.”

And J. K. Rowling. And Joyce Carol Oates. He knew.

“And you’ll notice this guy’s anonymous.”

“I haven’t noticed,” Jake lied, “because I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Wendy, his editor. “We want you thinking about the new book, not this ridiculousness.”

“But we’ve been talking about it,” said Matilda. “Wendy and I have, and the team, and we thought it might be time to bring in Mr. Guarise—”

“Alessandro,” said the attorney. “Please.”

“To go through it with us. See if there are any steps we should be taking.”

Alessandro was handing around a spreadsheet, and Jake, to his utter horror, saw that it was a very comprehensive display of TalentedTom’s online activities thus far: every tweet and Facebook post neatly dated and appallingly reproduced, displayed in order of their appearance.

“What am I looking at?” said Matilda, staring at the page.

“I had one of my paralegals do a bit of digging on this guy. He’s been active, at least in a small way, since November.”

“Were you aware of any of this?” Wendy asked.

Jake felt a wave of illness. He was, it was clear, about to tell his first outright untruth of the meeting. It was unavoidable and it was necessary, but it was also excruciating.

“No idea.”

“Well, that’s just as well.”

The assistant stuck her head into the room and asked if anyone needed anything. Matilda asked for a water. Jake didn’t think he could get even that down his throat without spilling it everywhere.

“So listen,” said Wendy. “And I know you’ll forgive me for asking this, but it’s kind of a baseline thing and we just need to hear you say it. As far as this bullshit goes, and I understand that what he’s actually saying is completely vague and nonspecific, but do you have any idea what this joker’s talking about?”

Jake looked around at them. His mouth had gone about as dry as sandpaper. He wished he’d asked for the water.

“Uh, no. I mean, like you said, it’s … what, I’m a thief? Of what?”

“Well, exactly,” said Matilda.

“He does use the word ‘plagiarist’ in some posts,” said Alessandro helpfully.

“Yeah, love that,” Jake said bitterly.

“But Crib isn’t plagiarized,” Matilda said.

“No!” Jake nearly shouted. “I wrote every word of Crib myself. On a dying laptop in Cobleskill, New York. Winter, spring, and summer of 2016.”

“Good. And not that it will ever come to this, but I assume you have drafts, notes, and the like?”

“I do,” said Jake, but he was shaking as he said it.

“I’m struck by the fact that he refers to himself as ‘TalentedTom,’” said Wendy. “Should we infer he’s a writer himself?”

“A talented one,” said Matilda, with extravagant sarcasm.

“When I read that,” said the publicist, whose name was Roland, “I just automatically thought, you know: Ripley.”

Jake, caught unawares, felt the heat rush to his face. The attorney said: “Who’s that?”

“Tom Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley. You know that book?”

“I saw the movie,” Alessandro said, and Jake, slowly, let out a breath. Apparently no one in the room seemed to associate “Ripley” with a third-rate MFA program where he’d taught for a couple of years.

“I think it’s kind of creepy, actually,” Roland went on. “Like, even as he’s calling you a plagiarist he’s saying: I’m capable of a lot worse than that.”

“Well, but it’s only sometimes he says plagiarist,” Wendy said. “The other times it’s just the story he accuses you of stealing. ‘The story doesn’t belong to you.’ What does that even mean?”

“People don’t realize you can’t copyright a plot,” Alessandro said finally. “You can’t even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.”

“If you could copyright a plot there wouldn’t be any novels at all,” said Wendy. “Imagine just one person owning the rights to Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Or Hero raised in obscurity discovers he’s incredibly important to an epic struggle for power. I mean, it’s absurd!”

“Well, this, to be fair, is a very distinctive plot. I think you said yourself, Wendy, that you’d never come across this before, not only in submissions but in your own experience as a reader.”

Wendy nodded. “That’s true.”

“What about you, Jake?”

Another dizzying breath, another lie.

“No. Never came across it in anything I’ve read.”

“And I think you’d remember!” Matilda said. “If a manuscript with this plot had come into my office at any time I’d have responded the way I did when Jake sent us his manuscript. But even if I weren’t the agent this writer chose to send it to, any agent would have been excited about a book with this plot. Eventually, I’d have heard about it just like the rest of us, which can only mean no such book exists.”

“Maybe unwritten,” Jake heard himself say.

The others looked at him.

“What do you mean?” Alessandro said.

“Well, I suppose it’s possible some writer had the same idea for a novel, but never actually wrote it.”

“Cry me a river!” Matilda threw up her hands. “We’re going to give credit to everyone out there who has an idea for a novel and just hasn’t gotten around to writing it down? Do you know how many people come up to me and say they have a great plot for a novel?”