Even though all four copies in the house vanished by the end of Boxing Day without a word from Julian of their final destination, I eventually found out the plot of First Flush. It was kind of hard to avoid at the time, as it seemed like everyone around me had a hot take or a word of praise for Josh’s work. When the Jen(n)s invited me to their January book club to discuss the novel, I turned them down, claiming that post-wedding catch-up on my life and the demands of being a newlywed were cramping my reading time. (My mom went in my place and entertained the assembled Brookes Babes with tales of Josh’s high school dinner table wit. Jenn told me it was like every woman there was creaming her pants.) Cait, for her part, peppered me with questions: “Are you Emily? Claire? How about Veronica? I bet you’re Veronica.” (I wasn’t Veronica.)

Still, it was easier to avoid the book in real life. Online, it was considerably more difficult. At first, I adopted a policy of avoiding websites where I came across an article about Josh. Bye-bye Feministing, so long Elle, au revoir LA Weekly and LA Times and LAist. Buzzfeed, I am looking at you and your listicles about “22 Things You Didn’t Know About Joshua K. Brookes (But We Asked For You)” and the four different variations of a “Which ‘First Flush’ Girl Are You?” quiz that were posted. The list became overwhelmingly long, and I eventually gave up when even a brief perusal of the New York Times became dicey (the piece in Sunday Styles on his corduroy game was particularly appalling). Just about the only place I felt safe was the sometimes toxic immigration website where I kept track of processing times for adjustment of status for Julian’s fiancé visa so that he could finally work and drive and leave the country.

One day in mid-January, I gave myself permission to read the briefest of blurbs on the Martha Stewart Living site — I’d gone on to read about vegetable gardening basics, and there it was, a tiny review in a list of “Books We’ll Love in 2011”:

Joshua K. Brookes’ debut is more than the usual boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds himself coming of age novel. Wrigley Short is an insufferable teenage sexist and debate team star who meets his match in the tart-tongued young feminist Emily Finn. Despite his disdain for the female of the species, Wrigley can’t help falling for Emily… but she refuses to date him until he respects women. As he passes through high school and into college, Wrigley can’t catch a break — every young woman who catches his fancy defies what he believes is necessary to be truly feminine, and therefore truly attractive to him. Wrigley’s comic misadventures as a budding feminist are tempered by heartfelt and often melancholic passages on masculinity and what it means to be a very young man in the new millennium.

I guess I’m not an Emily, I thought.

It was the first toe I dipped into Flushmania, and soon I was consuming every article I could find about the book, about horrible Wrigley and tart-tongued Emily and bookish Claire and self-indulgent Veronica and slutty Lizzie and the effervescent, grasping, jaw-droppingly gorgeous Rebecca. Yep, exactly as you might think — Rebecca was a highly idealized version of my sister Rachel, which she enjoyed immensely in spite of hating his guts and still brags about when three cocktails in. (“Of course, I didn’t actually fuck Josh Brookes, only his version of me did, but you have to wonder.” Wonder what? No answer to this, ever.)

Soon enough, I cracked and downloaded a copy of the book to my Kindle to read while Julian was at the gym — unable to work or do much of anything until his status changed, he got serious about losing the 10 pounds he’d gained during the visa process. (“Don’t want to wait until it gets out of hand, and I wake up to find myself fat like Will.” At this point, Will had not yet really started to go to seed as he has now, and I told Julian he was being quite unfair.) That Vanity Fair article was right; Josh’s writing was (and remains) good. I got sucked in, even though I knew it had been written by a pervert.

The Martha Stewart synopsis was pretty accurate. First Flush was about a high school debate team bully named Wrigley “Wrig” Short, who saw girls as useful only as disposable recipients of his fleeting sexual urges, and attractive only if they hewed closely to a template he’d devised of his ideal girl: conventionally pretty but unaware of her loveliness; intelligent but ignorant of his own cultural preferences, that he might teach her good taste; tidy and modest and emotionally serene; sexually inhibited but open to experimentation. Unsurprisingly, he remained mostly dateless save for the occasional blind date set up by a well-meaning friend. Emily Finn is a year younger, wonky-nosed, loud and a devotee of late-night B-movies, Sleater-Kinney and Judith Butler. (Honestly, this sounds like Caitlin more than me.) She muscles her way on the team and Wrig detests that she’s as talented as he is, until he finds his scorn morphing into an attraction he can’t quite account for or feel comfortable with.

