“Okay. So what if this was real? What if there’s a real mother and daughter out there, and what happens in Crib actually happened to them?”

He watched the color drain from her face. “But that’s horrible,” she said.

“Agreed. But think about it. If it’s real—real mother, real daughter—the last thing that woman wants is to read about what happened, let alone in a novel that’s being published all over the world. They’d obviously want to know who this author is, right?”

She nodded.

“And it’s right there on the back flap that I was associated with an MFA program at Ripley College. Where I would have crossed paths with the late Evan Parker. Where I could have heard his story.”

“Well, but even if that’s true, why be angry at you and not at Parker, for telling you in the first place? Why not be angry at whoever told Evan Parker the story to begin with?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t think anyone told Parker. I think Parker was close to it. So close he saw it happen, firsthand. And when he realized what he’d seen, maybe he decided it was too good a story to waste. Because he was a writer, and writers understand how ridiculously rare a story like that is.” Jake shook his head. He was feeling, for the very first time, some actual respect for Evan Parker, his fellow writer. And his fellow victim.

“I don’t think this was ever about plagiarism,” Jake said. “Or theft of story, or whatever else you decide to call it. It’s never been a literary issue at all.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means, okay, even if I did take something that wasn’t technically mine, Evan Parker took it first, and the person he took it from was furious about it. But then he died. So: end of story.”

“Obviously not,” Anna observed.

“Right. Because then, a couple of years later, along comes Crib, and unlike Parker’s attempt it’s actually a finished book, and somebody’s actually published it. Now the story’s out there in black and white, in all its glory, and two million total strangers have read it—in hardcover, paperback, mass market, audio, large-print editions! Now it’s translated into thirty languages and Oprah’s putting a sticker on the cover and it’s coming soon to a theater near you, and every time this person gets on the subway somebody’s got a copy open, right in their face.” He paused. “You know, I actually understand how they must feel.”

“This is really scaring me.”

I’ve been scared for months, he didn’t say.

Then she sat up. “Wait,” Anna said. “You know who he is, don’t you? I can see that you do. Who is he?”

Jake was shaking his head. “She,” he said.

“Wait,” she said. “What?” She had a lock of her gray hair coiled between her fingers, and she was twisting it.

“She. It’s a woman.”

“How can you know that?” she said.

He hesitated before answering her. It seemed insane, now that he was about to actually say it out loud.

“At Evan’s tavern last night, the woman sitting next to me knew Parker. She loathed him. Said he was a complete asshole.”

“Okay. But it sounds like you already knew that.”

“Yes. And then she reminded me about something else. Parker had a younger sister. Dianna. I knew about her, but I never gave her any thought, because she’s also dead. She died even before her brother.”

Anna seemed relieved. She even attempted a smile. “But then it isn’t her. Obviously.”

“Nothing about this is obvious. Dianna had a daughter. Crib is about what happened to her. Do you understand?”

She stared at him for the longest time, and at last, she nodded. And then, for what it was worth, there were two of them who knew.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 212–13

For weeks, they didn’t speak, and even after a lifetime of not speaking something about this felt different: harder, colder, relentlessly toxic. When they passed in the corridor or on the stairs or in the kitchen their eyes slid past each other, and Samantha felt, at certain moments, the actual physical vibration of what was accumulating inside her. She had no intention, still, just a growing idea of something approaching that would not be averted, even with effort, so what point could there be in trying to avert it? It was so much easier to just give up, and after that she felt nothing at all.

On the night Maria left home forever, she knocked on the door of her mother’s office and asked if she could borrow the Subaru.

“What for?”

“I’m moving out,” said Maria. “I’m leaving for college.”

Samantha tried not to react.

“What about senior year?”

Her daughter, maddeningly, shrugged. “Senior year is bullshit. I applied early. I’m going to Ohio State. I got a scholarship for out-of-state students.”

“Oh? When were you going to mention all this?”

Again, that shrug. “Now, I guess. I thought maybe I could drive my stuff out there, then I’ll bring the car back. Then I’ll take a bus or something.”

“Wow. Great plan. I guess you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“Well, it’s not as if you’re going to take me to college.”

“No?” Samantha said. “Well, how can I if you haven’t even told me it’s happening?”

She turned, and Samantha could hear her stalking back along the corridor to her room. She got up and followed.

“Why is that, by the way? Why did I have to hear from my high school math teacher that my daughter is graduating early? Why do I have to look through your desk to find out my daughter’s going to college out of state?”

“I thought so,” Maria said, her voice maddeningly calm. “Couldn’t keep your paws off my stuff, could you?”

“No, I guess not. Same as if I’d thought you were doing drugs. Proper parental oversight.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious. Now you’re suddenly interested in proper parental oversight?”

“I’ve always—”

“Right. Cared. Please, Mom, we’ve got, like, a couple more days to get through together. Let’s not blow it now.”

She got up from the bed and stepped in front of her mother, on her way, perhaps, along the hall to the bathroom, where Samantha had once confirmed her predicament with a pregnancy test from the Hamilton ThriftDrug, or down to the kitchen where Samantha had once tried to persuade her own mother that it made no sense—no sense!—to have or at any rate to keep this baby she had never wanted, never for one moment wanted, not then, not since, not now, and as that body passed before her she saw, shockingly, herself: slender and straight, with thin brown hair and that family way of slouching, both as she was now and as she had been in that long-ago moment, only wanting, hoping, and waiting for the day she could leave like Maria was about to leave. And without understanding what she was doing or knowing she was going to do it she reached out for her daughter’s wrist and yanked it hard, swinging the body attached to it powerfully back along an invisible arc, and as she did she had an idea of herself, swinging a little girl up into the air and smiling into her smile as the two of them spun around and around. It was something a mother might have done with her daughter, and a daughter with her mother, in a film or a television commercial for dresses or Florida beaches or weed killer to make the backyard pretty for an innocent child to play in, only Samantha couldn’t remember ever having done this herself, whether she’d been the spinning mother or the spun little girl, around and around in a perfect arc.

Maria’s head swung into one of that old bed’s wooden cannonballs, and the crack was so deep and so loud it silenced the world.

She fell like something light, barely making a sound, only there she was: half on and half off an old braided rug that had once, when Samantha herself was young, been in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom door. She waited for her daughter to get up, but the waiting ran along a parallel track to something else, which was the absolute and weirdly calm understanding that she was already gone.

Off. Fled. Escaped, after all.

Samantha must have sat there for a minute or an hour, or the better part of that night, watching the crumpled thing that had once, long ago, been Maria, her daughter. And what a waste that had been. What an exercise in pointlessness, bringing a human being into the world, only to find oneself more alone than before, more thwarted, more disappointed, more perplexed about what anything meant. This child who had never once reached for her or expressed love, who had never shown the smallest appreciation for what her mother had done, what she’d given up—not willingly, sure, but resignedly, responsibly—and now it had come to this. What for?