No Two Persons


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Copyright Notice
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Part I
 
 The Writer
 The Assistant
 The Actor
 Part II
 Part III
 
 The Artist
 The Diver
 The Teenager
 The Bookseller
 The Caretaker
 The Coordinator
 The Agent
 Epilogue
 Acknowledgments
 Author’s Note
 Also by Erica Bauermeister
 About the Author
 Newsletter Sign-up
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Part I
 The Writer
 Acknowledgments
 Author’s Note
 Contents
 Copyright
 Start of content
 
 
 
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 Begin Reading
 Table of Contents
 About the Author
 Copyright Page
 
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 The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
 
 
 
 For Holly
 
 
 
 No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.
 The Writings of Madame Swetchine, 1860
 
 
 
 I
 
 Maine
 2010
 
 
 
 The Writer
 
 The story on Alice’s computer screen had been finding its way into words for more than five years, or maybe forever. Over that time, it had grown, changed, creaked, flown, gone silent, and then gained its voice again, its plot taking unexpected paths, its characters turning into people she hadn’t thought they would be, just as she had. This glowing screen, the one constant. This story, in all its iterations. Now awaiting the last step. Someone to say yes.
 She was young for a writer, barely twenty-five, but in some ways Alice had always been old. Always been watching, learning, searching for the things that people were not saying. Truth lies below the table; she knew this even as a child. If given the choice, she would have taken her dinner plate down into the cool, dark space beneath the tablecloth, where she could watch her mother’s fingers tighten along with the conversation. Watch her older brother’s shoes point toward the exit even as their father interrogated him about his latest swim meet. Medals he did or didn’t get, effort he did or didn’t expend.
 Children, of course, did not eat under the table, so for Alice, a tendency toward napkin-dropping had to suffice.
 Why can’t she keep that thing on her lap? her father would say to her mother.
 
 But you could learn so much more, keeping your gaze down. Just as well for Alice, who had never liked meeting people’s eyes. It always felt like looking into a jam-packed closet—or opening the door to your own.
 In any case, her father preferred children who were respectful.
 When Alice had learned how to read, she’d discovered her own world, far from their house and their eastern Oregon town. Her brother called it hiding, but as he’d read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times by that point, he was hardly one to talk. After Alice brought her choices home from the library, she’d open their covers, smelling other children’s meals and lives in the pages, and she would put her face in and blow, like a human smudging to make the stories hers.
 Her brother caught her at it one day. Peter was eight years older than Alice, and ever so much taller. He was like a great and gentle horse in her life. When she confessed what she was doing, he just smiled.
 “Ah, Alice,” he said, switching into his Bilbo voice. “Just a plain hobbit you look. But there’s more about you than appears on the surface.”
 
 The year Alice turned nine, an author came to visit her school. It was on that day Alice understood for the first time—in a way that