Several uncomfortable wanking-in-the-boys’-room interludes later, Wrig summons the courage to pass Emily a note asking her to meet him for a “strategy session” in the AV club HQ-cum-debate team practice room. When she arrives, he tells Emily her place on the team is on the line unless she agrees to go out with him. “Not like you don’t want it. I see you, Emily Finn.” She refuses and quits before she gets cut, and lets loose a comic blue streak of swears and character assassination. As her parting shot, she explains that she’d gotten to like him in spite of her misgivings about fraternizing with a sexist pig, and that he had potential to reform. “When you figure it out, call me. Read some books. Start with Naomi Wolf, she’s pretty accessible, even for a moron like you.”

Much jerking off over Emily Finn later, Wrigley Short gets, in the parlance of our time, “woke” about women, feminism and the straightjackets of traditional gender roles. There’s a lot of sex — some of it really quite funny, some of it so appallingly awkward but true to life in its innocent bungling with clothes that won’t come off and hair tangled in chain-link bracelets that I felt bad for Wrig until I remembered he was Josh’s cipher. Wrig’s woeful freshman pursuit of the monstrous, hedonistic, sublime Rebecca is hysterical, when it isn’t wretchedly sad.

It continues to astound me that no one saw little Melissa in coy young Claire whom Wrig picked up in during a junior seminar on psychology and the law. She, like me, didn’t even realize she was going on a date until she found herself on one, except hers was at a downmarket falafel restaurant at midnight instead of a steak joint at 7pm. Claire’s ambition is to be a therapist, and she patiently takes a sort of atheist confession of misogynist sins from Wrigley, who has moved on from Wolf to Cixous by this point in his feminist autodidacticism. On the nights their schedules permit, she listens to him pour out his own insecurities about his identity as a boy, as a man, and how strong the pull remains for him to perform masculinity, even when he hasn’t always liked where it’s led him. She absolves him through her unaffected, artless sexuality — there’s nothing selfish about sex with Claire. It’s not that she lives to serve Josh, I mean, Wrigley, but that she doesn’t see sex as a power struggle. It is merely an expression of a body in thought, passion and dispassion twinned. Precisely how I had experienced our own first flush before Josh began to lose control.

It’s not giving away much to say that by the end of the novel, Wrigley Short is probably no longer a chauvinist. Though his female friends might call him a feminist, he doesn’t believe a man can truly ever wear that mantle properly. Accepted to the law school of Emily Finn’s university — it’s not clear whether he knew she was still an undergraduate or not, but it seems likely he was — Wrig spots her one bright September morning, walking purposefully across the bright green of the college quad. She puts one hand up to block the sun from her eyes, and raises her hand in greeting. Wrig is transfixed by what has changed physically in Emily — her nose is straightened, her hair now long and naturally reddish-brown rather than the purple pixie cut she favored in high school. Instead of the trench coat she wore because she wanted someone to accuse her of being a member of the Trench Coat Mafia, she now tops her knee-skimming kilt with a corduroy blazer. She looks… normal. And Wrig can not tell whether he desires an Emily Finn who conforms to his high school ideal or not.

The ending is ambiguous — does Emily Finn now date the reformed Wrigley Short, or does she find him wanting in some new way? Or does Wrig even want an Emily Finn like this, kind and cheerful and wearing someone else’s class ring around her neck? I suppose we’re to think that the journey to proto-wokeness is the point for Wrig, rather than getting the girl. But I know Josh. The point is making himself into the person his target, sorry, beloved, desires most. Emily Finn wanted a feminist, so Wrigley Short made himself one through no small amount of blood, sweat and tears (and semen, if we’re being honest). Josh learned I wanted a boy who marked me out as singular, not a weak echo of Rachel. Someone almost as brilliant as he, perhaps, and there could be no denying his brilliance, not then, not now. And then, when I was caught by my own device, he did with me as he wished. Wrig might have trapped Emily, too, just to see what he could do with her.

