“Meaning, you’re telling me that you think there was something significantly different about Clare’s last book, when in actual fact it is very much like every other book she has ever written. She just finally was able to successfully tell the story she has been trying and failing to tell for her whole career. Clare was finally brave enough to look at the truth, and tell it. Unfortunately…I think that truth broke her.”

Simon stared out the door to his office. The large birds-of-paradise arrangement was beginning to droop. “How?” he managed to ask. “I’m not seeing it.”

Although he would be lying if what Donna was saying wasn’t hitting a nerve with him, a suspicion he had never looked at head-on. It was only ever a whisper, tucked somewhere deep down in the dark corner of his awareness. Like a trapped little bird that would flap its wings, just to let him know it was there every time he first read one of Clare’s new manuscripts. It had always been easy enough for him to ignore before.

Donna paused for a moment before answering. “Every happy ending Clare ever wrote was her own. It was hers…and it was Adam’s. I assume you both know about Adam?”

Simon met Eileen’s eyes. “Yes,” he said and swallowed. “Yes, I know.”

“Every book, every short story, they were, every one of them, really about her and Adam. The multitude of fantastically fictional lives they might have had if he had lived. She gave them different names, different jobs; they lived in different cities, experienced different conflicts, but it was always Clare and Adam happy and together at the end of every book. Until…well, until she told herself the truth.”

“What truth?” Eileen asked.

“That before Adam died, he stopped loving Clare. Even if he had lived, she couldn’t have him. Not the way she wanted. Do you remember that first short story she published, in the Atlantic Monthly? ‘Lost on the North Platte’?”

“Yes,” Eileen blurted. “I remember it. She sent me a copy. I remember thinking it was so obviously—”

“About her and Adam,” Donna finished Eileen’s sentence. “She changed the names in the published version, but like so many of her short stories back then, I read the original with all the real names still in them. Everything after that story, she spent her career pretending she would have had a happy ever after, when really she and Adam were always going to have a tragedy. With A Perfect Life, she finally wrote it.”