At his book launch, Nye told the crowd he wasn’t going to read from the book. He said he found that boring, and he hoped he wouldn’t test the audience’s patience or put them all to sleep. People laughed, but Rebecca agreed. A few times a year, the English Department brought poets and fiction writers to campus to give readings, and some of them read in such a monotone voice, they killed the energy and mood in the room faster than a gas leak. When Nye said he wouldn’t read, Rebecca didn’t laugh, but inside, she breathed a sigh of relief. She would have hated to see a professor she liked give a disastrous performance onstage.

But Nye talked about the book. He summarized the plot and told the crowd what had inspired it and how long it took him to write it, all the nerdy shoptalk Rebecca loves to hear. And the book he described sounded a lot like the one that landed on her doorstep. In Nye’s book and in the handwritten one she is reading, a young woman gets murdered in a town very much like Gatewood. Rebecca thought it was just a coincidence. After all, she doesn’t read a lot of thrillers, but she spends a lot of time in bookstores and online. She knows how many books these days tell stories of women getting knocked off in various gruesome ways by various people—boyfriends, husbands, lovers, doctors, therapists, serial killers. Just like the books she prefers always seem to deal with an inheritance or a will or a lost love, thrillers plow their own fertile and murderous ground over and over. But this one isn’t just a thriller. It’s about the friendship between the two women, the way they confide in each other. And help each other. Until the man starts to ruin everything . . .

Nye said in class once that every writer has only one story to tell—and if they’re lucky and have a career, they get to tell it over and over. Was that as true of Jane Austen as the mysterious author of the book on her stoop?

The bus rattles up College Street. It’s close to full, students packed in next to one another in their bulky coats, trying to text and scroll through their phones with gloves on. The bus stops a block from campus, at the edge of downtown, and Rebecca stands up, tugging her bag over her shoulder. She knows she shouldn’t do it, she knows she needs to hustle, but she also knows she won’t survive the day without coffee. And she has just enough time to run into Troy’s and grab something she can bring into the writing center with her. Troy’s is a little pricey but also locally owned. Sometimes she thinks she works in the writing center so she can buy Troy’s coffee on the way in.