***

The first call about what I still had of Josh’s came in 2012, just around my second wedding anniversary. Julian and I had been in the Grenadines, doing very little but drink Mai Tais, wade in the cerulean sea, and fuck. A week of complete disconnection from Pasadena and Los Angeles, at a time when we probably were more in love, more simpatico than before we married. Immigration issues weren’t hanging over us for a bit — Julian had his green card, and we had eased into our lives together as one, and on our own. The trip, we hoped, would give us a chance to conceive — I was ready, I thought, to be a mother. Julian was more than ready to start our family after granting my wish to delay for a couple of years while we enjoyed being just two.

Our housekeeper Rianne was emailing us phone messages throughout our 10 days in Canouan, though we only checked them a couple of times. “This time is for you and me,” Julian reminded me. “The more relaxed you are, the more likely you’ll conceive.” The message from the young editor came through when we were on a layover in Miami, en route to LAX. Tucked in the club lounge at the airport, Julian had gone back into work mode, while I was still delaying looking at my own inbox. It’s so strange sometimes to recall that I was working almost full time still at this point, well before Julian’s fixation on babymaking turned into a blanket prohibition on my employment outside the home.

“Mel.” Julian reached out a hand to me as I settled back in my club chair with a glass of Veuve Clicquot (“acceptable” to Julian, just). “You have a message from someone named Keeley at Hachette. About a story you wrote? I didn’t know you were writing again.”

“Must be a wrong number.” I had a brief flash of something around the edges of my memories, a greenish glare of dread. “I haven’t written properly since the blog, and that was such a joke, even though that Penguin editor seemed interested.” This was true — that disaster of a blog, the one that sent me nearly into a nervous collapse before my wedding, the one where people told me to kill myself, where they flirted with Alex (and he flirted back, to my deep but never-mentioned chagrin), had come to the attention of someone at Penguin Books. I’d long suspected Josh had some hand in arranging the contact, but I had no way of knowing how the blog would have found its way to him.

I was curious, though — at the very least, I’d take a meeting. I’d sent over a couple of spec chapters at their request, expanded versions of entries about the time I’d used Julian’s money to buy a Porsche instead of the Mercedes SUV he’d picked out for me, and the meeting between my parents and Jocasta Cranford (total shitshow). But everyone wanted to hear more about Alex and how he and I had once been in love. I had a meeting at the Ivy with a young editorial assistant who spent much of our lunch peppering me with questions.

“We’re obsessed with Alex in the office. Obsessed! Can you show me a picture?” (I complied.) “Ohhhhhhh, he looks even better than how I’d thought. Rachel’s right — yum. But we all want to know: how can someone who claimed to love you drop you that quickly? How were you able to reconcile with him that easily, at least as friends? Why did Julian encourage you to be friends again? None of it makes sense, but it happened!” When I made it clear that any book I wrote based on my blog would have to be about Julian and me, not a delve into my puzzling past with Alexander Carr, the assistant sent me a polite and cheerful post-lunch “no thanks” email.

“Melissa Cranford!” Keeley squealed. “I’ve been trying to find you for the past six weeks. All I knew at first is you were ‘Melissa de Mornay,’ and I found your sister very easily, but she wasn’t budging on giving out your phone number. She said you’d been doxxed, how terrible!”

This wasn’t making me feel at any greater ease, since the only people I wished to speak with had known of Julian for many years, but Keeley kept up the charm. “I just want to say, I know about what happened with Penguin” (you do?) “and I get why they passed at the time, but if you ever feel like you have something more to say about — oh, is Julian there?” (How did she know all of these details?) “Well, about you know who, we’re all ears.”

“I’m sorry, Keeley,” I interrupted. “What is any of this about? I’m on a layover in Miami. We’re coming home from holiday, and I don’t have a ton of time.” (A lie, but Julian was raising a single blond eyebrow at me, like I was ruining his layover by speaking with someone who was not him.)

“Oh! Sorry, this isn’t about the blog.” Keeley let out a little titter — I guessed that was in part artifice, to make her seem more the bubbly sorority girl than the hard-edged fighter and schmoozer I suspected she actually was. “This is about ‘Summer Green.’ Do you remember ‘Summer Green’?”

