“Yes,” she agreed. “I started already. Several of her old journals are in my room.”

“What is this one about?” he asked, opening it back up to the first pages.

“Brooklyn, when she first moved there, and her roommate, Donna Mehan. Who was Donna? That name is familiar for some reason. Maybe Clare mentioned her to me back then.”

“Maybe, or maybe you remember her name from the New York Times bestseller list. She had a book a few years back, won the National Book Award. Everyone was reading it. Donna and Clare were roommates once upon a time. When I first met them, they were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other people.”

“You knew Donna?”

Simon nodded. “Technically, I still know her. I met both of them in a crappy little bar, the Blue Spruce, during an open mic night.”

Chapter 22

Clare

Sixteen years before her death

What did it mean? She couldn’t say for sure. Everything? Nothing at all? It was possible in this moment to believe both versions could be equally true. The Atlantic Monthly, it was no small thing and yet still utterly meaningless in the grander scope of worldwide accomplishments happening to thousands of other people right now. She hadn’t saved anyone’s life, crested Mount Everest, or even dug a well for an impoverished village somewhere in the middle of Africa. She had published a short story. That was all.

But standing here, in the living room of the third-floor apartment she shared with Donna, Flynn, and Sergio, her two free copies still hidden inside the thin mailer, Clare allowed herself to feel the thrill, momentarily permitted a balloon of pride to swell in her chest. She had done it. She was now “published,” for God’s sake. It was real; the proof was in her hands.

She kept her now-sweating hands from ripping the package open. She wanted to wait, take her time, savor this moment—absorb it fully. Because, even though she was right in the middle of it, on the swell of the accomplishment, the downslope from here was already cresting on her mental horizon.

What if this was it? What if it never happened again? She could plainly see that was the emotion that immediately followed this wonderful moment, and because of that, in spite of it already casting an early shadow, she needed to draw this out a bit. Really taste it.

No one else was home today, and that was a relief. She wanted this for herself, seeing the cover, opening to the table of contents, seeing her name and story title listed there. What would that feel like? After three years of trying, and almost a hundred rejections from editors all over the city, letters which she had piled up in three shoeboxes at the back of her closet, now, finally, one of her stories had found an editor who loved it at a publication she could be proud of.