By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

First Draft ### A Silent Inheritance bonus scene — Corinne Roussel POV

The notebook was new. That was the first thing Corinne noticed about it, sitting down at her own kitchen table for the first time in longer than she wanted to count — not the black hardbound kind she'd carried into eleven sessions with a recorder angled toward someone else's window, but a plain one, spiral-bound, the cheapest kind sold at the pharmacy two doors down from the apartment Croft's office still quietly paid for. She'd bought it on impulse, standing in line for a prescription refill, and hadn't been able to explain to herself, walking home, why a woman who'd spent eight months professionally transcribing another person's life had felt the sudden, specific need to own a notebook meant for nobody's use but her own.

She opened it. The first page was blank in a way that felt almost aggressive.

She had ghostwritten two memoirs before Emily's — real ones, published under other people's names, embargoed until the subjects themselves decided the world was ready. She had interviewed grieving widows and disgraced executives and one retired ballerina who'd cried for forty minutes about a knee injury from 1987 as though it had happened that morning. She was good at the job because she had always been able to find the true thing underneath what a person actually said, and hand it back to them cleaned and reordered, better than they'd been able to say it themselves.

She had never once tried to do it for herself. It had never occurred to her that the skill might not transfer.

My name is Corinne Roussel, she wrote, and then sat looking at the sentence for long enough that the pen dried out slightly against the paper. It was true, as far as it went. It was also the least interesting true thing she owned, and she found herself doing, instinctively, the thing she'd have told any real client to stop doing on page one — starting with the fact that required no courage to state.

She crossed it out. Not neatly. A hard, decisive line, the kind she'd never once let herself put through anything of Emily's.

I have been the collection point for other people's real voices for most of my adult life, and I am forty-one days into learning what it costs to have one of my own.

Better. Still not honest enough to keep.

The apartment was quiet in the specific way that meant Camille's Tuesday video call wasn't due for another two hours — she'd started counting the hours between calls the way she used to count sessions, an old habit repurposed, and hated herself a little for the repurposing even as she did it. Camille was doing well. Better than well. The Bruges facility had a garden she liked, and a physiotherapist she complained about with the specific, cheerful venom of a person who finally trusted that complaining wouldn't cost her anything. Corinne had visited three times since the transfer. Each time, Camille had asked, in the same plain, unguarded way she asked everything, whether the writer friend was coming too.

I don't have an answer for her yet, Corinne wrote, and this time she didn't cross it out. I don't know if Emily and I are the kind of friends who visit each other's sisters, or the kind who send careful messages twice a year and mean every word of them and never quite close the distance the lying put there. I think both of those might be true at once. I am trying to let that be allowed, instead of needing to resolve it into a clean answer the way I used to resolve everyone else's stories into clean answers, because a clean answer was what the client was paying for.

She read that back and felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn't realized was clenched — not relief exactly, closer to the specific ache of a muscle finally used correctly after months of bracing wrong.

The trial dates were set. Voss's lawyers were fighting everything they could fight and conceding nothing they didn't have to; Sten, by contrast, had reportedly told his own counsel, more than once, that he wasn't interested in minimizing his sentence, only in making sure the record was accurate about what he'd actually built and why. Corinne would testify in both. She had read her own statement so many times preparing for it that the words had started to feel like someone else's — which she supposed was almost funny, given how she'd spent the last eight months making Emily's own words feel like someone else's to the entire continent.

I keep waiting to feel like I've paid for it, she wrote. The prosecutor says two years suspended is generous. I believe her. I don't feel generous toward myself, most days, and I've decided that's not actually a problem I need her office to solve. Punishment was never going to be the thing that made this right. The thing that might, slowly, over a longer time than I have any right to expect, is this — sitting at this table, writing something nobody assigned me and nobody is paying for and nobody but me will ever read, because I am trying to remember what it feels like to have a voice I didn't build for somebody else's purposes.

Her phone buzzed against the table. Not the burner — that number had been dead for six weeks, Croft's office had confirmed it, along with everything else that had once routed back to a man calling himself, absurdly, formally, the composer, as though what he'd done to eleven sessions' worth of her handwriting deserved a title instead of a verdict. This was her real phone. Her only phone now. A message from Emily, three words, no context, exactly the kind of thing you sent someone when the context was already understood between you.

Thinking of you.

Corinne looked at it for a long moment, the way she used to look at a session's raw material before deciding which true thing in it was worth keeping. There was no professional instinct left to apply here. That was, she was starting to understand, the entire point.

Thinking of you too, she typed back, and meant it in the specific, unguarded way she'd once have flagged in someone else's writing as the moment worth building a whole chapter around — the sentence a person says when there's no recorder in the room and nothing left to gain from saying it except that it happens to be true.

She set the phone down and turned back to the notebook, to the page with its one hard crossed-out line and the paragraphs underneath it that hadn't earned a strikethrough yet, and found that for the first time in longer than she could comfortably measure, she wasn't trying to figure out what someone else needed this to say.

I don't know how this story ends, she wrote, and let it stand, unfinished, the way real drafts were supposed to stand before anyone but the person writing them had any right to an opinion about the shape. I used to think that not knowing was a problem to be managed — a gap you filled with research, or with whatever the client wanted to believe about themselves, or with the version that tested best. I am trying, badly, to learn that not knowing might just be what an honest first draft is required to feel like.

I am forty-one days into finding out.

She closed the notebook before she could talk herself into crossing out the last line too, and put the kettle on, and let the kitchen fill with the small, ordinary sound of water beginning, very slowly, to come to a boil.