Fuck. After First Flush hit the big time, and Josh kept up a steady stream of media appearances and thoughtful ruminations in New York Magazine and Harper’s on American masculinity, I suppose I knew he’d come looking for “Summer Green.”

“Nugae,” he’d called it. (I wasn’t the classicist in that relationship, but I was eager to pick up the morsels of Latin and ancient Greek he tossed to me occasionally, like a greedy but not hungry dog might schnarf up a bit of food that dropped between fork and mouth.) Trifles. I don’t think of them as trifles, even though it kind of started that way.

“Summer Green” was the name I’d given to our correspondence that first summer we were together, before we’d lost our way, I mean, he lost his way and dragged me along with him. I’d known since the springtime, well before Rachel donned her cap and gown and marched across the commencement stage, that Josh would be away for three weeks in July. “We always go to Cape Cod to visit my grandparents,” he explained to me over a Saturday lunch of chilaquiles. “It’s what we do. Hey!” He reached across the table and stroked my cheek with his thumb, and poked gently at the frown I’d hoped to hide. “Melissa, it’s only three weeks.”

When you’re sixteen, three weeks can be like several epochs. I remember clearly ticking down minutes in a particularly loathsome home ec course I’d been made to take, like, literally ticking them off as pencil scratches in my composition book. 40 minutes was agony, what would three weeks be like? “But what about your… our… stories?” I hadn’t quite gotten to reading Delta of Venus yet — that would come in junior year, along with his nightly demand for the thousand and whatevereth night of smut from me — but I had accidentally figured out fairly tame phone sex without any instruction, and he enjoyed the fruits of my unexpected Eureka! moment in that regard.

Josh didn’t respond at first, but squinted at me as he chewed through a mouthful of salsa-doused chips. He dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin, but a small slash of sauce hung in the corner of his mouth. I liked it when he looked more human and sloppy, so I didn’t say anything. “Reception is terrible out there,” he eventually said. “There’s only a landline, and it isn’t private. And of course, the cost of calling every day would wipe out whatever you’re making at your father’s firm this summer.” As I had the summer before, I was working as a file clerk and general dogsbody at my dad’s office. Minimum wage, and I’m not sure how needed I actually was, but everyone was convinced (except me) that it would look good for college.

I’m sure Josh recalls it differently, but it was my idea to write each other. “Like Abelard and Héloïse,” I suggested. For a change, this was something I had more knowledge of than Josh — my father’s father, mon cher grand-papa, had encouraged me to learn more about French history, and thought I might like a love story. Oh, Papa, it wasn’t just about love — it was about a woman consumed with lewd visions of her former lover. All you did was fill my head with lewd visions of my own.

For three weeks, we wrote each other every day — I wrote my first letter to Josh before he even stepped on the plane to Boston so that it would be waiting for him. Notes on postcards and on my pink stationery and sheets and sheets of the thick laid paper I filched from my father’s study. How I missed him, how I was reading Choderlos de Laclos that summer for epistolary inspiration, that Caitlin had briefly run away from home for a grand total of twenty-six hours, and that her parents hadn’t even missed her. About Rachel announcing she’d not be attending Cal State Northridge in September to work instead on her screenplay (what screenplay?), my parents’ shrugs of acceptance and my deep frustration at being the good girl, but for what reward? My words still looped and slipped over the page, with post-scripts crammed at the bottom of pages and shot up the margins where I found I had more to say after the “xxooxx Melissa” sign off. (Once I wrote “Love, M” but whited it out. He picked off the dried fluid and responded that love was nothing to be ashamed of, though I noted his farewell on that reply was a simple “Yrs, JKB.”)

