Epilogue
Come, children, let us shut up the box and puppets, for our play is played out.
—William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
“Oh, Jake,” said Brett, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
. . . “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
The one thing Sam remembered from being in a TV studio as a child that had not changed in the intervening years was how hot
the lights were. It was like being a speaker times ten, and she had chosen her outfit accordingly: a sleeveless silk halter
dress whose collar the techs could clip her mic on. It was, of course, red, though this time for a different reason.
What Sam was not used to and had not encountered in the past couple of decades since being in her dad’s studio, when instead she’d been on local cable channels or university TV, or, on one occasion, C-SPAN, was the live audience.
Luckily the lights onstage were still bright enough that it was difficult for Sam to make out any faces, so she couldn’t spot her codependency group.
She refused, absolutely refused, to look directly at Drishti.
Sam was also not accustomed to being one of two subjects in an interview, as she was now with Emily, who sat in the chair on her right, nor being face-to-face with one of the most famous and beloved faces in America, if not the world, who had chosen Sam’s novel as her Book Club Pick and who was, like most TV people, surprisingly smaller in person but with larger facial features, as if she were a Broadway actor with a visage designed to be seen from the back row, or some beautiful demigod.
“Are you ready?” she asked, and Sam said she was. Emily nodded. She wore Doc Martens and an electric purple dress, her hair
freshly dyed the same shade. Her new nose stud, a gold rabbit, glinted near one nostril. Aside from her stage makeup, applied
in the greenroom, she looked like exactly what she was: a bookseller. She also looked a little petrified. Sam winked at her.
The host patted Sam’s knee.
“I cannot wait to talk about this book,” she said.
A tech held up a sign that said quiet and the cameraman counted them down. Sam stared at the little red dot on the camera facing her and tried to smile in a natural,
nonfrozen way, which was impossible.
The cameraman pointed at the host.
“Helloooooo, book lovers!” the host said. “Y’all. Who is as excited as I am for today?” The audience clapped and cheered. “How many of you have been literally counting the hours until we could talk about this book?” The host raised her hand and pointed dramatically to herself. “I
have been awake since I read it,” she said, turning to Sam. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for weeks! I’ll be sending you my bill for my undereye-bag cream.”
“I will happily pay it,” said Sam.
“Thank you,” the host said, and turned back to the camera.
“But seriously, though this book is sensational, and I mean that in every sense of the word, it is also deadly serious. Not only does it expose some of the most shocking murders of our time, it focuses on an underlying issue most of us don’t talk about, that affects so many of us and our mental health. So let’s talk about—”
She held up one of the copies of Sam’s book stacked on the end table between them.
“Murder Your Darlings,” she said. She showcased the hardcover, which featured a fountain pen whose nib was bisected by a jackrabbit, by moving
it from side to side, then put it back. “The megahit bestseller of the season, the breakout book of the year, number one on
the New York Times list since the day it dropped, and rightly so.”
She golf-clapped toward Sam, who bowed her head back at the host—it was her recommendation, of course, that had put the book
on the list.
“Today,” said the host, “we’re talking with the author, Sam Vetiver—and the woman who saved her life, Emily Brown—”
Somebody in the audience yelled “The Rabbit, yaaassss! We love you!” and there was laughter. Emily smiled down at her boots.
“We do love you,” said the host, leaning forward to look past Sam to Emily. “The outpouring on social media ever since we announced
has been astronomical. I hope you feel it.”
“I do,” Emily said. She nodded vigorously. Her ears were blazing red.
The host picked up the novel again. “And this book! Whoo! People! You practically need oven mitts to hold this, am I right?
It has everything. Sex. Murder. Literature. And heartbreak. Because even though it’s written as a novel . . . it’s a true story.”
The studio grew very quiet.
“We all knew the major players in this book,” said the host. “We read Sam’s earlier wonderful novels. And we all knew William Corwyn.”
The light beam from the control box at the back of the studio shifted colors, and Sam knew that behind her, on the big screen,
there was now the giant projection of William’s author photo, his face. She would not look.
