Clare threw Donna’s book against the thick glass wall. The thud of its spine, first on the wall and then on the floor, broke the silence of her study. Several pages broke loose and littered the floor next to the large white shag rug and roused Charlie from his spot nearest the heating vent to sniff and investigate.

“You can go ahead and pee on those,” she told him.

He gave the pages a single snort, then trotted across the rug, under the glass table, and jumped up onto the white couch behind her. “You’re not supposed to be up there,” she said, and shook her head as she bent down to nuzzle his stupid, cute face and let him lick her cheek. She pulled the pale-blue throw from the back of the couch, laid it out, and positioned Charlie in the middle—pushing the extra fabric up and around him into a puppy nest. She kissed his face once more then headed to her desk to do the one thing Simon had expressly begged her not to.

Poised in her office chair, one hand on her mouse, she opened Facebook.

Her official author page popped up, the stream filled with her publicist’s recent posts—dates and locations for the thirty-city book tour she would still have to attend, despite her bloody, mangled corpse of a book being dead on arrival at the bottom of the canyon.

But Clare Collins wasn’t who she wanted to be right now, so she logged out of this account and typed in the user ID and password of the person who she needed to be in this moment: Sara Smith.

Sara Smith was no one. A low-profile, lurking plain Jane with a stock photo profile pic so innocuous, so truly forgettable, friend requests made by her were almost never rejected. It was easy to believe Sara Smith was someone who went to your high school, was someone you forgot. Maybe she was that wallflower in your junior year chemistry class who sat in the far corner? No, was it econ? Whatever, she’s already friends with everyone else you went to high school with—Accept Friend Request.

With Sara Smith’s help, Clare had, one by one, become social media friends with eighty-four people from her high school class. If any of them ever suspected Sara was really Clare Kaczanowski, the girl from their yearbook who had defied all their expectations and actually become “The Most Likely to Succeed” by changing her name to Clare Collins and writing loads of books, they never called Sara out on it. Which would be mortifying, especially since she had, from time to time, contributed to some of the comments when former classmates occasionally posted news stories about her.