In his tight small caps on college-ruled paper, Josh wrote of a large brown-shingled house on the edge of a lake, surrounded by smaller cabins, an overgrown camp filled with three generations of Brookeses and Fultons and Robinsons and Blakes, cousins upon cousins upon aunts and uncles. Snapping turtles and midnight canoe excursions to the shore opposite, hushed journeys lit by the low glow of a Coleman lamp. Rainy afternoons caught inside, the overblown scent of the damp and the rankness of the other teenaged bodies sweating out their hormones as they assembled soggy jigsaw puzzles that never came together properly. Family meals of sixteen, eighteen, twenty relatives, being frogmarched into the kitchen with the other kids to help make vats of garlicky spaghetti sauce from the tomatoes in the garden. Sun, sun, so much of it sometimes, his body now so tan by the end of it, he promised me I’d hardly recognize him. “I can imagine, sometimes, the world is only made of this family,” he wrote. “When we are together, we feel invincible, as if there is no need for anyone not of our kin. We are enough.”

Josh encouraged me to stay true to being a “good girl,” and reminded me that “good girls get what they deserve, Melissa, and you are an awfully good girl.” That letter had a heart drawn on the back of the envelope; it was the closest he had come to telling me that he felt something tender rather than fierce about me. Further enclosed, on a piece of featherlight rice paper headed “BURN THIS,” was a shockingly explicit note explaining how he had dreamed of rubbing himself all over my “rose-tipped breasts” before plunging into me, spearing me, taking and taking and taking of my body. (I did not burn it.)

When Josh returned, bronzed and lean as promised, he had the notion of making a story of our correspondence, “epistolary nugae” we could edit down and publish in the magazine. “Subject to the rest of the staff’s approval,” he stressed, as I sat in his lap, organizing and interleaving the correspondence together. I felt him stir beneath me, just a little hardness, and I was a bit terrible, grinding my bottom against him when I knew he said I wasn’t quite ready yet. “I’m going to make it perfect for you, I promise.”

We never did make “Summer Green” into a two-hander for publication; even with the exclusion of the “BURN THIS” note (by then folded up and hidden inside an inner pocket of the parka I only wore when we went to Big Bear or back east), it was far too emotionally explicit and too real to be published in a high school literary magazine, even one with the pretensions Josh had for ours. “I’ll keep it safe,” I promised at the start of the school year, as I tidied it up from where we’d spread it out on a production table in the magazine’s office, still trying to see if there was a way to make it work without tearing out its thrumming adolescent soulful lust.

I did keep it safe, as I promised. So safe no one saw it again, not even Rachel, who’d started poking around my room again, in pursuit of “whatever it is you spend night after night typing out instead of, you know, being normal.” In a small bank in Burbank rests a stack of letters and cards and a folded up piece of rice paper, once crammed in the cheapest safety deposit box I could afford at 16, and moved to more spacious accommodation after this call with Keeley.

“No, I’m not interested,” I snapped and hung up. I ignored the next call from Keeley and turned off my phone. “Someone who wanted me to write the blog up again. Not interested.” Julian patted my back and said it was best to leave that time in the past when we had so much future to expect.

Back in Pasadena (and out of earshot of Julian) I returned the call again. Keeley explained that Hachette wanted to publish a volume of Josh’s juvenilia, and “Summer Green” was the missing piece. “The way he described it, Ms. Cranford… it sounds so atmospheric, so dazzling, like two beautiful children discovering their place in the universe and their love for each other at the same time. And through letters! Who wrote letters like that in 2001? Well, I’m not surprised,” she chuckled. “It is Josh Brookes. Very on brand.”

“My answer’s the same, Keeley. No. He gave them to me, and I’m keeping them. So there really isn’t anything more to discuss.”

“Wait!” Keeley blurted. “If it’s money, we’ll pay you — a sum now, and royalties, of course.”

“Money’s not an issue for me,” I sniffed. “I have plenty of it. And I don’t want any of it from Hachette, or from Josh. I don’t know what he told you about us –“

“He said you had a bad break up, but he wouldn’t get into it. I know you’re ‘The Girl’ from those pieces. He told me how much he regrets whatever it was he did to push you away.”

A bad break up? I wish that was a fitting synopsis of how I’d finally snapped my vision into focus after nearly 18 months with Josh. “I’m a very private person, as is my husband. He and I agree that it’s not in our interests to make those letters public.”

