I turn back around. Her cheeks are flushed. Maybe in response to the praise? I remember what it was like to have a compliment from a professor.

“It’s about so much more than the murder,” I say. “You do so much with the friendship between the two women. Their class differences. One woman went to a really expensive private school and grew up privileged. The other is working her way through a state university with a crappy job. The way they confide in each other so intimately. Did I teach you how to do that?”

“Some of it, I guess. Some of it I just . . . knew how to do.”

“I’d been trying to write for years,” I say. “Even before Emily and Jake died, I’d been floundering. I’d started about thirty different novels. None of them went anywhere. When they died, there wasn’t a chance I was going to write anything.”

“You would have at some point,” she says. “It takes time when you lose someone.”

“That’s what they say. I think that’s one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that are bullshit. I don’t know if we’re ever the same.”

“You might be right,” she says.

I think I’m getting through to her. I take a couple of steps toward her and keep going. “You remember that night in Dubliners? That last night we saw each other.”

“I remember that night very well,” Madeline says.

Her words make me cringe. “Ugh. I really don’t remember it all. I had a lot to drink—”

“I’m more interested in what you’re saying about the book.”

“Okay. I came home that night, and I fell asleep in that very chair you’re in. I didn’t have to teach the next day. I woke up, hungover, just after the sun came up. I walked Grendel, drank a bunch of coffee, and started reading. It started innocently enough. I made some notes on my computer, things I wanted to tell you. Just little suggestions. And I could see how some of the scenes could be slightly different. Tighter. Or more expansive. The story was already so good, so vivid. And I was so consumed with it. No thesis had grabbed me that way or made me care that much in a long time. Not many published books had. I sat at the kitchen table and read the whole thing in a day. It was amazing. It is amazing.”

“Thank you,” she says. “It was pretty rough when I turned it in.”

“Sometimes raw and rough are better,” I say. “Sometimes we just need to get out of our own way as writers. We have to try not to overthink it.”

“That’s what you used to say in class,” Madeline says.