The audience applauded.
She smiled, put her hand to her heart, and said, “I couldn’t have written it without the support of my brilliant research assistant, who is, I hope, watching from Brooklyn.”
There was another, louder, round of applause.
The interviewer leaned in and asked her about her “process.” She said, “It’s not a process, exactly. It’s more a surrender to the book’s own logic.” She said, “Every time I try to control the sentences, the sentences run away from me.” She said, “I have a terror of being ordinary, so I let the sentences lead me somewhere extraordinary instead.”
They laughed.
She read the second page.
She butchered it.
She smiled at the butchery.
She took a drink of water and said, “It’s funny. Some lines, you write them in a trance, and later you have no memory of having written them at all. You find them in the draft and think, Where did you come from?”
She looked at the camera. For a split second, I thought she saw me.
Then she smiled, and the smile was for the world.
The pool held the image.
Beside me, the demon’s hands were steady on the stone. He did not speak. He did not interrupt.
He let me watch the woman in the cream coat, the woman whose name had floated on every prize shortlist for nine years, the woman who was now reading, to the world, the book I had written in secret.
He let me watch as the audience gave her a standing ovation, as the camera followed her offstage, as the interviewer wrapped her in a low, knowing embrace and said, “That was devastating, Margot. You should be so proud.”
He let me watch as she took the book, turned it in her hand, and wrote her own name in the title page for a fan who looked like she might never be able to read again for crying.
He let me watch as the show ended, the studio went dark, the woman in the cream coat went home.
He let me watch all of it.
I did not look away.
I did not breathe.
He was silent beside me. He was not watching the lake. He was watching me.
For a long time, I could not tell what was happening in my own chest. I thought it was fury, the old, ordinary kind—the flavorless, administrative rage of seeing your life rerouted without permission. But it was not. It was envy.
I wanted the book back.
I wanted the cover. I wanted the prize. I wanted the photograph of the woman at the table, hands open over her own words, the audience believing every syllable. I wanted, for the first time in the whole catalog of my wanting, not to be the ghost in the room but the body at the front of it. I wanted to have been seen.
The bond at my wrist blazed.
I turned to him. The words came out clean, raw, my own. “That is mine,” I said. “I want it. I want all of it. I am not ashamed of wanting it.”
The color in the sigils shot up my arm and across my chest, a flare of every shade at once, a peacocking, a pyrotechnic, an admission so total that for a split second I saw the colors out of the corners of my own eyes. The bond did not correct me. The bond applauded.
He put his bare hand over the lake.
He did it slow, with the gravity of a priest blessing a body. The water went clouded, then black, then sealed, the liquid surface going matte and then solid, as though the room had closed its own eye to the rest of the world. When he lifted his hand, the pool was gone, replaced by a slab of stone indistinguishable from the floor.
He had closed the lake.