A complete lie — Jules didn’t know yet about “Summer Green,” but he shortly would when the first letter arrived from Hachette. Cunningly addressed on the envelope to Julian, its contents were addressed to me. Its author, a more senior editor than Keeley, reiterated the generous deal. Jules surprised me by directing his ire not towards me for hiding it from him, but towards Josh. “As long as you’re with me, I’ll never let him touch you,” Julian reassured me as I wept into his shoulder, letting him kiss me down and down, from my forehead to my collarbone. “Come, be a pet and let me love you, darling.”

Like Easter, the timing of the annual letter pleading for “Summer Green” happens around the same time every year, but is something of a moveable feast. Letters have come just after Halloween and a few days before Christmas, but always near the end of the year. Each arrives addressed to Julian, and each is returned with a snappish response from us both that the answer is a forever “no.”

Bless Julian’s assistant Sergei in 2017, who kept fastidious notes of which of Jules’ contacts sent him mail at home rather than the office. When Jules had moved out of our Pasadena home, Sergei mailed change of address announcement cards to those on the “home” list, which included the editor at Macmillan. In plain black copperplate engraving on thick Smythson cardstock, each note advised simply that the Cranford residence was now in downtown LA. So when the 2017 and 2018 letters showed up, they were delivered to his new (now old) apartment on South Olive, the first place he’d lived after our split. Julian returned them as always, never commenting that I didn’t live with him, he stressed. “Why should they know,” he’d scoffed. No matter what was happening between us, “Summer Green” was still off-limits. “Why should they know when I still hold to our marriage vows to honor you, even when you’ve decided you won’t return the favor?” (Julian has always been particularly talented at wrapping barbs in pretty little parcels like that.)

But this past month, the jig was up — Sergei had moved on in early 2019, promoted to account manager after three years of sterling service to Julian. In his place was some new ambitious young man, less fastidious than Sergei about ensuring that notice of Julian’s move to the ostentatious tower with the Rothkos in the foyer and the dog spa on the terrace was dispatched to everyone on Sergei’s meticulously maintained list. The contact at Macmillan was one of those overlooked by this now unemployed assistant. When the letter was returned “Addressee Unknown,” Emmeline at Macmillan came looking for me at Jules’ office. At least this is what I gleaned when I checked off that final box on my to-do list and called Julian.

“This Emmeline” (his disdain oozed through my phone’s speaker) “Googled me to find a better address. Most recent thing she turned up was a picture of Fenn and me from last month at some appalling gallery opening I’d been dragged to in London. You should see some of these charlatans masquerading as ‘artists,’ darling. Quite absurd that Fenn has to jump through all these hoops to get a visa when her work actually looks like art.”

Rude, I thought, and stashed away the questions I had about Fenn’s immigration status for later.

“I’d no way of knowing,” he continued, “that this photo would appear anywhere online, let alone with any description of me as ‘boyfriend of Scottish artist Fennella Carr.’ This Emmeline went down a rabbit hole and turned up that engagement announcement Fenn’s fool mother put in the Times for you and Alex — she’d gone looking for Fenn and found you. She knows you’re in Berkeley, so I presume Josh Brookes knows you’re there, too.”

Around me the nearly empty studio no longer felt so safe, not the place of respite and comfort it had been for over a year. Alex — oh, I love him, his humor and wit and smarts, his free and open affection for me and the others he loves, how he towers over me, how my head rests beneath his chin just so. But he’s untested in being able to protect me from forces other than Julian. He’s still a little — what’s Julian’s word? — a little feral. Sometimes. Where Jules leads with his head (for the most part — god only knows what’s leading him when it comes to Fenn), Alex is all squidgy of feelings and short of temper. Messy around the edges, where Josh is pristinely crimped. I want to believe that Al can keep the Josh-wolf from the door, but I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Certainly, the world seemed smaller from the blue velvet loveseat where I was hugging my knees as Julian spelled out his conversation with the hated Emmeline. The cash offer for “Summer Green” was large, much larger than in years past. Macmillan would give me co-authorship and Emmeline dangled the possibility of a chance to work with an editor on my own writings, should I choose. Julian tried to sell me on this idea a little — I suspect he’s sick of dealing with the Emmelines of the world, even though he’d never throw me to their likes. “Perhaps getting you a byline on some lifestyle website, if they don’t think your writing’s up to literary snuff yet, even for one of their minor imprints.” Or I could keep my anonymity, if I chose.