“It was such a shock to find out about William,” said the host. “That we had a serial murderer not only in the very heart of the literary community but, for so many of us, next to our beds. And in our cars and on our walks and at the gym, on our earbuds. And in our minds and souls. Because that’s what authors and books do, isn’t it?
They get inside us and they change us. So to find out that William’s books, which affected so many thousands of lives, were not his but belonged to women he
had murdered—”
Somebody shouted something from the audience Sam could not hear. Her heart was thundering in her ears. Sweat rolled down her
sides into her Spanx. She exhaled a long silent breath.
“It was mind-blowing for all of us who loved his work. Just unbelievable. I remember reading the news story and saying to myself, That can not be right. So I can only imagine what it was like for you, Sam.”
There was a pause, and Sam realized she was supposed to speak—they had dead air! Since William, performance was harder than it used to be. She glanced at the host, who gave her a you-can-do-it nod.
“It was shattering,” Sam said.
“Tell us,” said the host, “what it was like from the inside.”
“I was in love,” said Sam. She cleared her throat—it had not been quite right ever since the hot tub, her vocal cords roughened
with scar tissue. “I was in love with William. How could you not be in love with William? He was the bad boy of literature.
And bad boys make good stories.” There were appreciative chuckles from the audience, and Sam started to find her rhythm. “But
really, it’s tough out there for us singletons. Those of you out there who are divorced, or have God forbid lost your person,
you know what it’s like to be alone, like really alone, or on the apps, scrolling through all the guys with little heads and
big fish. All you can think is, is anyone out there like me?” She felt rather than saw the nodding beyond the lights.
“And William was like you,” said the host.
“He was like me,” Sam confirmed. “Except for the serial killer part.”
The audience murmured. “What’s so astonishing to me,” said the host, “and so frightening, is that you really did not know. That nobody knew—except Emily, and we’ll dig into that a little later.
But nobody else had a clue, not William’s editor, or his agent, or anybody in the industry—including me!
I had him on this very show! For his novel, or rather Becky Bowman’s novel, You Never Said Goodbye.
He sat on this very stage where you are right now, Sam! How could nobody know?”
Sam shuddered, an involuntary ripple of flesh. “Well, the devil is charming,” she said, and there were sounds of recognition
from the viewers at this. “And William was so charming. He was master level at it. And seduction. And manipulation. And transposing other writers’ ideas into his own words.”
“Why?” said the host. “Why do you think he did it? That’s what we all want to know.”
“I’m not sure we ever really will,” said Sam. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking about it, not just researching the book
but lying awake at night, going over it in my head. From everything I’ve read, William was a malignant narcissist. He didn’t
see other people as people but as commodities he needed. He said something like that about the women while he was—toward the
end. That they were food. For his books. That he was like a vampire who could write but not come up with his own stories.”
“And this is the hallmark of a malignant narcissist.”
“One of them. I’ve interviewed several psychologists who specialize in this disorder and in sociopathy, trying to sync up
what they said with what I knew of William personally. It’s safe to say he was a sociopath. And one doctor had a theory, which
I think is true, that William didn’t remember murdering the women. He just skipped right over it in his own mind. William
came from a terrible trauma background—he mentioned it only a few times to me, and his family is all gone now, so I couldn’t
confirm it. But what he did tell me was horrific, and this doctor’s theory is that when something was truly traumatic, including
when he caused it, William blanked it out.”
“Fascinating,” said the host. “Truly fascinating. And terrifying. And you never knew. Never knew you were living with a serial
murderer.”
“No,” said Sam. “I knew—or sometimes I thought—things were a little hinky. You could ask my sponsor, who’s sitting out there somewhere with my codependency group, hi guys!
, and she’d tell you that from the beginning I was questioning my own instincts.
But that’s part of the problem. As I wrote in the book, I have my own trauma background, so I have a hard time knowing what to believe. ”
“And that is really the heart of the book for me,” said the host. “Not the shock of finding out who William Corwyn really was. Or the murders of the writers,
may they rest—and by the way, we’re offering all their novels reissued in their rightful names as a bundle,” and there was