“Second novels,” he said shortly. “I mean, fourth novels, technically, but since no one ever heard of me before Crib, it’s sort of my second act. It’s terrifying.”

“No, no,” Matilda said, wordlessly accepting her coffee from the waiter. “Don’t think about that. If I could only get my clients to stop worrying about their careers they’d write twice as many books and be a lot happier in general. You wouldn’t believe how much therapy there is in these relationships,” she said, directing this to Anna as if Jake—the subject of the theoretical therapy—were not right there at the table with them. “I’m not licensed! I took Intro Psych at Princeton, and I kid you not, that was the extent of my training. But the fragile egos I’m apparently responsible for! I mean, not your husband, but some of them … if they send me something to read and I don’t get back to them for a few days because it’s five hundred pages long or it’s the weekend or I happen to have other clients who are in the middle of auctions or winning the National Book Award or leaving their spouses and running off with their research assistants, God forbid! They’re on the phone to me with a knife at the wrist. Of course,” she said, perhaps hearing herself, “I adore my clients. Every one of them, even the tough ones, but some people make things so hard for themselves. Why?”

Anna nodded sagely. “I know how tough it must have been in the beginning, for Jake. Before you were involved and Crib became such a success. It takes courage to keep going. I’m so proud of him.”

“Thanks, honey,” said Jake. He felt as if he was interrupting them.

“I’m proud of him too. Especially these last months.”

Again, Anna turned to him with a confused look.

“Oh, it’s all fine,” he heard himself say. “It’ll pass.”

“I told you so,” Matilda said.

“I’ll get the book done. And then I’ll write another book.”

“And another!” she declared.

“Because that’s what writers do, right?”

“That’s what you do. And thank god for it!”

He noticed, when they left the restaurant, that she gave Anna an even longer hug than the one she gave him, but he was so relieved that he’d managed to block TalentedTom from invading their dinner that it was impossible to see the evening as anything but a win. His agent, it was obvious, really liked his new wife, and in this she had a lot of company.

In practical terms, Jake’s post-marriage life didn’t change all that much. Anna had opted for a modified modification, officially becoming Anna Williams-Bonner after filling out the required twenty or thirty forms and waiting on various lines at various agencies to acquire a new driver’s license and passport. They merged bank accounts and credit cards and health insurance policies and saw an attorney about their wills. Anna dispatched the last of Jake’s collegiate and post-collegiate furnishings—a reclining chair of faux leather, a framed Phish poster, a shag rug from Bed Bath & Beyond, circa 2002—to their just rewards, and repainted the living room. They went for an abbreviated honeymoon to New Orleans, where they gorged themselves on oysters and listened to jazz (which Anna liked) and blues (which Jake liked) and zydeco (which neither of them liked) at night.

On the night they returned to the city, Anna went to deliver a box of pralines to a neighbor who’d fed the cat while they were gone, and Jake let himself into the apartment, dropping an armload of mail onto the kitchen counter. His eye found it right away: an unremarkable envelope slipping out onto the granite countertop between Anna’s copy of Real Simple and his own Poets & Writers, which, nonetheless, gave him the deepest chill of his life.

Front and center, his address. More accurately, their address.

And in the upper left-hand corner, the name Talented Tom.

He looked at it for a long, terrible moment.

Then he snatched it up and rushed with it into the bathroom, turning on the water in the sink and locking the door behind him. He slit open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper inside with shaking hands.

You know what you did. I know what you did. Are you ready for everyone to know what you did? I hope so, because I’m getting ready to tell the world. Have fun with your career after that.

So this, he thought, listening to the din of his own breath over the running water, was what worse felt like. This person had come through the screen into the actual, tactile world, and now Jake was holding in his hands an object TalentedTom, too, had held. There was a new and sharp horror in that, as if the paper itself held all of the malevolence, all of the outrage Jake did not deserve. The cumulative weight of it took his breath away and rendered him incapable of movement, and he stayed where he was for so long that Anna came to the bathroom door and asked if he was feeling all right.

He was not feeling all right.

Eventually, he crammed the piece of paper into a pocket of his Dopp kit, took off his clothes, and got into the shower. He was trying to think it through with whatever of his cognitive abilities remained at his disposal, but this proved impossible even after half an hour under the hottest water he could stand. Nor was it possible in the days that followed, as he added the furtive collection of the mail to his already obsessive monitoring of the internet. He simply could not think of how to go forward, and that, ironically, was what made him realize the only place left to go was back.

Ripley was what he knew. Ripley was all he could be sure of. Something relevant to his present crisis had taken place at Ripley, that was obvious, and it was understandable; the heightened camaraderie of the MFA program—even (perhaps especially?) the low-residency MFA program!—acted powerfully upon people who couldn’t be “out” as writers in their ordinary, daily lives, perhaps not even to their own friends and families. Gathering on an otherwise empty college campus they were, perhaps for the first time, suddenly enfolded by their tribe and able to talk story! plot! character! with people they’d only just met and would know for only a brief, intense period. Evan Parker might have declined to share his infallible plot with the other students in the much touted “safety” of Jake’s formal workshop, but it was entirely possible that somebody in the program had managed to connect with him, maybe during drinks at the Ripley Inn, maybe lingering after a meal in the cafeteria. Or maybe afterward, at Evan Parker’s house or the other person’s house, or over email, with pages of actual manuscript sent back and forth for “critique.”

Whoever TalentedTom was, his obvious (if faulty!) grasp of what had transpired between Jake and his former student meant that he, too, was connected to that community, or at least had crossed paths with someone who was. And yet, Jake had allowed his own investigation to lapse with Martin Purcell of Burlington, Vermont. Now this asshole had contacted him at home, not through some social media platform, not even through his own website or publisher, but at his actual, physical place of residence. Which he shared with his wife. This was painfully, powerfully close. This signaled an unprecedented intensification of @TalentedTom’s campaign. This was unacceptable.

Defense, never the best strategy, was obviously no longer an option, not after this. He had to return to what he knew for sure—Ripley—and start again, from there.

He hadn’t bothered to open the large envelope containing Martin Purcell’s manuscript pages when it arrived back in the fall. Since then it had been gathering dust in a box under his bed, mixed in among other manuscripts (sent by actual friends, looking for his “thoughts”) and advance galleys (sent by publishers, looking for blurbs). Now Jake pulled the box out and went digging through it. When he found Purcell’s mailer he slit open the end and extracted the cover letter:

Dear Jake (if I may),

I am so incredibly grateful to you for agreeing to look at these stories! Thank you so much! I’d be delighted to discuss if you ever have time. No comment too small … or too big! I’ve been thinking of this as a novel made up of short stories, but maybe that is because the idea of writing a “novel” is so huge and terrifying. I don’t know how you novelists do it!

Anyway, feel free to email or give me a call when you’re finished, and thanks again.

Martin Purcell

[email protected]

There had to be sixty pages in there, Jake thought. He supposed he would actually have to read them. He returned to the living room, sat down on the kilim-covered couch, and opened his laptop. The cat, Whidbey, followed him, uncoiled along Jake’s left thigh, and began to purr.

Hi Martin! I’ve been reading your stuff. Wow—excellent work. Lots to discuss.

Within a couple of minutes, Purcell wrote back:

Fantastic! Just say when!

It was late afternoon and the sun had swung around Greenwich Avenue on its way west. He was supposed to leave here soon, to meet Anna at a Japanese place they liked, near her studio.

He wrote: