They had been friends, once upon a time in Brooklyn. Two struggling writers, going hungry together, sleeping on couches in an over-occupancy one-bedroom apartment. Hunting for silence, space, and the time to get words on pages. Wading through drifts of rejection, rejection, rejection, together with their other two roommates. It had been the four of them. Flynn had also been a writer back then but now worked as an editor for a midsized publisher uptown. Sergio was an actor who had eventually given up chasing off-Broadway and now lived in LA. Back then, their professional struggles were best weathered together, the pain of every “Thank you, no thank you” washed down with the biggest bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill they could scrape enough change together to afford from Roy’s Liquor around the corner.

Their miseries loved each other’s company, but the company started to shift the day she came home, bottle in hand, wanting to celebrate some success. Clare’s struggle ended first and the most dramatically, despite the fact that it was Donna who was, without question, the most singularly talented of them all.

She had her reasons to hate Clare, and in truth, Clare understood those reasons perfectly. It was easy to imagine being Donna, that very specific pain of watching your friend achieve professionally everything you ever wanted. Honestly, everything Donna deserved.

Clare looked down at Donna’s book, Messages from the Shadowlands, on the glass coffee table. It was an advance copy that Simon had requested from Donna’s publisher before the hardbacks hit the shelves, and long before the National Book Award medallions were placed on the covers. It had sat on her table ever since Clare had stayed up until three a.m. to finish it. When she had closed the book, she sat with it, silent, her pristine white-walled study dark beyond the reach of her crystal table lamp’s glow.

Stunned. Moved. Affected by Donna’s story, yes, she had been all of those things. And also, for the first time since Simon had plucked her from that wood-worn book bar in Brooklyn, the Blue Spruce, Clare felt shame creep over the grand facade of her own oversized success.

Had any of her many books, even one of them, ever made a single reader feel what Donna’s symphony had accomplished?

Clare picked the book up off the table. It was the reason Clare had reached and, as Donna so accurately pointed out, lost her footing, or perhaps worse, taken on characters and subjects beyond her ability to effectively convey. Because she had wanted to do more—she had wanted to do what Donna did, but instead she had landed at the bottom of the canyon.