I leaned back slightly, catching sight over my shoulder of the Amazon deliveryman dropping off another roll of bubble wrap on my little deck. He gave me a sweet salute hello, two fingers to the forehead, snapped forwards briskly. I returned the motion and he laughed loud enough for me to hear through the French doors.

“Anonymity isn’t possible, you know,” I sighed. “Summer Green” gets published and my name won’t be far behind, both as the young girl in that story and as The Girl Josh tried to save from her English prince, the girl who ended up slutty and tarnished and a cheat. I don’t want Brookes Babes showing up at my front door, asking me questions about what it was really like to date Josh, and how I could have ever broken his heart that many times.

“And if I don’t hand it over, what then? I mean, Josh hardly has leverage over me, does he?” I meant that to be a rhetorical question, but I don’t think it really was.

“I don’t know, Mel. Me-tooing an author who everyone thinks is… what’s that horrible word? Awake?”

Woke, I explained and rolled my eyes.

“Right. ‘Woke.’ So Woke Josh’s giant publisher wants to shift some units, knowing his fanbase — which to me looks like a bunch of fatties he’d never deign to rut, if you ask me — will snap them up. And he needs something to shove the First Flush screenplay out of development hell.”

Thanks in some part to Rachel, Josh’s runaway debut novel, much loved and masturbated to by young people of both sexes (and middle-aged women, if what Fenn told me about Cora is true), has bounced from studio to studio for seven years. It’s been kicking around so long that the first actor attached to the role of Wrigley Short has moved on from playing frat boys in booze-soaked teen comedies to responsible fathers in bittersweet dramadies set in suburban Wisconsin. Last I heard Timothée Chalamet was considered perfect for Wrig, but I hope he’ll be filling Adam Driver’s shoes in powerful domestic dramas before First Flush hits the screen.

If he put some pressure on me to hand over the letters, unveiling Josh as a sexual predator draped in the robes of a feminist would be a pleasure. Joshua K. Brookes had set me on the path to Julian, after all, convinced me that what I needed was a strong man who could take away the pain of thinking too much. But all I had against Josh were my own words, and who was I? The Girl. The whore. The one who walked away with no word to our hero about the nature of his sins, the one who’d made his first term at Yale so very dark and booze-soaked. The one who’d been found in bed with her boyfriend’s best friend, the one who’d later walk out on her marriage for fleeting sexual indulgences like Maria Bertram. Josh was a star, and I was… who? No longer the goddess. Confused and silly, a liar. A liar.

“You’re so much better with me,” Josh had told me again and again. “It’s a good thing I like to keep you close.” Left unsaid was the converse: you’re nothing without me, so you’d better stay close.

The sharp scent of the vinegar cleaner made my eyes water as I walked to the nearly-bare kitchenette. There could be no other reason for these tears. Little Melissa was much tougher than this Mel, or at least more quiet. “I’m not doing it. I don’t care what he wants.”

“Good girl.” Julian meant these words to comfort, but they rarely did. All I’d ever been was a good girl, or at least most of the time. Biddable, pliable. Ready to serve.

That’s not Melissa now, not always. Alex had convinced me to consider myself in the mirror directly, not through the filter of Julian’s perception. What do you see, sweetness? I can’t quite scry her yet, she’s still mostly a shadow, like one of the delicate silhouettes I’d learned to cut with sharp shears, a talent gained as I’d tried to fill up the vacuum of my days as Julian’s wife. But sometimes I see Rachel, or something like her — cheeky and cocksure, ballsy and unbowed. I could be like that, something like that.

“Right! I’ll take care of it. Nothing for you to do, darling,” Jules told me dismissively. “Go finish whatever it is that boyfriend of yours needs doing for him.”

“Fiancé,” I groused. “Don’t call her back. I’ll do it. Give me her number.”

I’m ready to take control of my past with Joshua K. Brookes. I want his skulking presence exorcised from each of the dank torture chambers in my dream house, every room where he stole scrap after scrap of my identity. I want these rooms unlocked and thrown open to sunshine, to the freshness of spring. And somewhere on my person, I’m hiding the key.