I can’t keep my voice from cracking. “Hi, Mrs. Liu.”
“Hello.” Her voice sounds muffled and nasal. I wonder if she’s been crying. “I’m calling because . . . well, there’s no easy way to say this.”
“Mrs. Liu, I think I know—”
“A woman named Adele Sparks-Sato reached out to me this morning. She wanted to know if I still had Athena’s drafting notebooks, and if she could have a look.”
She doesn’t elaborate, which forces me to ask, “Yes?”
“Well, she insinuated that you had stolen The Last Front from Athena. And she wanted to look through Athena’s notebooks, to see if there was any evidence that Athena had been working on that project.”
I press my hand against my forehead. This is it. It’s all over. I thought she was calling about Mother Witch, but this is so much worse. “Mrs. Liu, I don’t know what to say.”
“I told her no, of course.” My heart skips a beat. Mrs. Liu continues. “I don’t like when strangers . . . Anyhow, I told her to give me some time to think about it. And I thought I would talk to you first.” She pauses again. I know what she wants to ask; she’s just not brave enough to say it. I imagine her standing in her kitchen, nails digging into her palm, trying to speak aloud the possibility that the last person who saw her daughter alive might have stolen her magnum opus as well. “June . . .” Her voice catches. I hear her sniffle. “As you know, June, I very much do not want to open those notebooks.”
And the follow-up question, unspoken: Do I have reason to?
Believe me, in that moment, I want to confess.
This would have been the best time, the right time, to come clean. I think of our last conversation, two years ago, when I visited her home. “I so wish I had been able to read her last novel,” Mrs. Liu told me as I stood up to leave. “Athena so rarely opened herself up to me. Reading her work wasn’t like knowing her thoughts, but it was at least a part of her she’d decided to let me see.”
I’ve torn that from her. I’ve denied a mother her daughter’s final words. If I tell her the truth now, Mrs. Liu will at least get those words back. She’ll see the effort that occupied the last years of Athena’s life.
But I can’t break.
That’s been the key to staying sane throughout all of this: holding the line, maintaining my innocence. In the face of it all, I’ve never once cracked, never admitted the theft to anyone. By now, I mostly believe the lie myself—that it was my efforts that made The Last Front the success that it was, that when it comes down to it, it is my book. I’ve contorted the truth into such ways that I can, in fact, make peace with it. If I tell Mrs. Liu otherwise, all of this unravels. I drive the nail in my own coffin. And the world may be crumbling around me regardless, but I can’t let it all slip away if there’s even the slightest hope of salvaging it.
“Mrs. Liu.” I take a deep breath. “I worked very, very hard on The Last Front. My blood and sweat are in that book.”
“I see.”
“Your daughter was an exceptional writer. And so am I. And I think it hurts both her legacy, and my future, to overlook either truth.”
I’m skilled with words. I know how to lie without lying. And I know, on some level, that Mrs. Liu must know what I’m really telling her. I’m sure she knows, if she gives Adele Sparks-Sato permission, what they will find in Athena’s notebooks.
But she is terrified of what lies inside those Moleskines. That is clearer now than ever. I’m speaking to a mother who, when it comes down to it, would really rather not confront what dark things lay buried in her daughter’s soul. No mother wants to know her child that well. Here, then, are the terms of our bargain—she’ll keep my secrets, as long as she never has to confront Athena’s.
“Very well,” says Mrs. Liu. “Thank you, June.”
Before she hangs up, I blurt, “And Mrs. Liu, about Mother Witch . . .” I trail off. I’m not sure what I want to say, or if it’s prudent to say anything at all. Todd told me that Mrs. Liu isn’t suing for damages, but I hate to have this hanging over me. I want confirmation from Mrs. Liu’s own mouth that this is going away. “I mean, so I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to rewrite the opening . . .”
“Oh, June.” She sighs. “I don’t care about that.”
“It really is original work,” I say. “I did—I did take the first paragraph—I don’t know how, I think we were just trading excerpts, and it wound up in my notebook somehow, and it’s been so long that I forgot . . . but anyways, the rest of the story . . .”
“I know,” says Mrs. Liu, and now there’s a hard edge in her voice. “I know, June. Athena never would have written something like that.”
Before I can ask her what she means, she hangs up.
Seventeen
BY THE END OF THE MONTH, THE DUST HAS SETTLED AND ALL RELEVANT parties have made up their minds. I am hated by the internet, an embarrassment to the industry, and hanging on to my relationship with my publisher by a thread.
At least I’m not broke. Indeed, by most external measures, I am still quite a success. I occupy that curious space where the fraction of the reading population that’s constantly online hates me, but the rest of America’s book buyers don’t. People are still picking my books off the sale racks at Target and Books-A-Million. Despite a petition circled by Adele Sparks-Sato and Diana Qiu to have Eden pull all my titles from shelves until they’ve conducted a third-party investigation (delusional), my sales haven’t dropped.
In fact, they’re doing better. Brett was right about scandals generating free marketing. Unofficial until your royalty statement, reads his latest email, but your sales are nearly double this month what they were this time a year ago.
It only takes a little exploring around the seedier corners of the internet to learn what’s going on. Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob. (It appears the alt-right cares a lot about due process, but only when the accused has done something like sexual assault or racially motivated plagiarism.) A popular Fox News cohost encourages all of his millions of viewers to support me so that Eden doesn’t drop me from their list, which has created a strange situation in which thousands of Trump voters are buying a book about mistreated Chinese laborers. My publicist passes on an interview request from a popular young YouTuber, but I decline when I discover that most of her viral videos are titled things like “WATCH ME SNEAK A GUN INTO MY ECON LECTURE LOL” and “LIB SNOWFLAKE GETS OWNED BY THE FACTS ON ABORTION.”
Okay, yes, I know how bad this looks. Like Taylor Swift, I had no intention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie. Obviously I’m not a Trumper—I voted for Biden! But if these people are hurling money at me, is it so wrong of me to accept? Should we not celebrate scamming cash from racist rednecks whenever we get the chance?
So here’s how things have shaken out. I’ve lost my reputation, but I’m far from canceled, and I have a steady income for the foreseeable future. Things could be worse. Maybe I’ve burned all my bridges in publishing, but that doesn’t mean my life is over. I still have more savings than most people my age. Maybe it’s time to stop while I’m ahead.