Yeah, that stuff is cool to think about and all that, but this is still a novel, a story. And more pertinent to this story is the bit here where your mother blurted out a name different from Mercy. I was surprised you didn’t comment or write about it at that point or at any point. Maybe you’re in one of those forest-for-the-trees situations. the-Just because Mary is my real name doesn’t mean you can’t use it. I mean, fuck, you’ve used everything else, why not my first name?

For hundreds of pages the reader has been wondering if I am *the* Mercy Brown. Maybe at this point, they assume that, but I’d still bet your house that a part of them would be like, “Wait, wait, wait, the Rhode Island farmers already burnt Mercy’s heart and consumed her ashes. How is she back?” Which is fun, in a way, that they would assume the cure worked. Sure, it’s similar enough to the stake-in-the-heart stuff for someone to be culturally lulled into thinking drinking a heart-ash slushy killed the vamp dead. But in the world of this novel, if the heart cure worked, then why is Mercy still slam dancing around?

Therefore! I am not Mercy. Yeah?

I’ve been waiting for you to pivot to that, but you haven’t. You haven’t once wavered away from Mercy as Mercy in the text … until that little “Mary? No, Mercy” bit from your mom. Oh, man, when I read that I sat up in my coffin—come on, that was funny—but then you totally breezed by it, and a little too casually for the casual reveal. I kept waiting for you to point your authory, Nosferaturian fingers at it. But you didn’t. Now, I think you included it in the novel subconsciously, and, man, for all the internalized spelunking you do, you need to listen to yourself closer.

Wouldn’t it make more story sense that I am Mercy’s sister, Mary? Mary was exhumed on the same gloomy day as her sister, but no one removed Mary’s heart, or whatever was left of it. Mercy was cured. Mary wasn’t. Think about it. Older brother Edwin still died after the exhumations and Mercy’s heart roast. Also, how did Mercy catch the wasting disease in the first place? Go back and reread the history paper you and I wrote. In my interview I, as Mercy, described my sister, MARY, sitting on my chest and going through the whole spectral vamp bit. You, Art, assumed and present it as Mercy’s origin story, of how Mercy became a vampire. And THEN, prior to the sleepover, I go on to ramble about not knowing how I was made into a vampire. Maybe … it’s because I wasn’t Mercy, and I was MARY the whole time!