A car. A house. A garage. A basement. Most people in New York City didn’t have them, but his books had sold well enough for him to live nearly the same as he would have if his home were in the suburbs somewhere.

And yet, Timothy almost never went into his basement. He avoided it just as much in real life as Emily did in his imagination. She chose never to go downstairs ever again. He ventured down only when absolutely necessary.

You are Emily.

“No no no no. I’m a man. She’s a girl.”

You were a child once.

“A boy.”

That doesn’t matter.

Yes, it did. It did matter.

And so, since Timothy was who he was, a man who’d been a boy and not a girl, he could write about a boy coming home to his father after a fight at school, about a boy whose dad told him he needed to grow up and not be a pansy, needed to learn to fight back.

It didn’t mean it was real. It didn’t mean it’d ever happened.

He could write about that.

Or about how a father slapped his son and kept doing it harder and harder in order To Teach Him a Lesson, and how the boy didn’t want to fight back and also didn’t want to turn away because it was his dad and he wanted to be brave and not let him down.

Or about the tears that the boy cried when he was alone in his room, and about how badly he wanted to make his father proud and wanted to love him and wanted to run away from him and never ever ever ever see him again, all at the same time.

Or about how his dad hurt his mom. About him punching her in the face and then laughing at the way she would cower when he raised his fist again. He could write about that. Or about how the boy wanted to hurt him for that, and especially for making her do those things with him in the basement.

And that’s what you did.

“No.”

You wanted to hurt him. Wanted to kill him because—

“No!”

Yes. You killed him that day when you two were out on the river. You pushed him over the side of that rowboat, and when he tried to get back into it, you hit him in the head with the oar. You had to do it three times before he finally stopped trying, stopped moving. And then he went under the water and didn’t come up again. He was your first one.

“That isn’t true,” Timothy protested. He was shaking his head defiantly. “That’s just a scene from one of my novels. That’s from Cold Clay.”

Life and art.

Art and life.

Imitating, becoming each other.